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This study employs microsimulation techniques to provide an accounting of exposure to imprisoned or formerly imprisoned kin. We characterize the risk and prevalence of imprisonment within full kinship networks and find that the life course trajectories of familial imprisonment experienced by black and white Americans take on qualitatively distinct forms: the average black American born at the height of the prison boom experienced the imprisonment of a relative for the first time at age 7 and by age 65 belongs to a family in which more than 1 in 7 working-age relatives have ever been imprisoned. By contrast, the average white American who experiences the imprisonment of a relative does not do so until age 39 and by age 65 belongs to a family in which 1 in 20 working-age relatives have ever been imprisoned. Future reductions in imprisonment rates have the potential to meaningfully reduce these racial disparities in family imprisonment burden.

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

Pil H. Chung: Departments of Sociology and Demography, University of California, Berkeley
E-mail: pchung@berkeley.edu

Peter Hepburn: Departments of Sociology and Demography, University of California, Berkeley
E-mail: pshepburn@demog.berkeley.edu

Acknowledgements: We gratefully acknowledge David Harding, Kristin Turney, Sandra Susan Smith, Daniel Schneider, Christopher Wildeman, Robert Pickett, and Elayne Oliphant for the invaluable advice and feedback they provided at various stages of this work.

Citation: Chung, Pil H., and Peter Hepburn. 2018. “Mass Imprisonment and the Extended Family.” Sociological Science 5: 335-360.
Received: March 29, 2018
Accepted: April 24, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a15

Moore–Penrose Estimators of Age–Period–Cohort Effects: Their Interrelationship and Properties

By Parker Webservices on June 7, 2018 in Articles

Ethan Fosse, Christopher Winship

Sociological Science, June 7, 2018
10.15195/v5.a14

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The intrinsic estimator (IE) has become a widely used tool for the analysis of age–period–cohort (APC) data in sociology, demography, and other fields. However, it has been recently recognized that the IE is a subtype of a larger class of estimators based on the Moore–Penrose generalized inverse (MP estimators) and that different estimators can lead to radically divergent estimates of the true, unknown APC effects. To clarify the differences and similarities of MP estimators, we introduce a canonical form of the linear constraints imposed on the true temporal effects. Using this canonical form, we compare the IE to related MP estimators, examining the conditions under which they recover the true temporal effects, the impact of the size and sign of nonlinearities on the estimated linear effects, and their sensitivity to the number of age, period, and cohort categories. We show that two MP estimators, which we call the difference estimator (DE) and the orthogonal estimator (OE), impose constraints that are both less sensitive and easier to interpret than those of the IE. We conclude with practical guidelines for researchers interested in using MP estimators to estimate temporal effects.

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

Ethan Fosse: Department of Sociology, Princeton University
E-mail: efosse@princeton.edu

Christopher Winship: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
E-mail: cwinship@wjh.harvard.edu

Citation: Fosse, Ethan, and Christopher Winship. 2018. “Moore–Penrose Estimators of Age–Period–Cohort Effects: Their Interrelationship and Properties.” Sociological Science 5: 304-334.
Received: March 12, 2018
Accepted: April 2, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a14

Gender Convergence in Housework Time: A Life Course and Cohort Perspective

By Parker Webservices on May 31, 2018 in Articles

Thomas Leopold, Jan Skopek, Florian Schulz

Sociological Science, May 31, 2018
10.15195/v5.a13

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Knowledge about gender convergence in housework time is confined to changes studied across repeated cross-sections of data. This study adds a dynamic view that links broader social shifts in men’s and women’s housework time to individual life-course profiles. Using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (1985–2015), our analysis is the first to trace changes in housework time across the entire adult life course (ages 20–90) and across a large range of cohorts (1920–1990). The results revealed two types of gender convergence in housework time. First, the gender gap converged across the life course, narrowing by more than 50 percent from age 35 until age 70. Life-course profiles of housework time were strongly gendered, as women’s housework time peaked in younger adulthood and declined thereafter, whereas men’s housework time remained stably low for decades and increased only in older age. Second, the gender gap converged across cohorts, narrowing by 40 percent from cohorts 1940 until 1960. Cohort profiles of housework time showed strong declines in women and moderate increases in men. Both cohort trends were linear and extended to the most recently born, supporting the notion of continued convergence in housework time.

