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Clickbait Crime News? Metrics and Professional Authority in Local Newsrooms

By on June 22, 2026 in Articles

Jonathan Ben-Menachem

Sociological Science June 22, 2026
10.15195/v13.a27

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Existing research on newsroom metrics documents how journalists construct compatibility between discordant professional and commercial evaluation frameworks. This study examines the underexplored case where metrics validate existing practices. Drawing on interviews with 58 crime journalists in 40 U.S. newsrooms, I find that reporters whose work consistently performed well on audience metrics often defended professional evaluation criteria. Editors facilitated this defense through brokerage, absorbing commercial logics so reporters could experience their work as professionally guided. Market position structured interpretive responses: reporters could avoid metrics, override them, selectively appropriate them, or integrate them into practice. The transition from pageview to subscription regimes reshaped whether concordance was experienced as contaminating or legitimating. Even under concordance, journalists defended professional evaluation criteria.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Jonathan Ben-Menachem: Department of Sociology, Columbia University.
E-mail: jb4487@columbia.edu.

Acknowledgments: I gratefully acknowledge feedback from my colleagues in Columbia Sociology’s Qual Lab, my graduate school cohort, and several anonymous reviewers and journal editors. In particular, I thank Ari Galper, Emily Mazo, Tey Meadow, Michael Schudson, Mario Small, and Bruce Western for their generous engagement with this project at various stages. Finally, I thank the journalists who shared their time and experiences with me.


Supplemental Materials


  • Citation: Ben-Menachem, Jonathan. 2026. “Clickbait Crime News? Metrics and Professional Authority in Local Newsrooms” Sociological Science 13: 685-711.
  • Received: March 11, 2026
  • Accepted: May 5, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Kieran Healy
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a27


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Beyond Text: Using AI-Generated Visual Conjoints to Study Gender and Housework Attribution

By on June 16, 2026 in Articles

Léa Pessin, Kevin Munger

Sociological Science June 16, 2026
10.15195/v13.a26

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Despite substantial gender convergence in education and employment, women continue to perform a disproportionate share of housework. We employ a novel visual conjoint experiment to isolate the normative mechanisms underlying this persistent inequality. Using AI-generated photorealistic images, we systematically vary the tidiness of domestic spaces, room type, source of mess, socioeconomic status, and the gender and race/ethnicity of occupants, alongside text describing couples’ employment arrangements. A quota sample of 2,994 U.S. respondents each evaluated five vignettes, yielding 14,970 observations. We find that gender effects operate primarily through responsibility attribution rather than through differential perception of messiness or anticipated social judgment. Women are assigned significantly more cleaning responsibility than men, with the gender penalty concentrated among dual-earner couples. Child-caused mess is perceived as messier than adult-caused mess yet carries reduced social consequences, suggesting that it operates as a legitimating excuse. Our findings suggest that gender equality in paid work is necessary for achieving gender equality in housework, but that it is not sufficient, and that this gap will persist absent changes in normative expectations around responsibility for housework.

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Léa Pessin: Department of Social and Political Science, European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy.
E-mail: lea.pessin@eui.eu.

Kevin Munger: Department of Social and Political Science, European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy.
E-mail: kevin.munger@eui.eu

Acknowledgments: This work has benefited from generous feedback from the Bocconi Dondena Seminar Speaker Series and the LMU Munich Department of Sociology Research Colloquium. Pessin acknowledges funding by the European Union, under the European Research Council grant for the WeEqualize project (grant agreement no. 101117327). Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Replication materials including all data and code and documentation necessary to reproduce all empirical results reported in the article can be found at https://github.com/kmunger/Housekeeping_SocSci_Replication.


