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According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, state-level poverty rates range from a low of less than 10 percent in Iowa to a high of more than 20 percent in California. We seek to account for these differences using a theoretical framework proposed by Brady, Finnigan, and Hübgen (2017), which emphasizes the prevalence of poverty risk factors as well as poverty penalties associated with each risk factor. We estimate state-specific penalties and prevalences associated with single motherhood, low education, young households, and joblessness. We also consider state variation in the poverty risks associated with living in a black household and a Hispanic immigrant household. Brady et al. (2017) find that country-level differences in poverty rates are more closely tied to penalties than prevalences. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we find that the opposite is true for state-level differences in poverty rates. Although we find that state poverty differences are closely tied to the prevalence of high-risk populations, our results do not suggest that state-level antipoverty policy should be solely focused on changing “risky” behavior. Based on our findings, we conclude that state policies should take into account cost-of-living penalties as well as the state-specific relationship between poverty, prevalences, and penalties.

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

Jennifer Laird: Department of Sociology, Lehman College
E-mail: jennifer.laird@lehman.cuny.edu

Zachary Parolin: Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy, University of Antwerp
E-mail: Zachary.Parolin@uantwerpen.be

Jane Waldfogel: School of Social Work, Columbia University
E-mail: j.waldfogel@columbia.edu

Christopher Wimer: School of Social Work, Columbia University
E-mail: cw2727@columbia.edu

Acknowledgements: A draft of this article was presented at the 2017 meeting of the American Sociological Association. We are grateful to David Brady and Jake Rosenfeld for their insights on a prior version of this article. This research is supported by generous funding from The JPB Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Citation: Laird, Jennifer, Zachary Parolin, Jane Waldfogel, and Christopher Wimer. 2018. “Poor State, Rich State: Understanding the Variability of Poverty Rates across U.S. States.” Sociological Science 5: 628-652.
Received: June 17, 2018
Accepted: August 21, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a26

Like Bees to a Flower: Attractiveness, Risk, and Collective Sexual Life in an AIDS Epidemic

By Parker Webservices on September 26, 2018 in Articles

Margaret Frye, Nina Gheihman

Sociological Science, September 26, 2018
10.15195/v5.a25

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We examine how men’s shared understandings of women’s physical attractiveness are influenced by concerns about risk in the context of a generalized AIDS epidemic. Using 180 conversational journals—descriptions of informal conversations about sex occurring in Malawi between 1999 and 2011—we show that men deploy discourses of risk to question and undermine the status advantages enjoyed by attractive women. Men simultaneously portray attractive women as irresistibly appealing and as destructive to men. Men engage in two types of collective responses: First, men work to discipline themselves and each other, reframing attractiveness as illusory and unworthy of pursuit; and second, men endeavor to discipline attractive women themselves, portraying them as evil temptresses that must be suppressed and reasserting their masculine dominance through harassment and violence. These findings reveal how men’s classifications of women as sexual objects operate as forms of symbolic violence, legitimating and naturalizing their gendered domination over women.

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

Margaret Frye: Department of Sociology, University of Michigan
E-mail: mtfrye@umich.edu

Nina Gheihman: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
E-mail: nina.gheihman@fas.harvard.edu

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to Asad L. Asad, Bart Bonikowski, Larissa Buchholz, Caitlin Daniels, Paul DiMaggio, Mitchell Dunier, Pablo Gastón, Michele Lamont, YaWen Lei, Omar Lizardo, Terence McDonnell, Orlando Patterson, Ann Swidler, Lorne Tepperman, and Jocelyn Viterna for their feedback and suggestions for revision. Previous versions of this were presented at Notre Dame’s Sociology Departmental Colloquium and African Studies Workshop, Princeton University’s Notestein Seminar Series (through the Office of Population Research), Harvard University’s Culture and Social Analysis Workshop, the Sociology of Development Conference at Brown University, and the Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting.

