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Sociological research on vocal dynamics demonstrates that as actors engage in conversation, their vocal frequencies tend to converge over time. Previous scholars have theorized that patterns of vocal accommodation serve as a mechanism through which speakers non-consciously communicate perceptions of each other’s relative status. In this article I discuss existing evidence linking vocal accommodation to status perceptions. Next, I report results from a laboratory experiment in which I test the proposed causal link between status and vocal accommodation by randomly assigning members of dyadic task groups to occupy either a higher or lower status position and assessing patterns of vocal accommodation. Results support the theorized causal relationship between group status structure and vocal accommodation. I argue that, as an unobtrusive and non-conscious indicator of status, vocal accommodation is a valuable, yet underused tool for assessing group status structures in a wide variety of situations and regarding many substantive sociological questions.

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

Joseph Dippong: Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
E-mail: jdippong@uncc.edu

Acknowledgments: The research reported here was funded in whole under award W911NF-17-1-0008 from the U.S. Army Research Office/Army Research Laboratory. The views expressed are those of the author and should not be attributed to the Army Research Office/Army Research Laboratory.

Citation: Dippong, Joseph. 2020. “Status and Vocal Accommodation in Small Groups.” Sociological Science 7: 291-313.
Received: May 6, 2020
Accepted: June 8, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Mario Small
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a12

Re-examining How Partner Co-presence and Multitasking Affect Parents’ Enjoyment of Childcare and Housework

By Parker Webservices on July 28, 2020 in Articles

Allison Dunatchik, Svetlana Speight

Sociological Science July 28, 2020
10.15195/v7.a11

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Partner co-presence and multitasking are two contextual characteristics of time use that are commonly theorized to affect parental well-being. Although partner co-presence is often assumed to promote greater well-being, multitasking is frequently conceptualized as an indicator of time pressure. This study re-examines the relationship between these contextual characteristics and parents’ enjoyment of childcare and housework. Using data from the U.K. Time Use Survey (2014–2015), our results indicate that associations between partner co-presence, multitasking, and enjoyment of unpaid work vary substantively depending on the type of task carried out. They also vary by gender of the parent. Mothers reported greater enjoyment of housework and interactive childcare with a partner present; however, this association did not extend to other types of childcare. Fathers’ enjoyment varied little by partner co-presence. Similarly, multitasking was a varied experience depending on the types of activities parents combined. In some instances, combining unpaid work activities (e.g., housework with childcare) was associated with lower enjoyment; however, combining unpaid work with leisure was often associated with greater enjoyment. These results add nuance to prior research on how the contextual characteristics of time use relate to parental well-being and suggest that prior conceptualizations of partner co-presence and multitasking are incomplete.

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

Allison Dunatchik: The University of Pennsylvania, Department of Sociology
E-mail: adunat@sas.upenn.edu

Svetlana Speight: The National Centre for Social Research
E-mail: svetlana.speight@natcen.ac.uk

Acknowledgments: This research was funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council’s Secondary Data Analysis Initiative ES/R004854/1. We are grateful to Professor Oriel Sullivan for her comments on previous versions of this manuscript, which have greatly improved the article. We would also like to thank Robert Wishart, who provided analytical advice and expertise. Finally, we thank members of the project Advisory Group for their input and support throughout the project.

Citation: Dunatchik, Allison, and Svetlana Speight. 2020. “Re-examining How Partner Copresence and Multitasking Affect Parents’ Enjoyment of Childcare and Housework.” Sociological Science 7: 268-290.
Received: March 1, 2020
Accepted: May 24, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Mario Small
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a11

It's All about the Parents: Inequality Transmission across Three Generations in Sweden

By Parker Webservices on June 1, 2020 in Articles

Per Engzell, Carina Mood, Jan O. Jonsson

Sociological Science June 1, 2020
10.15195/v7.a10

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A recent literature studies the role of grandparents in status transmission. Results have been mixed, and theoretical contributions highlight biases that complicate the interpretation of these studies. We use newly harmonized income tax records on more than 700,000 Swedish lineages to establish four empirical facts. First, a model that includes both mothers and fathers and takes a multidimensional view of stratification reduces the residual three-generation association in our population to a trivial size. Second, data on fathers’ cognitive ability show that even extensive controls for standard socioeconomic variables fail to remove omitted variable bias. Third, the common finding that grandparents compensate poor parental resources can be attributed to greater difficulty of observing parent status accurately at the lower end of the distribution. Fourth, the lower the data quality, and the less detailed the model, the greater is the size of the estimated grandparent coefficient. Future work on multigenerational mobility should pay less attention to the size and significance of this association, which depends heavily on arbitrary sample and specification characteristics, and go on to establish a set of more robust descriptive facts.