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

Thomas Leopold: Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, and State Institute for Family Research at the University of Bamberg
E-mail: t.leopold@uva.nl

Jan Skopek: Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin
E-mail: skopekj@tcd.ie

Florian Schulz: State Institute for Family Research at the University of Bamberg, and Department of Sociology, University of Bamberg
E-mail: florian.schulz@ifb.uni-bamberg.de

Acknowledgements: This study was supported by the German Research Foundation (grant number SCHU 3081/1-1). Replication files to this article are available at the authors’ websites: http://www.thomasleopold.eu, http://www.skopek.org, and http://www.floschulz.de.

Citation: Leopold, Thomas, Jan Skopek, and Florian Schulz. 2018. “Gender Convergence in Housework Time: A Life Course and Cohort Perspective.” Sociological Science 5: 281-303.
Received: March 29, 2018
Accepted: April 19, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a13

Gaydar and the Fallacy of Decontextualized Measurement

By Parker Webservices on May 24, 2018 in Articles

Andrew Gelman, Greggor Mattson, Daniel Simpson

Sociological Science, May 24, 2018
10.15195/v5.a12

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Recent media coverage of studies about “gaydar,” the supposed ability to detect another’s sexual orientation through visual cues, reveal problems in which the ideals of scientific precision strip the context from intrinsically social phenomena. This fallacy of objective measurement, as we term it, leads to nonsensical claims based on the predictive accuracy of statistical significance. We interrogate these gaydar studies’ assumption that there is some sort of pure biological measure of perception of sexual orientation. Instead, we argue that the concept of gaydar inherently exists within a social context and that this should be recognized when studying it. We use this case as an example of a more general concern about illusory precision in the measurement of social phenomena and suggest statistical strategies to address common problems.

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

Andrew Gelman: Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York
E-mail: gelman@stat.columbia.edu

Greggor Mattson: Department of Sociology and Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Oberlin College, Ohio
E-mail: gmattson@oberlin.edu

Daniel Simpson: Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto, Canada
E-mail: dp.simpson@gmail.com

Acknowledgements: We thank Michal Kosinski and Martin Plöderl for helpful comments.

Citation: Gelman, Andrew, Greggor Mattson, and Daniel Simpson. 2018. “Gaydar and the Fallacy of Decontextualized Measurement.” Sociological Science 5: 270-280.
Received: March 6, 2018
Accepted: April 1, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a12

Competition in the Family: Inequality between Siblings and the Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Advantage

By Parker Webservices on May 17, 2018 in Articles

Michael Grätz

Sociological Science, May 17, 2018
10.15195/v5.a11

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Research on educational mobility is concerned with inequalities between families. Differences in innate abilities and parental responses lead, however, to educational differences between siblings. If parental responses vary by family socioeconomic background, within-family inequality can affect between-family inequality (i.e., educational mobility). This study uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) to test whether sibling similarity in education varies by family socioeconomic background. In addition, I test whether the effects of birth order, birth spacing, and maternal age on education vary by family background. Results show that sibling similarity in education is similar in low– and high–socioeconomic status families. The negative influences of a higher birth order and a younger maternal age on educational attainment, however, are concentrated in socioeconomically disadvantaged families. These findings suggest that socioeconomically advantaged families do not generally compensate for ability differences between their children but that they compensate for disadvantageous life events.

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

Michael Grätz: Nuffield College, University of Oxford; Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University
E-mail: michael.gratz@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

Acknowledgements: I thank the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for supporting my research through a PhD scholarship. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement no. 320116 for the research project FamiliesAndSocieties. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the European Consortium for Sociological Research conference in Tilburg, the annual meeting of the Population Association of America in Boston, the ISA RC28 on Social Stratification and Mobility meeting in Budapest, the SOEP User Conference in Berlin, and at workshops in Zürich and Berlin. For their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript, I would like to thank Tina Baier, Fabrizio Bernardi, Diederik Boertien, Andrés Cardona, Dalton Conley, Juho Härkönen, Anne Christine Holtmann, and Florencia Torche.

Citation: Grätz, Michael. 2018. “Competition in the Family: Inequality between Siblings and the Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Advantage.” Sociological Science 5: 246-269.
Received: December 19, 2017
Accepted: April 2, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a11

Trump Voters and the White Working Class

By Parker Webservices on April 16, 2018 in Articles

Stephen L. Morgan, Jiwon Lee

Sociological Science, April 16, 2018
10.15195/v5.a10

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To evaluate the claim that white working-class voters were a crucial block of support for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, this article offers two sets of results. First, self-reports of presidential votes in 2012 and 2016 from the American National Election Studies show that Obama-to-Trump voters and 2012 eligible nonvoters composed a substantial share of Trump’s 2016 voters and were disproportionately likely to be members of the white working class. Second, when county vote tallies in 2012 and 2016 are merged with the public-use microdata samples of the 2012-to-2016 American Community Surveys, areal variations across 1,142 geographic units that sensibly partition the United States show that Trump’s gains in 2016 above Romney’s performance in 2012 are strongly related to the proportion of the voting population in each area that was white and working class. Taken together, these results support the claim that Trump’s appeal to the white working class was crucial for his victory.

