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Many sociologists suspect that publication expectations have risen over time—that how much graduate students have published to get assistant professor jobs and how much assistant professors have published to be promoted have gone up. Using information about faculty in 21 top sociology departments from the American Sociological Association’s Guide to Graduate Departments of Sociology, online curricula vitae, and other public records, I provide empirical evidence to support this suspicion. On the day they start their first jobs, new assistant professors in recent years have already published roughly twice as much as their counterparts did in the early 1990s. Trends for promotion to associate professor are not as dramatic but are still remarkable. I evaluate several potential explanations for these trends and conclude that they are driven mainly by changes over time in the fiscal and organizational realities of universities and departments.

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

John Robert Warren: Department of Sociology, Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota
E-mail: warre046@umn.edu

Acknowledgements: This article was prepared for presentation at the Sociology Department Workshop at the University of Minnesota, whose College of Liberal Arts’ Dean’s Freshman Research and Creative Scholars program provided support for this project. Support has also come from the Minnesota Population Center, which receives core funding (P2C HD041023) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. I sincerely thank graduate research assistant Chris Levesque; undergraduate interns Harold Carpenter, Kristina Mann, Charles Massie, Zixiong Peng, and Morgan Schmitt-Morris; and undergraduate research assistants Megan Bursch, James Crim, Julina Duan, Alejandra Narvaez, Shannyn Telander, and Nathan Torunsky for their hard and careful work on this research. I am also very grateful to my colleagues Jack DeWaard, Doug Hartmann, Jonas Helgertz, Jennifer C. Lee, Chandra Muller, Gina Rumore, and Barbara Schneider for providing helpful comments and suggestions. However, errors and omissions are my responsibility. Please direct correspondence to me at warre046@umn.edu.

Citation: Warren, John Robert. 2019. “How Much Do You Have to Publish to Get a Job in a Top Sociology Department? Or to Get Tenure? Trends over a Generation.” Sociological Science 6:172-196.
Received: December 10, 2018
Accepted: January 10, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v6.a7

The Social Stratification of Environmental and Genetic Influences on Education: New Evidence Using a Register-Based Twin Sample

By Parker Webservices on February 20, 2019 in Articles

Tina Baier, Volker Lang

Sociological Science, February 20, 2019
10.15195/v6.a6

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The relative importance of genes and shared environmental influences on stratification outcomes has recently received much attention in the literature. We focus on education and the gene-environmental interplay. Specifically, we investigate whether—as proposed by the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis—genetic influences are more important in advantaged families. We argue that the social stratification of family environments affects children’s chances to actualize their genetic potential. We hypothesize that advantaged families provide more child-specific inputs, which enhance genetic expression, whereas the rearing environments of children in disadvantaged families are less adapted to children’s individual abilities, leading to a suppression of genetic potential. We test this relationship in Germany, which represents an interesting case due to its highly selective schooling system characterized by early tracking and the broad coverage of part-time schools. We use novel data from the TwinLife panel, a population-register–based sample of twins and their families. Results of ACE-variance decompositions support the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis: Shared environmental influences on education matter only in disadvantaged families, whereas genetic influences are more important in advantaged families. Our findings support the growing literature on the importance of the gene-environmental interplay and emphasize the role of the family environment as a trigger of differential genetic expression.

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

Tina Baier: Department Educational Decisions and Processes, Migration, Returns to Education, Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories
E-mail: tina.baier@lifbi.de

Volker Lang: Department of Sociology, Bielefeld University
E-mail: volker.lang@uni-bielefeld.de

Acknowledgements: This article was supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (awarded to Martin Diewald [DI 759/11-1], Rainer Riemann [RI 595/8-1], and Frank M. Spinath [SP 610/6-1]) and the European Consortium for Sociological Research (ECSR) internship grant. We received excellent comments from participants in the ECSR conference in Milan in August 2017, the “Reading Group” held at the University of Oxford in November 2017, and the “Social Inequality and Social Demography” colloquium held at Humboldt University of Berlin in January 2018. We also would like to thank especially Martin Diewald, Anette Fasang, and the editors for their valuable feedback on an earlier version of the article.