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

Per Engzell: Nuffield College and Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, University of Oxford; Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University
E-mail: per.engzell@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

Carina Mood: Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University; Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm
E-mail: carina.mood@sofi.su.se

Jan O. Jonsson: Nuffield College and Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, University of Oxford; Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University; Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm
E-mail: janne.jonsson@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

Acknowledgments: This work received funding from the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life, and Welfare (FORTE), grant no. 2016-07099. The first author also acknowledges support from Nuffield College and the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, The Leverhulme Trust. Previous versions of this study have been circulated under the title “Putting the Grandparents to Rest: False Positives in Multigenerational Mobility Research” and presented at the Swedish Institute for Social Research, the European Consortium for Sociological Research (ECSR) Conference in Paris 2018, and the Population Association of America (PAA) Annual Meeting in Austin 2019. We thank participants at these occasions, in particular Robert Erikson, Sara Kjellsson, Simon Hjalmarsson, Are Skeie Hermansen, and Florencia Torche, for helpful comments and criticism. Thanks also to the Editor, Deputy Editor, and Consulting Editor at Sociological Science who handled our manuscript. Any errors remain our own.

Citation: Engzell, Per, Carina Mood, and Jan O. Jonsson. 2020. “It’s All about the Parents: Inequality Transmission across Three Generations in Sweden.” Sociological Science 7: 242-267.
Received: March 24, 2020
Accepted: April 13, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a10

The Small-World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus

By Parker Webservices on May 27, 2020 in Articles

Kim A. Weeden, Benjamin Cornwell

Sociological Science May 27, 2020
10.15195/v7.a9

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To slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, many universities shifted to online instruction and now face the question of whether and how to resume in-person instruction. This article uses transcript data from a medium-sized American university to describe three enrollment networks that connect students through classes and in the process create social conditions for the spread of infectious disease: a university-wide network, an undergraduate-only network, and a liberal arts college network. All three networks are “small worlds” characterized by high clustering, short average path lengths, and multiple independent paths connecting students. Students from different majors cluster together, but gateway courses and distributional requirements create cross-major integration. Connectivity declines when large courses of 100 students or more are removed from the network, as might be the case if some courses are taught online, but moderately sized courses must also be removed before less than half of student-pairs are connected in three steps and less than two-thirds in four steps. In all simulations, most students are connected through multiple independent paths. Hybrid models of instruction can reduce but not eliminate the potential for epidemic spread through the small worlds of course enrollments.

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

Acknowledgments: Dr. Weeden and Dr. Cornwell contributed equally to this project. The authors thank the Cornell University administration, and in particular Dr. Lisa Nishii, for facilitating access to the data; Lauren Griffin and Alec McGail for research assistance; and Jake Burchard, Scott Feld, John Schneider, Demival Vasques Filho, Barry Wellman, Erin York Cornwell, and two anonymous reviewers for comments and advice. Cornell University had no role in the study design, data analysis, or preparation of the report.

Citation: Weeden, Kim A., and Benjamin Cornwell. 2020. “The Small-World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus.” Sociological Science 7: 222-241.
Received: April 17, 2020
Accepted: May 7, 2020
Editors: Mario Small
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a9

The U.S. Occupational Structure: A Social Network Approach

By Parker Webservices on May 18, 2020 in Articles

Andrés Villarreal

Sociological Science May 18, 2020
10.15195/v7.a8

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We propose a new approach to study the structure of occupational labor markets that relies on social network analysis techniques. Highly detailed transition matrices are constructed based on changes in individual workers’ occupations over successive months of the Current Population Survey rotating panels. The resulting short-term transition matrices provide snapshots of all occupational movements in the U.S. labor market at different points in time and for different sociodemographic groups. We find a significant increase in occupational mobility and in the diversity of occupational destinations for working men over the past two decades. The occupational networks for black and Hispanic men exhibit a high overall density of ties resulting from a high probability of movement among a limited set of occupations. Upward status mobility also increased during the time period studied, although there are large differences by race and ethnicity and educational attainment. Finally, factional analysis is proposed as a novel way to explore labor market segmentation. Results reveal a highly segmented occupational network in which movement is concentrated within a limited number of occupations with markedly different levels of occupational status.