Citation: Frye, Margaret, and Nina Gheihman. 2018. “Like Bees to a Flower: Attractiveness, Risk, and Collective Sexual Life in an AIDS Epidemic.” Sociological Science 5: 596-627.
Received: July 23, 2018
Accepted: August 21, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a25

The Labor Market Value of Taste: An Experimental Study of Class Bias in U.S. Employment

By Parker Webservices on September 12, 2018 in Articles

Kyla Thomas

Sociological Science, September 12, 2018
10.15195/v5.a24

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This article investigates cultural forms of class bias in the middle-income U.S. labor market. Results from an audit study of employment discrimination in four U.S. cities reveal that cultural signals of class, when included in résumés, have a systematic effect on the callback rates of women applying to customer-facing jobs. For these women, displays of highbrow taste—the cultural signals of a higher-class background—generate significantly higher rates of employer callback than displays of lowbrow taste—the cultural signals of a lower-class background. Meanwhile, cultural signals of class have no systematic effect on the callback rates of male and/or non–customer-facing job applicants. Results from a survey-experimental study of 1,428 U.S. hiring managers suggest that these differing patterns of employer callback may be explained by the positive effect of higher-class cultural signals on perceptions of polish and competence and their negative effect on perceptions of warmth.

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

Kyla Thomas: Center for Economic and Social Research, University of Southern California
E-mail: kylathom@usc.edu

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Paul DiMaggio for his intellectual guidance and support as well as Viviana Zelizer, Devah Pager, Susan Fiske, David Pedulla, Patrick Ishizuka, René Flores, and participants of the University of Michigan’s Inequality and Family Working Group for their valuable insights and feedback. This research was supported by the Fahs-Beck Fund for Research and Experimentation, Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Social Organization, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

Citation: Thomas, Kyla. 2018. “The Labor Market Value of Taste: An Experimental Study of Class Bias in U.S. Employment.” Sociological Science 5: 562-595.
Received: November 17, 2017
Accepted: July 15, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a24

Unions and Nonunion Pay in the United States, 1977-2015

By Parker Webservices on August 15, 2018 in Articles

Patrick Denice, Jake Rosenfeld

Sociological Science, August 15, 2018
10.15195/v5.a23

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We provide the most extensive investigation into the connection between union power and nonunion worker pay to date. Leveraging nearly four decades of Current Population Survey (CPS) data on millions of U.S. workers, we test whether private sector union density, measured at the occupation and occupation region levels, helps raise average wages among unorganized private sector workers. We find stable and substantively large positive effects of private sector union strength on nonunion private sector workers’ wages, especially for men. These results are robust to the inclusion of controls for the risk of automation, offshoring, the related rising demand for skill, overall employment levels, industry, and the strength of public sector unions. Disaggregating the results by occupation reveals positive and substantively large union spillover effects across a range of occupations, including those not transformed by automation, offshoring, or rising skill demands. These disaggregated results also indicate that occupational segregation limits the positive spillover effects from unions to nonunion women workers: in highly organized occupations, nonunion women benefit, but there are comparatively few women in these segments of the labor market.

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

Patrick Denice: Department of Sociology, The University of Western Ontario
E-mail: pdenice@uwo.ca

Jake Rosenfeld: Department of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis
E-mail: jrosenfeld@wustl.edu

Acknowledgements: Partial support for this research came from a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research infrastructure grant (P2C HD042828) to the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington.

Citation: Denice, Patrick, and Jake Rosenfeld. 2018. “Unions and Nonunion Pay in the United States, 1977–2015.” Sociological Science 5: 541-561.
Received: June 12, 2018
Accepted: July 10, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a23

Schools as Moderators of Genetic Associations with Life Course Attainments: Evidence from the WLS and Add Health

By Parker Webservices on August 2, 2018 in Articles

Sam Trejo, Daniel W Belsky, Jason D. Boardman, Jeremy Freese, Kathleen Mullan Harris, Pam Herd, Kamil Sicinski, Benjamin W. Domingue