Citation: Baier, Tina, and Volker Lang. 2019. “The Social Stratification of Environmental and Genetic Influences on Education: New Evidence Using a Register-Based Twin Sample.” Sociological Science 6: 143-171.
Received: September 25, 2018
Accepted: December 31, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
DOI: 10.15195/v6.a6

Danger on the Way to School: Exposure to Violent Crime, Public Transportation, and Absenteeism

By Parker Webservices on February 13, 2019 in Articles

Julia Burdick-Will, Marc L. Stein, Jeffrey Grigg

Sociological Science, February 13, 2019
10.15195/v6.a5

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In this study, we propose and test a mechanism for the effect of neighborhood of residence on school outcomes: absenteeism that results from exposure to danger on the way to school. We first determine the most efficient route to school using public transportation for 4,200 first-time freshmen in Baltimore City public high schools. Then, we link the specific streets along the most efficient route to incident-level crime data from the Baltimore Police Department. We find that students whose estimated routes require walking along streets with higher violent-crime rates have higher rates of absenteeism throughout the year. We also show that absenteeism is not associated with exposure to dangerous streets while riding on public transit and exposure to property crime.These conclusions hold with and without adjustments for student demographic characteristics, prior school attendance, violent crime around homes and schools, and unobserved differences related to school preference and neighborhood selection.

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

Julia Burdick-Will: Department of Sociology and School of Education, Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: jburdickwill@jhu.edu

Marc L. Stein: School of Education, Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: m.stein@jhu.edu

Jeffrey Grigg: School of Education, Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: jgrigg1@jhu.edu

Acknowledgements: This research was made possible by a grant from the Spencer Foundation and indirect support from the Baltimore Education Research Consortium and the Hopkins Population Center. Curt Cronister provided invaluable technical support. We are grateful for the feedback from and assistance of the Baltimore City Public Schools.All errors and opinions are our own.

Citation: Burdick-Will, Julia,Mark L. Stein, and Jeffrey Grigg. 2019. “Danger on the Way to School: Exposure to Violent Crime, Public Transportation, and Absenteeism.” Sociological Science 6: 118-142.
Received: November 8, 2018
Accepted: December 31, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v6.a5

Best Practices for Estimating, Interpreting, and Presenting Nonlinear Interaction Effects

By Parker Webservices on February 6, 2019 in Articles

Trenton D. Mize

Sociological Science, February 6, 2019
10.15195/v6.a4

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Many effects of interest to sociologists are nonlinear. Additionally, many effects of interest are interaction effects—that is, the effect of one independent variable is contingent on the level of another independent variable. The proper way to estimate, interpret, and present these two types of effects individually are well known. However, many analyses that combine these two—that is, tests of interaction when the effects of interest are nonlinear—are not properly interpreted or tested. The consequences of approaching nonlinear interaction effects the way one would approach a linear interaction effect are severe and can often result in incorrect conclusions. I cover both nonlinear effects in the context of linear regression, and—most thoroughly—nonlinear effects in models for categorical outcomes (focusing on binary logit/probit). My goal in this article is to synthesize an evolving methodological literature and to provide straightforward advice and techniques to estimate,interpret, and present nonlinear interaction effects.

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

Trenton D. Mize: Department of Sociology and Advanced Methodologies, Purdue University
E-mail: tmize@purdue.edu

Acknowledgements: I thank J. Scott Long, Bianca Manago, Long Doan, and Josh Doyle for their helpful comments on previous drafts and Dave Armstrong and Shawn Bauldry for the many insightful conversations that influenced the content of the article.

Citation: Mize, Trenton D. 2019. “Best Practices for Estimating, Interpreting, and Presenting Non-linear Interaction Effects.” Sociological Science 6: 81-117.
Received: December 18, 2018
Accepted: December 27, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
DOI: 10.15195/v6.a4

Do Test Score Gaps Grow Before, During, or Between the School Years? Measurement Artifacts and What We Can Know in Spite of Them

By Parker Webservices on January 24, 2019 in Articles

Paul T. von Hippel, Caitlin Hamrock

Sociological Science, January 24, 2019
10.15195/v6.a3

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Do test score gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged children originate inside or outside schools? One approach to this classic question is to ask (1) How large are gaps when children enter school? (2) How much do gaps grow later on? (3) Do gaps grow faster during school or during summer? Confusingly, past research has given discrepant answers to these basic questions.

We show that many results about gap growth have been distorted by measurement artifacts. One artifact relates to scaling: Gaps appear to grow faster if measurement scales spread with age. Another artifact relates to changes in test form: Summer gap growth is hard to estimate if children take different tests in spring than in fall.

Net of artifacts, the most replicable finding is that gaps form mainly in early childhood, before schooling begins. After school begins, most gaps grow little, and some gaps shrink. Evidence is inconsistent regarding whether gaps grow faster during school or during summer. We substantiate these conclusions using new data from the Growth Research Database and two data sets used in previous studies of gap growth: the Beginning School Study and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort of 1998–1999.