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

Stephen L. Morgan: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University.
E-mail: stephen.morgan@jhu.edu.

Jiwon Lee: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University.
E-mail: jiwonlee@jhu.edu.

Acknowledgements: We thank the seminar participants at Johns Hopkins University and
New York University for their suggestions.

Citation: Morgan, Stephen L., and Jiwon Lee. 2018. “Trump Voters and the White Working Class.” Sociological Science 5:234-245.
Received: February 19, 2018
Accepted: March 25, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a10

The Sources of Life Chances: Does Education, Class Category, Occupation, or Short-Term Earnings Predict 20-Year Long-Term Earnings?

By Parker Webservices on March 21, 2018 in Articles

ChangHwan Kim, Christopher R. Tamborini, Arthur Sakamoto

Sociological Science, March 21, 2018
DOI 10.15195/v5.a9

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In sociological studies of economic stratification and intergenerational mobility, occupation has long been presumed to reflect lifetime earnings better than do short-term earnings. However, few studies have actually tested this critical assumption. In this study, we investigate the cross-sectional determinants of 20-year accumulated earnings using data that match respondents in the Survey of Income and Program Participation to their longitudinal earnings records based on administrative tax information from 1990 to 2009. Fit statistics of regression models are estimated to assess the predictive power of various proxy variables, including occupation, education, and short-term earnings, on cumulative earnings over the 20-year time period. Contrary to the popular assumption in sociology, our results find that cross-sectional earnings have greater predictive power on long-term earnings than occupation-based class classifications, including three-digit detailed occupations for both men and women. The model based on educational attainment, including field of study, has slightly better fit than models based on one-digit occupation or the Erikson, Goldthorpe, and Portocarero class scheme. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for the sociology of stratification and intergenerational mobility.

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

ChangHwan Kim: Department of Sociology, University of Kansas
Email: chkim@ku.edu

Christopher R. Tamborini: Office of Retirement Policy, U.S. Social Security Administration
Email: chris.tamborini@ssa.gov

Arthur Sakamoto: Department of Sociology, Texas A&M University
Email: asakamoto@tamu.edu

Acknowledgements: The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Social Security Administration (SSA). Access to SSA data linked to Census Bureau survey data is subject to restrictions imposed by Title 13 of the U.S. Code. The data are accessible at a secured site such as the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers (https://www.census.gov/fsrdc) and must undergo disclosure review before their release. For researchers with access to these data, the computer programs used in this analysis are available upon request.

Citation: Kim, ChangHwan, Christopher R. Tamborini, and Arthur Sakamoto. 2018. “The Sources of Life Chances: Does Education, Class Category, Occupation or Short-Term Earnings Predict 20-Year Long-Term Earnings?” Sociological Science 5:206-233.
Received: December 19, 2017
Accepted: February 6, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a9

Income Inequality and the Persistence of Racial Economic Disparities

By Parker Webservices on March 12, 2018 in Articles

Robert Manduca

Sociological Science, March 12, 2018
DOI 10.15195/v5.a8

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More than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act, black–white family income disparities in the United States remain almost exactly the same as what they were in 1968. This article argues that a key and underappreciated driver of the racial income gap has been the national trend of rising income inequality. From 1968 to 2016, black–white disparities in family income rank narrowed by almost one-third. But this relative gain was negated by changes to the national income distribution that resulted in rapid income growth for the richest—and most disproportionately white—few percentiles of the country combined with income stagnation for the poor and middle class. But for the rise in income inequality, the median black–white family income gap would have decreased by about 30 percent. Conversely, without the partial closing of the rank gap, growing inequality alone would have increased the racial income gap by 30 percent.

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

Robert Manduca: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
Email: rmanduca@g.harvard.edu

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Victoria Asbury, Alex Bell, Lawrence Bobo, Hope Harvey, Nathaniel Hendren, Roland Neil, Devah Pager, Robert Sampson, Roseanna Sommers, James Sidanius, Mo Torres, Adam Travis, Bruce Western, and the seminar participants at the Harvard University Contemporary Studies of Race and Ethnicity Workshop for their helpful comments and feedback. This research has been supported by the Harvard Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy.

