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In normal times, the network ties that connect students on a college campus are an asset; during a pandemic, they can become a liability. Using prepandemic data from Cornell University, Weeden and Cornwell (2020) showed how co-enrollment in classes creates a “small world” network with high clustering, short path lengths, and multiple independent pathways connecting students. Using data from the fall of 2020, we assess how the structure of the co-enrollment network changed as Cornell, like many other institutions of higher education, adapted to the pandemic by adopting a hybrid instructional model. We find that under hybrid instruction, not only is a much smaller share of students in the face-to-face network, but the paths connecting student pairs in the network lengthened, the share of student pairs connected by three or fewer degrees of separation declined, clustering increased, and a greater share of co-enrollment ties occurred between students in the same field of study. The small world became both less connected and more fragmented.

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

Kim A. Weeden: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: kw74@cornell.edu

Benjamin Cornwell: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: btc49@cornell.edu

Barum Park: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: b.park@cornell.edu

Acknowledgments: Direct correspondence to Kim A. Weeden, Department of Sociology, Cornell University; kw74@cornell.edu. We acknowledge Cornell University’s administration for generously and promptly providing access to anonymized data.

Citation: Weeden, Kim A., Benjamin Cornwell, and Barum Park. 2021. “Still a Small World? University Course Enrollment Networks before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Sociological Science 8: 73-82.
Received: November 19, 2020
Accepted: December 18, 2020
Editors: Mario Small
DOI: 10.15195/v8.a4

Using Sequence Analysis to Quantify How Strongly Life Courses Are Linked

By Parker Webservices on January 19, 2021 in Articles

Tim F. Liao

Sociological Science January 19, 2021
10.15195/v8.a3

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Dyadic or, more generally, polyadic life course sequences can be more associated within dyads or polyads than between randomly assigned dyadic/polyadic member sequences, a phenomenon reflecting the life course principle of linked lives. In this article, I propose a method of U and V measures for quantifying and assessing linked life course trajectories in sequence data. Specifically, I compare the sequence distance between members of an observed dyad/polyad against a set of randomly generated dyads/polyads. TheU measure quantifies how much greater, in terms of a given distance measure, the members in a dyad/polyad resemble one another than do members of randomly generated dyads/polyads, and the V measure quantifies the degree of linked lives in terms of how much observed dyads/polyads outperform randomized dyads/polyads. I present a simulation study, an empirical study analyzing dyadic family formation sequence data from the Longitudinal Study of Generations, and a random seed sensitivity analysis in the online supplement. Through these analyses, I demonstrate the versatility and usefulness of the proposed method for quantifying linked lives analysis with sequence data. The method has broad applicability to sequence data in life course, business and organizational, and social network research.

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

Tim F. Liao: Department of Sociology, University of Illinois
E-mail: tfliao@illinois.edu

Acknowledgments: The author wishes to acknowledge the benefit of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP#160101063, chief investigators Irma Mooi-Reci and Mark Wooden, and partner investigator Tim Liao). The abovementioned project anticipated the need for the research reported in this article. The author would also like to thank Anette Fasang and Marcel Raab, who kindly shared the Longitudinal Study of Generations data used in their 2014 Demography publication, and Yifan Shen for comments.

Citation: Liao, Tim F. 2021. “Using Sequence Analysis to Quantify How Strongly Life Courses Are Linked.” Sociological Science 8: 48-72.
Received: November 5, 2020
Accepted: December 13, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
DOI: 10.15195/v8.a3

Which Data Fairly Differentiate? American Views on the Use of Personal Data in Two Market Settings

By Parker Webservices on January 13, 2021 in Articles

Barbara Kiviat

Sociological Science January 13, 2021
10.15195/v8.a2

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Corporations increasingly use personal data to offer individuals different products and prices. I present first-of-its-kind evidence about how U.S. consumers assess the fairness of companies using personal information in this way. Drawing on a nationally representative survey that asks respondents to rate how fair or unfair it is for car insurers and lenders to use various sorts of information—from credit scores to web browser history to residential moves—I find that everyday Americans make strong moral distinctions among types of data, even when they are told data predict consumer behavior (insurance claims and loan defaults, respectively). Open-ended responses show that people adjudicate fairness by drawing on shared understandings of whether data are logically related to the predicted outcome and whether the categories companies use conflate morally distinct individuals. These findings demonstrate how dynamics long studied by economic sociologists manifest in legitimating a new and important mode of market allocation.