Sociological Science, August 2, 2018
10.15195/v5.a22

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Genetic variants identified in genome-wide association studies of educational attainment have been linked with a range of positive life course development outcomes. However, it remains unclear whether school environments may moderate these genetic associations. We analyze data from two biosocial surveys that contain both genetic data and follow students from secondary school through mid- to late life. We test if the magnitudes of the associations with educational and occupational attainments varied across the secondary schools that participants attended or with characteristics of those schools. Although we find little evidence that genetic associations with educational and occupational attainment varied across schools or with school characteristics, genetic associations with any postsecondary education and college completion were moderated by school-level socioeconomic status. Along similar lines, we observe substantial between-school variation in the average level of educational attainment students achieved for a fixed genotype. These findings emphasize the importance of social context in the interpretation of genetic associations. Specifically, our results suggest that though existing measures of individual genetic endowment have a linear relationship with years of schooling that is relatively consistent across school environments, school context is crucial in connecting an individual’s genotype to his or her likelihood of crossing meaningful educational thresholds.

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

Sam Trejo: Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
E-mail: samtrejo@stanford.edu.

Daniel W. Belsky: Duke University School of Medicine and Social Science Research Institute
E-mail: dbelsky@duke.edu

Jason D. Boardman: Institute of Behavioral Science and Sociology Department, University of Colorado Boulder
E-mail: boardman@colorado.edu

Jeremy Freese: Department of Sociology, Stanford University
E-mail: jfreese@stanford.edu

Kathleen Mullan Harris: Department of Sociology and Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
E-mail: kathie_harris@unc.edu

Pam Herd: Department of Sociology and La Folette School of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin–Madison
E-mail: pherd@lafollette.wisc.edu

Kamil Sicinski: Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
E-mail: ksicinsk@ssc.wisc.edu

Benjamin W. Domingue: Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
E-mail: bdomingue@stanford.edu

Acknowledgements: This work has been supported (in part) by award 96-17-04 from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant DGE-1656518 (Trejo), the Institute of Education Sciences under grant R305B140009 (Trejo), and a Jacobs Foundation Early Career Research Fellowship (Belsky). This research uses Add Health GWAS data funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant R01 HD073342 to Kathleen Mullan Harris and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and National Institutes of Health grant R01 HD060726 to Harris, Boardman, and McQueen. Add Health is a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; it is funded by grant P01 HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study is directed by Pamela Herd, and the work conducted herein was supported by the National Institute on Aging (R01 AG041868-01A1 and P30 AG017266). This research benefitted from GWAS results made available by the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium. Any opinions expressed are those of the author(s) alone and should not be construed as representing the opinions of each foundation.

Citation: Trejo, Sam, Daniel W. Belsky, Jason D. Boardman, Jeremy Freese, Kathleen Mullan Harris, Pam Herd, Kamil Sicinski, and Benjamin W. Domingue. 2018. “Schools as Moderators of Genetic Associations with Life Course Attainments: Evidence from the WLS and Add Health.” Sociological Science 5: 513-540.
Received: March 20, 2018
Accepted: April 16, 2018
Editors: Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a22

The Social Life of Mortgage Delinquency and Default

By Parker Webservices on July 26, 2018 in Articles

Brian J. McCabe

Sociological Science, July 26, 2018
10.15195/v5.a21

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Although falling behind on a mortgage loan has significant personal consequences, we know little about whether the experience of delinquency or default influences the housing market behavior of other people in the defaulter’s social networks. In this article, I ask how exposure to mortgage default through social networks affects perceptions of the housing market, judgments about the strategic default behavior of other households, and expectations for homeownership. Although individuals purposively draw on information from their social networks to aid in their housing search, theories of social influence have yet to be applied to the negative experience of mortgage delinquency or default. Drawing on the National Housing Survey, I find that individuals exposed to mortgage strain through their social networks express more negative expectations for the housing market and hold more permissive attitudes about strategic default. Homeowners reporting network exposure to mortgage strain are more likely to prefer rental housing when they next move. These results are strongest when individuals are connected to someone who has fallen behind on a mortgage payment in the previous three months.