  • Citation: Pessin, Léa, Kevin Munger, 2026. “Beyond Text: Using AI-Generated Visual Conjoints to Study Gender and Housework Attribution” Sociological Science 13: 661-684.
  • Received: January 20, 2026
  • Accepted: April 14, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Elizabeth Bruch
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a26


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Changing Opportunity: Rising Local Wealth Inequality and Growing Class Gaps in Income Mobility

By on June 15, 2026 in Articles

Manuel Schechtl, Florencia Torche

Sociological Science June 15, 2026
10.15195/v13.a25

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Recent research documents widening class gaps in intergenerational income mobility in the United States. Children from low-income families in more recent cohorts attain lower incomes than their counterparts in earlier cohorts, while no comparable decline is observed among children from high-income families. This study examines whether rising local wealth inequality contributes to this growing class divide in mobility. To do so, it combines newly published estimates of local wealth inequality from GEOWEALTH-US with cohort-based measures of upward mobility from Opportunity Insights. First-difference models reveal a consistent negative association between rising local wealth inequality and declining upward income mobility for children from low-income families, but no comparable association for their high-income peers. These associations are robust to economic and demographic changes, including, critically, changes in income inequality. A decomposition exercise suggests that rising local wealth inequality accounts for roughly one-fifth of the observed increase in class gaps in mobility. Together, the findings identify local wealth inequality as a central dimension of stratification shaping children’s economic opportunities above and beyond income inequality.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Manuel Schechtl: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
E-mail: schechtl@unc.edu

Florencia Torche: Princeton University.
E-mail: ftorche@princeton.edu

Acknowledgments: This research was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package All code necessary to replicate
this study is available in an OSF repository at: https://osf.io/a3vfd/


  • Citation: Schechtl, Manuel, Florencia Torche. 2026. “Changing Opportunity: Rising Local Wealth Inequality and Growing Class Gaps in Income Mobility” Sociological Science 13: 645-660.
  • Received: March 13, 2026
  • Accepted: April 27, 2026
  • Editors: Stephen Vaisey, Herman van de Werfhorst
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a25


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Declining Inequality and Persistent Inequality Structures

By on June 10, 2026 in Articles

Soohyun Roh, Nathan Wilmers

Sociological Science June 10, 2026
10.15195/v13.a24

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Prior research finds that rising labor market inequality in the United States was abetted by structural changes in the economy: a consolidation of occupation and organizational bases of advantage; rising within-job inequality; and declining pay and employment in middle-earning jobs. In this article, we revisit these structural changes by asking whether they have been reversed as labor market inequality fell over the last decade. Drawing on restricted-use microdata from the Occupational Employment and Wages Statistics, we find that declining inequality is due to declining inequality in occupation premiums. There has been only a small reversal of consolidation and no decrease in inequality within jobs. Low-wage jobs gained on shrinking middle-earning occupations, further eroding union, manufacturing, and public sector wage premiums. These findings demonstrate a novel configuration of labor market inequality, in which pay rose in low-wage jobs, but underlying inequality structures in the economy persisted.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Soohyun Roh: Sloan School of Management, MIT
E-mail: rohs@mit.edu.

Nathan Wilmers: Sloan School of Management, MIT
E-mail: wilmers@mit.edu.

Acknowledgments: Thank you for very helpful comments from the MIT Applied Microeconomics Seminar, University of Maryland Strategy Seminar, NYU Sociology Colloquium, Columbia Center for Wealth and Inequality Seminar, Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar Seminar, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management Seminar, and Stockholm University Department of Economics Seminar. This research was conducted with restricted access to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the BLS or the US government. This research was funded by MIT Sloan. Please direct correspondence to wilmers@mit.edu.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Full replication code is available at https://osf.io/8tbwh. In June 2025, the BLS suspended researcher access to its restricted data. As such, data for the bulk of this analysis are no longer accessible for replication (or to Roh and Wilmers). If the BLS restarts its data access program, then data will be accessible through the application as a visiting researcher.


  • Citation: Roh, Soohyun, Nathan Wilmers. 2026. “Declining Inequality and Persistent Inequality Structures” Sociological Science 13: 614-644.
  • Received: October 16, 2025
  • Accepted: February 26, 2026
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Cristobal Young
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a24


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Family Networks and Childcare Choices: A Predictive Machine Learning Approach

By on June 2, 2026 in Articles

Nicolás Soler, Tom Emery, Agnieszka Kanas

Sociological Science June 2, 2026
10.15195/v13.a23

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How first-time parents arrange childcare has critical implications for their careers and the child’s development. Previous research shows that childcare choices are shaped by family care availability, understood as an additive function of a small set of parental and grandparental characteristics. However, research on family networks suggests that care availability is rather a non-linear, non-additive function of large family networks. We compare the predictive ability of these two perspectives using a machine learning framework and register-based family network data. We find that considering how the child’s great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins shape care availability, and modeling their influence using more flexible models, provides small yet significant improvements in predictive ability, particularly among more disadvantaged parents. Predictions are driven by parents’ and grandparents’ socioeconomic characteristics, but cousins’ age and daycare use are important yet understudied predictors. Other important understudied predictors include parents’ self-employment, healthcare spending, and timing of daycare uptake.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Nicolás Soler: Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
E-mail: soleralvarezmiranda@essb.eur.nl.