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

Paul T. von Hippel: LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin
E-mail: paulvonhippel.utaustin@gmail.com

Caitlin Hamrock: E3 Alliance
E-mail: chamrock@e3alliance.org

Acknowledgements: We thank Mina Kumar for research assistance. We thank the William T. Grant Foundation and the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis for grants supporting this work.

Citation: von Hippel, Paul T., and Caitlin Hamrock. 2019. “Do Test Score Gaps Grow Before, During, or Between the School Years? Measurement Artifacts and What We Can Know in Spite of Them.” Sociological Science 6: 43-80.
Received: February 20, 2018
Accepted: July 23, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
DOI: 10.15195/v6.a3

Exploring the Sources of Collective Effervescence: A Multilevel Study

By Parker Webservices on January 17, 2019 in Articles

Lasse Suonperä Liebst

Sociological Science, January 17, 2019
10.15195/v6.a2

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Collective effervescence is assigned a key role in sociological theorizing on ritual and group processes, yet surprisingly little research has systematically measured the phenomenon and examined its sources. In addressing this research gap, the current article explores and compares several correlates of collective effervescence. The data included questionnaires and geospatial records of spatial setting and movement patterns recorded at a large music festival. Multilevel regression modeling was applied, and the strength of the estimated evidence was assessed with frequentist and Bayesian approaches. Results suggest that collective effervescence is a highly spatially clustered phenomenon that, in particular, is associated with the social-morphological feature of being in a crowd of people. The article discusses the implications of these results for sociological Durkheim scholarship as well as for festival-event studies.

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

Lasse Suonperä Liebst: Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen
E-mail: lsl@soc.ku.dk

Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank the following individuals for their comments and suggestions: Randall Collins, Line Vistisen Liebst, Inge Kryger Pedersen, and Richard Philpot.

Citation: Liebst, Lasse Suonperä. 2019. “Exploring the Sources of Collective Effervescence: A Multilevel Study.” Sociological Science 6: 27-42.
Received: October 27, 2018
Accepted: November 25, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v6.a2

Inequality of Educational Opportunity in East and West Germany: Convergence or Continued Differences?

By Parker Webservices on January 10, 2019 in Articles

Markus Klein, Katherin Barg, Michael Kühhirt

Sociological Science, January 10, 2019
10.15195/v6.a1

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Diversity in education systems, and broader political and economic conditions, are commonly credited with international variation in inequality of educational opportunity (IEO). Comparing East and West Germany before reunification allows us to investigate whether vastly different political, economic, and educational systems led to differences in IEO. Postreunification, East Germany adopted the West’s systems and experienced an economic recession. IEO had been smaller in East Germany than in West Germany but was on an upward trajectory before reunification. After 1990, IEO in East Germany converged to the West German level as a result of decreased IEO in the west and increasing levels in the east. Postreunification convergence suggests that differences in political context and education policy are crucial for IEO.

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

Markus Klein: School of Education, University of Strathclyde
E-mail: markus.klein@strath.ac.uk

Katherin Barg: Graduate School of Education, University of Exeter
E-mail: k.barg@exeter.ac.uk

Michael Kühhirt: Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Cologne
E-mail: michael.kuehhirt@uni-koeln.de

Acknowledgements: The authors gratefully acknowledge the participants in the German Life History Study (GLHS), the German General Social Survey (GGSS), and the German Microcensus (GMC) for providing their information; the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin for collecting and managing the GLHS data; the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences for collecting and managing the GGSS data; and the statistical offices of the Länder under the supervision of the Federal Statistical Office for collecting and managing the GMC data. The authors would also like to thank Walter Müller, Andreas Hadjar, and Ian Rivers for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript; Julia Däumling for the excellent research assistance; and Matilda Klein for the copyediting. Sole responsibility for any remaining errors lies with the authors.