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

Brian J. McCabe: Department of Sociology, Georgetown University
E-mail: mccabeb@georgetown.edu

Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Citation: McCabe, Brian J. 2018. “The Social Life of Mortgage Delinquency and Default.” Sociological Science 5: 489-512.
Received: April 18, 2018
Accepted: May 26, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a21

Benefit Inequality among American Workers by Gender, Race, and Ethnicity, 1982–2015

By Parker Webservices on July 19, 2018 in Articles

Tali Kristal, Yinon Cohen, Edo Navot

Sociological Science, July 19, 2018
10.15195/v5.a20

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Gender, racial, and ethnic gaps in wages are well known, but group disparities in employer-provided benefits, which account for one-quarter of total compensation, are not. We use benefit costs data to study levels and trends in gender, racial, and ethnic gaps in voluntary employer-provided benefits. Analyzing Employer Costs for Employee Compensation microdata on wages and benefit costs for the years 1982 to 2015, matched to Current Population Survey files by wage decile in the industrial sector, we find that (1) benefit gaps were wider than wage gaps for minorities but were narrower for gender, (2) racial and ethnic gaps in benefits increased faster than wage gaps, and (3) the gender gap in benefits decreased faster than the wage gap. We show that these findings reflect the types of jobs women, blacks, and Hispanics have held for the past three decades.

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

Tali Kristal: Department of Sociology, University of Haifa
E-mail: kristal@soc.haifa.ac.il

Yinon Cohen: Department of Sociology, Columbia University
E-mail: yc2444@columbia.edu

Edo Navot:United States Department of Labor
E-mail: navot.edo@dol.gov

Acknowledgements: We thank the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation for its partial support of this project. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the summer meeting of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (in 2017) and the Intergenerational Mobility and Income Inequality Workshop held at the University of Haifa (in March 2018). We thank Yitchak Haberfeld and the participants in these meetings for their comments. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and its staff, who facilitated this research with generosity and patience. The research was conducted with restricted access to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The views expressed in any publication resulting from an analysis of these data do not necessarily reflect the views of the BLS. Additionally, the views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Department of Labor or any agency within it.

Citation: Kristal, Tali, Yinon Cohen, and Edo Navot. 2018. “Benefit Inequality among American Workers by Gender, Race and Ethnicity, 1982–2015.” Sociological Science 5: 461-488.
Received: April 17, 2018
Accepted: June 5, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a20

"I Didn't Want To Be 'That Girl'": The Social Risks of Labeling, Telling, and Reporting Sexual Assault

By Parker Webservices on July 12, 2018 in Articles

Shamus R. Khan, Jennifer S. Hirsch, Alexander Wamboldt, Claude A. Mellins

Sociological Science, July 12, 2018
10.15195/v5.a19

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This article deploys ethnographic data to explain why some students do not label experiences as sexual assault or report those experiences. Using ideas of social risks and productive ambiguities, it argues that not labeling or reporting assault can help students (1) sustain their current identities and allow for several future ones, (2) retain their social relationships and group affiliations while maintaining the possibility of developing a wider range of future ones, or (3) avoid derailing their current or future goals within the higher educational setting, or what we call “college projects.” Conceptually, this work advances two areas of sociological research. First, it expands the framework of social risks, or culturally specific rationales for seemingly illogical behavior, by highlighting the interpersonal and institutional dimensions of such risks. Second, it urges researchers to be more attentive to contexts in which categorical ambiguity or denial is socially productive and to take categorical avoidance seriously as a subject of inquiry. Substantively, this work advances knowledge of why underreporting of campus sexual assault occurs, with implications for institutional policies to support students who have experienced unwanted nonconsensual sex regardless of how those students may label what happened.

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

Shamus R. Khan: Department of Sociology, Columbia University
E-mail: sk2905@columbia.edu

Jennifer S. Hirsch: Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
E-mail: jsh2124@columbia.edu

Alexander Wamboldt:Department of Sociology, Columbia University
E-mail: asw2176@columbia.edu

Claude A. Mellins: Division of Gender, Sexuality and Health, Departments of Psychiatry and Sociomedical Sciences, New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University Medical Center
E-mail: cam14@cumc.columbia.edu

Acknowledgements: The authors thank the research participants, the Undergraduate Advisory Board, Columbia University, and the entire Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation team who contributed to the development and implementation of this ambitious effort, particularly Matthew Chin, Gloria Diaz, Abby DiCarlo, and Megan Kordenbrock. Leigh Reardon, Gloria Diaz, Matthew Chin, and Megan Kordenbrock assisted in the data collection and analysis of this project. Several scholars commented on previous drafts; we owe particular thanks to Maria Abascal, Christopher Muller, and Adam Reich for their suggestions.