Tom Emery: Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
E-mail: tom@odissei-data.nl.

Agnieszka Kanas: Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
E-mail: kanas@essb.eur.nl.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Code to reproduce the results can be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19189668. The data are non-public microdata from Statistics Netherlands that are accessible to accredited researchers under certain conditions (see Statistics Netherlands 2026).


  • Citation: Soler, Nicolás, Tom Emery, Agnieszka Kanas, 2026. “Family Networks and Childcare Choices: A Predictive Machine Learning Approach” Sociological Science 13: 589-613.
  • Received: February 18, 2026
  • Accepted: March 23, 2026
  • Editors: Stephen Vaisey, Michael Rosenfeld
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a23


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Echo Chambers Are Defined by Conflict, Not Isolation

By on May 11, 2026 in Articles

Anna Keuchenius, Petter Törnberg, Justus Uitermark

Sociological Science May 11, 2026
10.15195/v13.a22

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The influential “echo chamber” hypothesis suggests that social media drive polarization through a mutual reinforcement between isolation and radicalization. The existence of such echo chambers has been a central focus of academic debate, with competing studies finding ostensibly contradictory empirical evidence. This article identifies a fundamental methodological limitation of these empirical studies: they do not differentiate between negative and positive interactions. To overcome this limitation, we develop a method to extract signed network representations of Twitter/X debates using machine learning. Applying our approach to a major Dutch cultural controversy, we show that the inclusion of negative interactions provides a new empirical picture of the dynamics of online polarization. Our findings suggest that conflict, not isolation, is at the heart of polarization.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Anna Keuchenius: Sociology, University of Amsterdam
E-mail: anna@keuchenius.com.

Petter Törnberg: Computational Social Science, University of Amsterdam
E-mail: p.tornberg@uva.nl

Justus Uitermark: Human Geography Planning and International Development Studies
University of Amsterdam, E-mail: j.l.uitermark@uva.nl

Financial Disclosure: This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 732942, project ODYCCEUS.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: The data and code underlying this article are available as part of our replication materials available at this link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30948659.v1 or the DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.30948659. Due to Twitter/X’s Terms of Service and ethical and legal obligations, we do not share tweet text, user IDs, or any data that could identify individuals or their stance in the debate. The dataset contains sensitive information, including political opinions, and releasing identifiable content would pose ethical risks to users and violate GDPR requirements. To support replication, we provide code, documentation, and non-identifying data sufficient to reproduce all analytical steps, with full analyses possible via rehydration of tweet IDs.


  • Citation: Keuchenius, Anna, Petter Törnberg, and Justus Uitermark. 2026. “Echo Chambers Are Defined by Conflict, Not Isolation” Sociological Science 13: 565-588
  • Received: January 8, 2025
  • Accepted: January 12, 2026
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Bart Bonikowski
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a22


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How a Seemingly Innocuous and Intuitive Methodological Choice Confused a Generation of Research on Policy Responsiveness

By on May 4, 2026 in Articles

Peter K. Enns

Sociological Science May 4, 2026
10.15195/v13.a21

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The finding that government policy is, “virtually unrelated to the desires of the low- and middle-income citizens” (Gilens 2005:789), is one of the most influential social science results of the last two decades. This article offers a new perspective on this finding. I show that the seemingly innocuous decision to restrict analyses to data where different income groups’ policy support differs (i.e., a preference gap exists) introduced Simpson’s paradox, leading to misleading conclusions about whose preferences policy reflects. The same concerns apply to analyses of responsiveness to men and women and to partisan groups. I also present evidence that other common approaches for evaluating policy responsiveness can produce equally misleading conclusions. These findings suggest a need to reconsider conventional wisdom about political influence. The conclusion offers methodological recommendations and discusses implications related to understanding social and economic inequality and support for populist candidates.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Peter K. Enns: Professor, Department of Government; Professor, Brooks School of Public Policy; Robert S. Harrison Director, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, Cornell University; Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist, Verasight.
E-mail: peterenns@cornell.edu.