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

Barbara Kiviat: Department of Sociology, Stanford University
E-mail: bkiviat@stanford.edu

Acknowledgments: For helpful comments, the author thanks Laura Adler, Alexandra Feldberg, Carly Knight, Rourke O’Brien, Kim Pernell, Alix Winter, and the editors of Sociological Science, as well as participants of the MIT-NYU Morals and Markets Workshop and the 2019 annual meetings of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics and American Sociological Association. For advice on the survey instrument used in this research, the author thanks Birny Birnbaum, Douglas Heller, Rajat Jain, Sam Luks, Katherine Morris, Gennady Stolyarov II, and the Dobbin Research Group. The author gratefully acknowledges funding from the National Science Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award 1802286).

Citation: Kiviat, Barbara. 2021. “Which Data Fairly Differentiate? American Views on the Use of Personal Data in Two Market Settings.” Sociological Science 8: 26-47.
Received: September 26, 2020
Accepted: November 12, 2020
Editors: Gabriel Rossman, Ari Adut
DOI: 10.15195/v8.a2

How to Sell a Friend: Disinterest as Relational Work in Direct Sales

By Parker Webservices on January 6, 2021 in Articles

Curtis Child

Sociological Science January 6, 2021
10.15195/v8.a1

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Economic sociologists agree that monetary transactions are not necessarily antithetical to meaningful social relationships. However, they also accept that creating “good matches” between the two requires hard work. In this article, I contribute to the relational program in economic sociology by examining a common but understudied type of work in which one party to a relationship stands to benefit from it financially. I identify in these highly commercialized contexts a particular style of relational work anticipated, but not fully developed, in Pierre Bourdieu’s writings: disinterest. I argue that the disinterested style is manifest by economically implicated individuals who downplay their objectively apparent economic interests in order to preserve or encourage good feelings about a relationship that is meaningful to them. Drawing upon data from the direct selling industry, I show how distributors use disinterest to navigate their work.

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

Curtis Child: Department of Sociology, Brigham Young University
E-mail: cchild@byu.edu

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to Sage Christianson, Eric Dahlin, Krista Frederico, Ben Gibbs, Jon Jarvis, Stacey Johnson, Jane Lopez, Heather Shurtliff, and Greg Wurm for support and comments on earlier drafts.

Citation: Child, Curtis. 2021. “How to Sell a Friend: Disinterest as Relational Work in Direct Sales.” Sociological Science 8: 1-25.
Received: September 18, 2020
Accepted: October 20, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v8.a1

The Toll of Turnover: Network Instability, Well-Being, and Academic Effort in 56 Middle Schools

By Parker Webservices on December 18, 2020 in Articles

Hana Shepherd, Adam Reich

Sociological Science December 18, 2020
10.15195/v7.a28

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This article examines whether network instability—namely, the extent of turnover in a person’s social network over time—is a distinct social process that affects individual well-being. Using a unique two-wave network data set collected in a field experiment that involved more than 21,100 students across 56 middle schools, we find a strong negative association between network instability and well-being and academic effort at the individual level, independent of other types of network change effects. We assess whether the negative effect of network instability remains when the source of instability is exogenous, the result of participation in the randomized intervention. Network instability leads to negative consequences even in this context, negatively impacting students who directly participated in the intervention. For nonintervention students in treatment schools, the intervention stabilized their social networks. We discuss the implications of these findings for studies of social networks and collective action.

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

Hana Shepherd: Department of Sociology, Rutgers University
E-mail: hshepherd@sociology.rutgers.edu

Adam Reich: Department of Sociology, Columbia University
E-mail: ar3237@columbia.edu

Acknowledgments: We thank the members of the Columbia University Networks and Time Workshop for their feedback on this project. Amy Kate Bailey, Lauren Krivo, Emily Marshall, Christine Percheski, and LaTonya Trotter provided helpful feedback on early versions of the manuscript. The data set used in this article (available at Inter-University Consortium for Politics and Social Research, https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37070.v1) was collected by Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Hana Shepherd and was funded by grants from the W. T. Grant Foundation Scholars Program, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Princeton Educational Research Section, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rutgers Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.