This research was funded by Columbia University through generous support from multiple donors. The research benefited from infrastructural support from the Columbia Population Research Center, which is funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under award number P2CHD058486. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Citation: Khan, Shamus R., Jennifer S. Hirsch, Alexander Wamboldt, and Claude A. Mellins. 2018. “”I Didn’t Want To Be ‘That Girl'”: The Social Risks of Labeling, Telling, and Reporting Sexual Assault.” Sociological Science 5: 432-460.
Received: February 24, 2018
Accepted: May 26, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Mario Small
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a19

Network Evolution and Social Situations

By Parker Webservices on July 5, 2018 in Articles

Per Block

Sociological Science, July 5, 2018
10.15195/v5.a18

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Studying the evolution of friendship networks has a long tradition in sociology. Multiple micromechanisms underlying friendship formation have been discovered, the most pervasive being reciprocity, transitivity, and homophily. Although each mechanism is studied in depth on its own, their relation to one another is rarely analyzed, and a theoretical framework that integrates research on all of them does not exist. This article introduces a friendship evolution model, which proposes that each micromechanism is related to interactions in different social situations. Based on this model, decreasing returns to embedding in multiple mechanisms are hypothesized. Complete social network data of adolescents and statistical network models are used to test these hypotheses. Results show a consistently negative interaction in line with the formulated model. The consequences of this negative relation between the network evolution mechanisms are explored in a simulation study, which suggests that this is a strong determinant of network-level integration and segregation.

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

Per Block: Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences, ETH Zürich
E-mail: per.block@gess.ethz.ch

Acknowledgements: This work greatly benefited from discussions with and advice from Zsofia Boda, James Hollway, Janne Jonsson, Isabel Raabe, Tom Snijders, Christoph Stadtfeld, Christian Steglich, Andras Vörös, as well as comments by the attendees of the Sunbelt Conference in Redondo Beach, the International Network of Analytical Sociologists (INAS) conference in Boston, the Sociology seminar in Groningen, and the Nuffield Network Seminar. This work was partially carried out at the University of Oxford and benefited from a scholarship from Nuffield College.

Citation: Block, Per. 2018. “Network Evolution and Social Situations.” Sociological Science 5:402-431.
Received: April 30, 2018
Accepted: May 16, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a18

At the Expense of Quality

By Parker Webservices on June 28, 2018 in Articles

Brittany M. Bond, Tatiana Labuzova, Roberto M. Fernandez

Sociological Science, June 28, 2018
10.15195/v5.a17

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Many organizations use employee referral programs to incentivize employees to refer potential applicants from their social networks. Employers frequently offer a monetary bonus to employees who refer an applicant, and this is often contingent on whether the person is then hired and retained for a given length of time. In deciding whether to refer someone, referrers face a potential role conflict, as they need to balance their motivations for helping connections find job opportunities with concerns regarding their reputations with their employers. To the extent that monetary incentives shift an employee’s considerations away from finding the best matches for the employer, referral bonuses may increase the chances that lower-quality candidates are referred. Using a survey vignette experiment, we find that even a small referral bonus increases the likelihood that referrers will refer lower-quality candidates, and they are more likely to refer people they do not know well. We further discuss theoretical and practical implications regarding the efficiency of incentivized referral programs in producing quality applicant pools for employers.

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

Brittany M. Bond: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
E-mail: bbond@mit.edu

Tatiana Labuzova: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
E-mail: labuzova@mit.edu

Roberto M. Fernandez: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
E-mail: robertof@mit.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank our colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and elsewhere for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. We have also benefitted from help, advice, and feedback from Matthew Amengual, Rhett Andrew Brymer, Santiago Campero, John Carroll, Emilio Castilla, Minjae Kim, Ezra Zuckerman Sivan, Heather Yang, and participants in the Economic Sociology Working Group at MIT Sloan and the Ninth Annual Meeting of the People and Organizations Conference at The Wharton School.