Acknowledgments: I thank Gabrielle Sorresso and Claudia Miner for outstanding research assistance, David Bateman, Dan Butler, Scott Desposato, Derek Epp, Chris Faricy, Marty Gilens, Luke Keele, Doug Kriner, Neil Malhotra, Henry Mo, Jacob Montgomery, Tom Pepinsky, Bryn Rosenfeld, Kim Weeden, Ariel White, and Chris Wlezien for extremely helpful comments and feedback, Stephen Parry and Kenneth Tyler Wilcox from Cornell’s Statistical Consulting Unit, and the Cornell Center for Social Sciences for verifying that the data and replication code replicate the numerical results reported in the main text and online supplement to this article. Previous versions of this article were presented at the University of California San Diego Methods Workshop, the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Society for Political Methodology, the 25th Anniversary of the American Politics Research Group (APRG) George Rabinowitz Seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Introduction to Public Policy (PUBPOL 2301), Public Opinion (GOVT 6461), Time Series Analysis (GOVT 6089), and Comparative Political Behavior (GOVT 6594) courses at Cornell University.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Data and code to reproduce all numerical results are available here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/9QADPC.


  • Citation: Enns, K. Peter. 2026. “How a Seemingly Innocuous and Intuitive Methodological Choice Confused a Generation of Research on Policy Responsiveness” Sociological Science 13: 528-564.
  • Received: December 15, 2025
  • Accepted: February 25, 2026
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Bart Bonikowski
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a21


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Dissecting Taste Distinction: Cultural Tastes and Perceptions of Individuals’ Status and Qualities

By on April 30, 2026 in Articles

Mikkel Haderup Larsen, Mads Meier Jæger

Sociological Science April 30, 2026
10.15195/v13.a20

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A rich literature in sociology argues that familiarity with legitimate culture creates favorable perceptions of individuals’ status and qualities, which in turn yield privilege. Yet, it remains unclear which tastes affect what perceptions by how much. To address these important questions, we designed a survey experiment in Denmark that “dissects” and quantifies the effect of individuals’ tastes across six taste domains (music, food, performing arts, leisure, sport, and literature) on perceptions of status and qualities. Ignoring taste domains, we find that an individual whose taste profile in general includes more legitimate tastes is perceived more favorably in terms of status and qualities but less favorably in terms of sociability. Dissecting taste distinction by domain, we find that tastes in music and food have the strongest effect on perceptions, whereas tastes in other domains have little effect. Finally, we find that the substantive (and not just statistical) effect of tastes is large with regard to perceptions of cultural sophistication and sociability but small with regard to perceptions of social rank, earnings, and respectability. Overall, our results show that not all taste domains matter equally, legitimate tastes elicit both positive and negative perceptions, and tastes are powerful signals.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Mikkel Haderup Larsen: ROCKWOOL Foundation Intervention Unit.
E-mail: mhl@rfintervention.dk.

Mads Meier Jæger: Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen.
E-mail: mads.jaeger@samf.ku.dk.

Acknowledgments: We have presented this article at the 2024 British Journal of Sociology Conference, the 31st Nordic Sociological Association Conference, the Sixth Annual Conference on Experimental Sociology (ACES), the 2024 European Consortium for Sociological Research (ECSR) Conference, the 2024 CEPDISC Conference, and at workshops at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Iceland, and the ROCKWOOL Foundation. We thank participants at these events for helpful comments and suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Carlsberg Foundation (grant no. CF21-325) and the ROCKWOOL Foundation (grant no. 934121). The experiment was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen (Case ID: UCPH-SAMF-SOC-2023-02).


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: If you wish to reproduce our results, you can access the data set and accompanying R code at https://tinyurl.com/yjm8f9ce. Please be aware that we provide the data set solely for the purpose of reproducing the results we present in the article. You may not use the data set for any other purpose without written consent from the authors.