Citation: Shepherd, Hana, and Adam Reich. 2020. “The Toll of Turnover: Network Instability, Well-Being, and Academic Effort in 56 Middle Schools.” Sociological Science 7: 663-691.
Received: August 12, 2020
Accepted: September 30, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a28

Racial and Gender Disparities among Evicted Americans

By Parker Webservices on December 16, 2020 in Articles

Peter Hepburn, Renee Louis, Matthew Desmond

Sociological Science December 16, 2020
10.15195/v7.a27

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Drawing on millions of court records of eviction cases filed between 2012 and 2016 in 39 states, this study documents the racial and gender demographics of America’s evicted population. Black renters received a disproportionate share of eviction filings and experienced the highest rates of eviction filing and eviction judgment. Black and Latinx female renters faced higher eviction rates than their male counterparts. Black and Latinx renters were also more likely to be serially filed against for eviction at the same address. These findings represent the most comprehensive investigation to date of racial and gender disparities among evicted renters in the United States.

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

Peter Hepburn: Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Rutgers University-Newark
E-mail: peter.hepburn@rutgers.edu

Renee Louis: Department of Sociology, Princeton University
E-mail: reneel@princeton.edu

Matthew Desmond: Department of Sociology, Princeton University
E-mail: matthew.desmond@princeton.edu

Acknowledgments: Members of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University offered valuable feedback on an early draft of this article. Sandra Park of the American Civil Liberties Union provided guidance on the structure of disparate impact claims and the Fair Housing Act. The Eviction Lab is funded by the JPB, Gates, and Ford Foundations as well as the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under award number P2CHD047879. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not represent the official views of the NIH.

Citation: Hepburn, Peter, Renee Louis, and Matthew Desmond. 2020. “Racial and Gender Disparities among Evicted Americans.” Sociological Science 7: 649-662.
Received: September 21, 2020
Accepted: November 14, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a27

Threshold Models of Collective Behavior II: The Predictability Paradox and Spontaneous Instigation

By Parker Webservices on December 8, 2020 in Articles

Michael W. Macy, Anna Evtushenko

Sociological Science December 8, 2020
10.15195/v7.a26

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Collective behavior can be notoriously hard to predict. We revisited a possible explanation suggested by Granovetter’s classic threshold model: collective behavior can unexpectedly fail, despite a group’s strong interest in the outcome, because of the sensitivity of cascades to small random perturbations in group composition and the distribution of thresholds. Paradoxically, we found that a small amount of randomness in individual behavior can make collective behavior less sensitive to these perturbations and therefore more predictable. We also examined conditions in which collective behavior unexpectedly succeeds despite the group’s weak interest in the outcome. In groups with an otherwise intractable start-up problem, individual randomness can lead to spontaneous instigation, making outcomes more sensitive to the strength of collective interests and therefore more predictable. These effects of chance behavior become much more pronounced as group size increases. Although randomness is often assumed to be a theoretically unimportant residual category, our findings point to the need to bring individual idiosyncrasy back into the study of collective behavior.

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

Michael W. Macy: Department of Sociology and Department of Information Science, Cornell University
E-mail: mwm14@cornell.edu

Anna Evtushenko: Department of Information Science, Cornell University
E-mail: ae392@cornell.edu

Acknowledgments: We thank Jon Kleinberg, Dana Warmsley, and Danielle Toupo for contributing ideas and technical suggestions. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (SES 1756822, “Testing Unpredictability with MultipleWorlds”). Correspondence should be sent to Michael W. Macy, Department of Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853.

Citation: Macy, Michael W., and Anna Evtushenko. 2020. “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior II: The Predictability Paradox and Spontaneous Instigation.” Sociological Science 7: 628-648.
Received: October 18, 2020
Accepted: November 1, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a26

The Inheritance of Race Revisited: Childhood Wealth and Income and Black–White Disadvantages in Adult Life Chances

By Parker Webservices on December 1, 2020 in Articles

David Brady, Ryan Finnigan, Ulrich Kohler, Joscha Legewie

Sociological Science December 1, 2020
10.15195/v7.a25

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Vast racial inequalities continue to prevail across the United States and are closely linked to economic resources. One particularly prominent argument contends that childhood wealth accounts for black–white (BW) disadvantages in life chances. This article analyzes how much childhood wealth and childhood income mediate BW disadvantages in adult life chances with Panel Study of Income Dynamics and Cross-National Equivalent File data on children from the 1980s and 1990s who were 30+ years old in 2015. Compared with previous research, we exploit longer panel data, more comprehensively assess adult life chances with 18 outcomes, and measure income and wealth more rigorously. We find large BW disadvantages in most outcomes. Childhood wealth and income mediate a substantial share of most BW disadvantages, although there are several significant BW disadvantages even after adjusting for childhood wealth and income. The evidence mostly contradicts the prominent claim that childhood wealth is more important than childhood income. Indeed, the analyses mostly show that childhood income explains more of BW disadvantages and has larger standardized coefficients than childhood wealth. We also show how limitations in prior wealth research explain why our conclusions differ. Replication with the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and a variety of robustness checks support these conclusions.