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

Andrés Villarreal: Department of Sociology, University of Maryland-College Park
E-mail: avilla4@umd.edu

Citation: Villarreal, Andrés. 2020. “The U.S. Occupational Structure: A Social Network Approach.” Sociological Science 7:187-221.
Received: November 22, 2019
Accepted: March 31, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a8

Self-Citation, Cumulative Advantage, and Gender Inequality in Science

By Parker Webservices on May 6, 2020 in Articles

Pierre Azoulay, Freda B. Lynn

Sociological Science May 6, 2020
10.15195/v7.a7

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In science, self-citation is often interpreted as an act of self-promotion that (artificially) boosts the visibility of one’s prior work in the short term, which could then inflate professional authority in the long term. Recently, in light of research on the gender gap in self-promotion, two large-scale studies of publications examine if women self-cite less than men. But they arrive at conflicting conclusions; one concludes yes whereas the other, no. We join the debate with an original study of 36 cohorts of life scientists (1970–2005) followed through 2015 (or death or retirement). We track not only the rate of self-citation per unit of past productivity but also the likelihood of self-citing intellectually distant material and the rate of return on self-citations with respect to a host of major career outcomes, including grants, future citations, and job changes. With comprehensive, longitudinal data, we find no evidence whatsoever of a gender gap in self-citation practices or returns. Men may very well be more aggressive self-promoters than women, but this dynamic does not manifest in our sample with respect to self-citation practices. Implications of our null findings are discussed, particularly with respect to gender inequality in scientific careers more broadly.

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

Pierre Azoulay: MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and National Bureau of Economic Research
E-mail: pazoulay@mit.edu

Freda B. Lynn: Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Iowa
E-mail: freda-lynn@uiowa.edu

Acknowledgements: Address all correspondence to freda-lynn@uiowa.edu. Azoulay acknowledges the financial support of the National Science Foundation through its SciSIP Program (Award SBE-1460344). Soomi Kim provided exceptional research assistance. We thank Ezra Zuckerman for useful discussions. The authors contributed equally, and all errors are our own.

Citation: Azoulay, Pierre, and Freda B. Lynn. 2020. “Self-Citation, Cumulative Advantage, and Gender Inequality in Science.” Sociological Science 7:152-186.
Received: March 23, 2020
Accepted: March 29, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a7

Effects of Public School Closures on Crime: The Case of the 2013 Chicago Mass School Closure

By Parker Webservices on April 28, 2020 in Articles

Noli Brazil

Sociological Science April 28, 2020
10.15195/v7.a6

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Public school closures are increasing in number and size in U.S. cities. In response, parents, teachers, and public school advocates argue that closures carry negative consequences for multiple institutions across a wide set of outcomes. One such institution is the local neighborhood, and a negative consequence that is frequently raised is increased crime. I test this claim by using the 2013 Chicago mass school closure as a case study. Rather than conceiving of a school closure as a binary event (closed or not closed) I break it out according to a school’s status after closure: vacant, repurposed, and merged with an existing school. I find that vacancy and repurposing into a nonschool are associated with decreased crime. In contrast, merging a closed school with an existing school is associated with increased crime. The vacancy and repurposing effects are spatiotemporally localized, concentrated in the 75-meter area surrounding the school and disappearing after a year, whereas the student merger effect persisted over time across larger spatial scales. My results suggest that the relationship between closure and neighborhood crime is not straightforward, varying by postclosure land use status and spatiotemporal factors.

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

Noli Brazil: Department of Human Ecology, University of California, Davis
E-mail: nbrazil@ucdavis.edu

Acknowledgements: I thank Luis Guarnizo, Andrew Papachristos, and Jenna Stearns for generously reading previous versions and providing invaluable feedback. I also thank Enrica Jiang for data collection and research assistance. Any remaining errors are mine alone.