Citation: Manduca, Robert. 2018. “Income Inequality and the Persistence of Racial Economic Disparities.” Sociological Science 5: 182-205.
Received: December 11, 2017
Accepted: January 6, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a8

The Problems and Promise of Hierarchy: Voice Rights and the Firm

By Parker Webservices on March 5, 2018 in Articles

Robert F. Freeland, Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan

Sociological Science, March 5, 2018
DOI 10.15195/v5.a7

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The firm’s continued importance for coordinating economic activity is puzzling given that (1) economists have not demonstrated that the greater alignment of effort they expect from hierarchical coordination overcomes the reduction in employee effort created by “low-powered” incentives, (2) employee effort is further threatened by the alienating effects of hierarchical control, and (3) firms, as we show, are necessarily hierarchical. Why, then, do firms dominate the capitalist economy? Our theory is rooted in a more subtle set of rights that is also intrinsic to the firm hierarchy: “voice rights” (who can speak within and on behalf of the firm). Control of voice is crucial for endowing the firm with a capacity that cannot be acquired by a mere “nexus” of contractors: it can become a reliable and accountable actor. This, in turn, gives the firm three necessary (if insufficient) ingredients for creating strong identification with the collective enterprise. Our theory thus suggests why firms remain important despite their inherent limitations and why some firms are marked by alienation and perfunctory performance while others are marked by strong identification and consummate performance.

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

Robert F. Freeland: Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Email: freeland@ssc.wisc.edu

Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Email: ewzucker@mit.edu

Acknowledgements: We are grateful for feedback from the following conference and seminar audiences: ESSEC Business School (2011), the American Sociological Association (2012), the Saïd Business School (2014), the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (2012), and the Economic Sociology Working Group (2012), the IWER Seminar (2013), and the MIT-Harvard Economic Sociology Seminar. We have also benefited from help, advice, and feedback from Matthew Bidwell, Rodrigo Canales, Phech Colatat, Gabriella Coleman, Frank Dobbin, Bob Gibbons, Sandy Jacoby, Ethan Mollick, Woody Powell, Tom Kochan, Kieran Healy, Pam Oliver, Paul Osterman, Jeff Pfeffer, Mike Piore, Hiram Samel, Mike Sauder, Cat Turco, Eric van den Steen, and Nate Wilmers. The usual disclaimers apply.

Citation: Freeland, Robert F., and Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan. 2018. “The Problems and Promise of Hierarchy: Voice Rights and the Firm.” Sociological Science 5: 143-181.
Received: July 15, 2017
Accepted: January 7, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a7

Grandparent Effects on Educational Outcomes: A Systematic Review

By Parker Webservices on February 21, 2018 in Articles

Lewis R. Anderson, Paula Sheppard, Christiaan W. S. Monden

Sociological Science, February 21, 2018
DOI 10.15195/v5.a6

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Are educational outcomes subject to a “grandparent effect”? We comprehensively and critically review the growing literature on this question. Fifty-eight percent of 69 analyses report that grandparents’ (G1) socioeconomic characteristics are associated with children’s (G3) educational outcomes, independently of the characteristics of parents (G2). This is not clearly patterned by study characteristics, except sample size. The median ratio of G2:G1 strength of association with outcomes is 4.1, implying that grandparents matter around a quarter as much as parents for education. On average, 30 percent of the bivariate G1–G3 association remains once G2 information is included. Grandparents appear to be especially important where G2 socioeconomic resources are low, supporting the compensation hypothesis. We further discuss whether particular grandparents matter, the role of assortative mating, and the hypothesis that G1–G3 associations should be stronger where there is (more) G1–G3 contact, for which repeated null findings are reported. We recommend that measures of social origin include information on grandparents.

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

Lewis R. Anderson: Trinity College and Department of Sociology, University of Oxford
Email: lewis.anderson@sociology.ox.ac.uk

Paula Sheppard: Nuffield College and Department of Sociology, University of Oxford
Email: paula.sheppard@sociology.ox.ac.uk

Christiaan W. S. Monden: Nuffield College and Department of Sociology, University of Oxford
Email: christiaan.monden@sociology.ox.ac.uk

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to Patrick Präg for his many useful comments and suggestions, to Guido Neidhöfer for sharing with us the results of his literature search, and to the participants of the Multigenerational Social Mobility Workshop held at Nuffield College, University of Oxford on September 21 and 22, 2017, for their comments. This research has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement number 681546 (FAMSIZEMATTERS).