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

David Brady: School of Public Policy, University of California, Riverside, and WZB Berlin Social Science Center
E-mail: dbrady@ucr.edu

Ryan Finnigan: Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis
E-mail: rfinnigan@ucdavis.edu

Ulrich Kohler: Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Potsdam
E-mail: ukohler@uni-potsdam.de

Joscha Legewie: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
E-mail: jlegewie@fas.harvard.edu

Acknowledgments: Direct correspondence to David Brady, School of Public Policy, University of California, INTS 4133, 900 University Ave., Riverside, CA 92521; email:dbrady@ucr.edu. The last three authors are listed alphabetically and contributed equally. This article benefitted from presentations at the New York University–Abu Dhabi Social Research and Public Policy seminar; University of California, Santa Barbara, Broom Center for Demography; the PAA meetings; the University of California Riverside Applied/Development Economics Brown Bag; theWorking Groups on Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility and Movements, Organizations, and Markets in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles; and the WZBUSP Writing Workshop. We appreciate suggestions from Sociological Science reviewers and editor Jesper Sorensen, Thomas Biegert, Agnes Blome, Irene Boeckmann, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Tyson Brown, Mareike Buenning, Rich Carpiano, Joe Cummins, Chenoa Flippen, Sanjiv Gupta, Martin Hällsten, Lena Hipp, Sabine Huebgen, Bob Kaestner, Sasha Killewald, Nadia Kim, Matthew Mahutga, Fabian Pfeffer, Emanuela Struffolino, Florencia Torche, Zachary Van Winkle, Andres Villarreal, and Hanna Zagel.

Citation: Brady, David, Ryan Finnigan, Ulrich Kohler, and Joscha Legewie. 2020. “The Inheritance of Race Revisited: Childhood Wealth and Income and Black–White Disadvantages in Adult Life Chances.” Sociological Science 7: 599-627.
Received: August 7, 2020
Accepted: September 24, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a25

Who Supports Global Cooperation? Cooperative Internationalism at the Intersection of Social Class and Economic Development

By Parker Webservices on November 23, 2020 in Articles

Brandon Gorman, Charles Seguin

Sociological Science November 23, 2020
10.15195/v7.a24

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Throughout the twentieth century, the world has seen a rapid increase in global social, economic, and political integration. According to many studies, attitudes toward international organizations and international cooperation have also grown more positive, particularly among elites and in the affluent, densely connected countries of the global core. Using survey responses on 18 different questions from six cross-national attitude surveys, we find that “cooperative-internationalist” attitudes, though widely popular, are no more common in the global core than on the periphery. Furthermore, we find elites are more likely to hold proglobal attitudes than non-elites only in wealthy core countries. These results indicate that scholars may have incorrectly assumed that (modest) class differences in cooperative-internationalist attitudes in Western countries generalize globally, both within and between countries. We conclude with a call to theorize cooperative internationalism as a function of how different groups of people interpret their own costs and benefits of global cooperation.

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

Brandon Gorman: Department of Sociology, University at Albany, SUNY
E-mail: bgorman@albany.edu

Charles Seguin: Department of Sociology and Criminology, Pennsylvania State University
E-mail: czs792@psu.edu

Acknowledgments: The authors are listed in alphabetical order; each contributed equally. We thank Daniel Laurison, Eric Schoon, and members of the Culture and Politics Workshop
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for comments and guidance on earlier drafts. Mayuko Nakatsuka and Elise Wolff provided able research assistance for this project.

Citation: Gorman, Brandon, and Charles Seguin. 2020. “Who Supports Global Cooperation? Cooperative Internationalism at the Intersection of Social Class and Economic Development.” Sociological Science 7: 570-598.
Received: August 27, 2020
Accepted: October 14, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a24

Concept Class Analysis: A Method for Identifying Cultural Schemas in Texts

By Parker Webservices on November 9, 2020 in Articles

Marshall A. Taylor, Dustin S. Stoltz

Sociological Science November 9, 2020
10.15195/v7.a23

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