Citation: Brazil, Noli. 2020. “Effects of Public School Closures on Crime: The Case of the 2013 Chicago Mass School Closure.” Sociological Science 7: 128-151.
Received: January 9, 2020
Accepted: February 22, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a6

Selective Enrollment Public Schools and District-Level Achievement Outcomes from 3rd to 8th Grade

By Parker Webservices on April 2, 2020 in Articles

Véronique Irwin

Sociological Science April 2, 2020
10.15195/v7.a5

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Fierce local debates throughout the United States surround the equity of admitting students to public schools using academic criteria. Although research has evaluated the central assumption of these debates—that Selective Enrollment Public (SEP) schools enhance the welfare of students who attend them—none has addressed the district-level outcomes associated with these schools. This is important because the selectivity and scope of SEP schools produce tiered school systems (SEP districts). This district-level process, in turn, calls for an analysis of district-level achievement outcomes. To address this gap, I compile an original list of SEP schools using an innovative web scraping procedure. I combine these data with newly available district-level measures of third to eighth grade achievement from the Stanford Education Data Archive. Analyses follow a difference-in-differences design, using grade level as the longitudinal dimension. This approach facilitates a falsification test, using future treated districts, to reject spurious causation. I find evidence of overall slower growth in mean math achievement in SEP districts and for white, black, and Latinx racial/ethnic groups separately. SEP districts also see an increase in the white–Latinx math achievement gap. This work highlights the importance of considering SEP schools as part of a differentiated school system.

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

Véronique Irwin: Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
E-mail: virwin@berkeley.edu

Acknowledgements: I thank Samuel Lucas, Daniel Schneider, Anthony Jack, and Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana for their thoughtful comments. This work also benefited from excellent feedback at the Improving Education and Reducing Inequality Conference at the Russell Sage Foundation and was supported by funding from Russell Sage Foundation Grant #83-18-14.

Citation: Irwin, Véronique. 2020. “Selective Enrollment Public Schools and District-Level Achievement Outcomes from 3rd to 8th Grade.” Sociological Science 7: 100-127.
Received: September 24, 2019
Accepted: February 27, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a5

School Choice, Neighborhood Change, and Racial Imbalance Between Public Elementary Schools and Surrounding Neighborhoods

By Parker Webservices on March 25, 2020 in Articles

Kendra Bischoff, Laura Tach

Sociological Science March 25, 2020
10.15195/v7.a4

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The expansion of school choice in recent years has potentially generated demographic imbalances between traditional public schools and their residential attendance zones. Demographic imbalances emerge from selective opting out, when families of certain racial and/or ethnic backgrounds disproportionately choose not to enroll in their neighborhood-based public schools. In this article, we use a unique data set of school attendance zones in 21 large U.S. school districts to show how changes in neighborhood conditions and school choice options influence race-specific enrollments in locally zoned public elementary schools from 2000 to 2010. We find that the presence of more school-choice options generates racial imbalances between public elementary schools and their surrounding neighborhoods, but this association differs by type of choice-based alternative. Private schools, on average, reduce the presence of non-Hispanic white students in locally zoned schools, whereas charter schools may reduce the presence of nonwhite students in locally zoned schools. Increases in neighborhood-school racial imbalances from 2000 to 2010 were concentrated in neighborhoods undergoing increases in socioeconomic status, suggesting that parents’ residential and school decisions are dynamic and sensitive to changing neighborhood conditions. Selective opting out has implications for racial integration in schools and the distribution of familial resources across educational contexts.

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

Kendra Bischoff: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: kbischoff@cornell.edu

Laura Tach: Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University
E-mail: lmt88@cornell.edu

Acknowledgements: This project was funded by the Cornell Center for Social Sciences. Bischoff was also supported by a National Academy of Education–Spencer Foundation fellowship. We would like to thank Salvatore Saporito for generously sharing the school attendance boundary data he collected for the 1999–2000 school year. This project would not have been possible without it. We also thank Chenoa Flippen, Peter Rich, Steven Alvarado, Matt Hall, Anna Haskins, and Erin York Cornwell for their comments on previous versions of this article.

Citation: Bischoff, Kendra, and Laura Tach. 2020. “School Choice, Neighborhood Change, and Racial Imbalance Between Public Elementary Schools and Surrounding Neighborhoods.” Sociological Science 7: 75-99.
Received: July 1, 2019
Accepted: January 16, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a4

"A Situation Where There Aren't Rules": Unwanted Sex for Gay, Bisexual, and Questioning Men

By Parker Webservices on March 9, 2020 in Articles

Jessie V. Ford, Andréa Becker

Sociological Science March 9, 2020
10.15195/v7.a3

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