Citation: Klein, Markus, Katherin Barg, and Michael Kühhirt. 2018. “Inequality of Educational Opportunity in East and West Germany: Convergence or Continued Differences?” Sociological Science 6: 1-26.
Received: October 15, 2018
Accepted: November 21, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
DOI: 10.15195/v6.a1

Cultural Capital and Educational Inequality: A Counterfactual Analysis

By Parker Webservices on December 12, 2018 in Articles

Mads Meier Jæger, Kristian Karlson

Sociological Science, December 12, 2018
10.15195/v5.a33

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We use National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) data and a counterfactual approach to test the macro-level implications of cultural reproduction and cultural mobility theory. Our counterfactual analyses show that the observed socioeconomic gradient in children’s educational attainment in the NLSY79 data would be smaller if cultural capital was more equally distributed between children whose parents are of low socioeconomic status (SES) and those whose parents are of high SES. They also show that hypothetically increasing cultural capital among low-SES parents would lead to a larger reduction in the socioeconomic gradient in educational attainment than reducing it among high-SES parents. These findings are consistent with cultural mobility theory (which argues that low-SES children have a higher return to cultural capital than high-SES children) but not with cultural reproduction theory (which argues that low-SES children have a lower return to cultural capital). Our analysis contributes to existing research by demonstrating that the unequal distribution of cultural capital shapes educational inequality at the macro level.

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

Mads Meier Jæger: Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen
E-mail: mmj@soc.ku.dk

Kristian Karlson: Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen
E-mail: kbk@soc.ku.dk

Acknowledgements: We presented this article at the 2015 Research Committee 28 meeting at Tilburg University and at several research seminars at the University of Copenhagen. We thank the participants at these events for their excellent comments. The research leading to the results presented in this article has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) and ERC grant 312906.

Citation: Jæger, Mads Meier, and Kristian Karlson. 2018. “Cultural Capital and Educational Inequality: A Counterfactual Analysis.” Sociological Science 5: 775-795.
Received: September 5, 2018
Accepted: November 7, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a33

Hegemonic Gender Norms and the Gender Gap in Achievement: The Case of Asian Americans

By Parker Webservices on December 3, 2018 in Articles

Amy Hsin

Sociological Science, December 3, 2018
10.15195/v5.a32

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Many argue that hegemonic gender norms depress boys’ performance and account for the gender gap in achievement. I describe differences in the emergence of the gender gap in academic achievement between white and Asian American youth and explore how the immigrant experience and cultural differences in gender expectations might account for observed differences. For white students, boys are already underperforming girls in kindergarten, with the male disadvantage growing into high school. For Asian Americans, boys perform as well as girls throughout elementary school but begin underperforming relative to girls at the transition to adolescence. Additionally, I show that the Asian American gender gap is larger in schools with stronger male-centric sports cultures and where boys’ underachievement is normalized. I speculate that model-minority stereotypes, the immigrant experience, and standards of masculinity that promote pro-school behaviors in boys act as protective factors in early childhood but wane at the transition to adolescence during a period when the dominant peer culture plays a larger role in shaping gender identities. The study offers evidence that the gender gap in achievement is not an inevitable fact of biology but is shaped by social environment.

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

Amy Hsin: Department of Sociology, Queens College, City University of New York
E-mail: amy.hsin@qc.cuny.edu

Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank Yu Xie, Kate Choi, Sophia Catsambis, and Lizandra Friedland for commenting on earlier versions of this work. All remaining errors are strictly the responsibility of the author.

Citation: Hsin, Amy. 2018. “Hegemonic Gender Norms and the Gender Gap in Achievement: The Case of Asian Americans.” Sociological Science 5: 752-774.
Received: July 22, 2018
Accepted: October 23, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a32

How States Make Race: New Evidence from Brazil

By Parker Webservices on November 26, 2018 in Articles

Stanley R. Bailey, Fabrício M. Fialho, Mara Loveman

Sociological Science, November 26, 2018
10.15195/v5.a31

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The Brazilian state recently adopted unprecedented race-targeted affirmative action in government hiring and university admissions. Scholarship would predict the state’s institutionalization of racial categories has “race-making” effects. In this article, we ask whether the Brazilian state’s policy turnabout has affected racial subjectivities on the ground, specifically toward mirroring the categories used by the state. To answer, we conceptualize race as multidimensional and leverage two of its dimensions—lay identification and government classification (via open-ended and closed-ended questions, respectively)—to introduce a new metric of state race-making: a comparison of the extent of alignment between lay and government dimensions across time. Logistic regression on large-sample survey data from before the policy turn (1995) and well after its diffusion (2008) reveals an increased use of state categories as respondents’ lay identification in the direction of matching respondents’ government classification. We conclude that the Brazilian state is making race but not from scratch nor in ways that are fully intended.

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

Stanley R. Bailey: Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine
E-mail: bailey@uci.edu

Fabrício M. Fialho: Centre de Recherches Internationales, Sciences Po Paris, France
E-mail: fabriciofialho@gmail.com

Mara Loveman: Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
E-mail: mloveman@berkeley.edu