  • Citation: Larsen, Mikkel Haderup, and Mads Meier Jæger. 2026. “Dissecting Taste Distinction: Cultural Tastes and Perceptions of Individuals’ Status and Qualities” Sociological Science 13: 501-527.
  • Received: October 10, 2025
  • Accepted: January 13, 2026
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Elizabeth Bruch
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a20


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More Common, Less Equal: Disparities in College Internship Participation Over Time

By on April 23, 2026 in Articles

Carrie L. Shandra

Sociological Science April 23, 2026
10.15195/v13.a19

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Internships play a key role in the production of inequality in the U.S. labor market, yet are often unobserved in analyses of youth employment. This study makes two empirical contributions to the study of internships. First, I use nationwide data from the 1994–2017 College Senior Survey to evaluate the association between internship participation and individual and institutional markers of privilege over time, net of grades, college major, and demographic controls. Second, I test if disparities in internship participation narrowed, persisted, or widened over three decades, independent of controls. Results indicate that internship participation has more than doubled since the mid-1990s, marking a period of rapid internship expansion, but these gains were not equal for all students. Those with the highest family income, with college-educated parents, from the most selective colleges, and from private colleges were consistently more likely to participate. Further, these internship participation gaps persisted or widened over time. Findings indicate that internships follow similar patterns of stratification as formal credentials, despite their more ambiguous nature. They also suggest that persistent barriers to internship participation remain for less-privileged students.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Carrie L. Shandra, State University of New York at Stony Brook
E-mail: Carrie.Shandra@stonybrook.edu.

Acknowledgments: This research was funded by a Presidential Grant and a Visiting Scholar award from the Russell Sage Foundation. Assistance with data acquisition and support was received from Ellen Stolzenberg and the Higher Education Research Institute. This study benefited from conversations with Sarah Damaske, Jessica Halliday Hardie, Dara Shifrer, Angela Frederick, Rachel Fish, Jennifer Pearson, and Linda Blum. All errors are my own.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: This article uses proprietary data from the Higher Education Research Institute. Code used for data processing and analysis is available at https://osf.io/n39h2.


  • Citation: Shandra, Carrie L. 2026. “More Common, Less Equal: Disparities in College Internship Participation Over Time” Sociological Science 13:476-500.
  • Received: February 11, 2026
  • Accepted: March 2, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Cristobal Young
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a19


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Fathers’ Military Service and Children’s College Attainment

By on April 20, 2026 in Articles

Paula Fomby, Patricia van Hissenhoven Flórez

Sociological Science April 20, 2026
10.15195/v13.a18

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Men’s early adult experiences shape the life chances of their future children. For Black men in the United States, systemic exclusion from educational and labor market opportunity has long constrained intergenerational mobility. We examine whether military service alters this trajectory, drawing on the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1968–2023, N=7,808 father–child pairs) to investigate college completion among adult children whose fathers were born between 1920 and 1976. Since the mid-twentieth century, the Armed Forces have offered Black men racial integration, occupational advancement, economic stability, and educational benefits that were less available in civilian society. Black fathers’ military service increased children’s probability of earning a bachelor’s degree by 53 percent compared with children of Black nonveterans, with larger differences when fathers served before the transition to an all-volunteer force. Gains were attributable to GI Bill benefit receipt and diversion out of limited civilian opportunity in early adulthood. White fathers’ veteran status conferred no educational advantage to their children, reflecting different counterfactuals: service provided greater relative benefits when the alternative was a racially closed civilian opportunity structure rather than an open one.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Paula Fomby, University of Pennsylvania
E-mail: pfomby@sas.upenn.edu.

Patricia van Hissenhoven Flórez, University of Pennsylvania
E-mail: vpatr@sas.upenn.edu.

Acknowledgments: We are grateful to Angela Dixon, Megan Reed, Christine Schwartz, and participants in seminars at Emory University, University of Maryland, and University of Wisconsin for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript and to the University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center and its NICHD Center Grant (P2C HD044964) for administrative and computing support. All errors and omissions are the responsibility of the authors.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Reproducibility package available at: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/sites/psid/view/studies/303003


  • Citation: Fomby, Paula, Patricia van Hissenhoven Flórez. 2026. “Fathers’ Military Service and Children’s College Attainment” Sociological Science 13: 441-475.
  • Received: January 6, 2026
  • Accepted: March 9, 2026
  • Editors: Stephen Vaisey, Ellis Monk
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a18


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