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Hispanics’ paradoxical life expectancy advantage over whites has largely been attributed to Hispanics’ lower smoking prevalence. Yet across birth cohorts, smoking prevalence has declined for whites and Hispanics, and Hispanics’ obesity prevalence has increased substantially. Our analysis uses data from the 1989 to 2014 National Health Interview Survey and Linked Mortality files to investigate whether these trends could lead Hispanics to lose their comparative mortality advantage. Simulations suggest that foreign-born Hispanics’ life expectancy advantage over whites is likely to persist because cohort trends in smoking and obesity largely offset each other. However, U.S.-born Hispanics’ life expectancy advantage over whites is likely to diminish or disappear entirely as the 1970s and 1980s birth cohorts age due to increases in obesity prevalence and the relatively high mortality risks of those who are obese. Results have important implications for understanding the future of immigrants’ health advantages and ethnic disparities in health.

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

Jennifer Van Hook: Department of Sociology, Penn State University
E-mail: jxv21@psu.edu

Michelle L. Frisco: Department of Sociology, Penn State University
E-mail: mlf112@psu.edu

Carlyn E. Graham: Department of Sociology, Penn State University
E-mail: ceg248@psu.edu

Acknowledgments: We are grateful to Virginia Chang for helpful comments in her role as a discussant of this article at the 2019 meeting of the Population Association of America. We also acknowledge assistance provided by the Population Research Institute at Penn State University, which is supported by an infrastructure grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2CHD041025).

Citation: Van Hook, Jennifer, Michelle L. Frisco, and Carlyn E. Graham. 2020. “Signs of the End of the Paradox? Cohort Shifts in Smoking and Obesity and the Hispanic Life Expectancy Advantage.” Sociological Science 7: 391-414.
Received: June 13, 2020
Accepted: July 20, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a16

What Age Is in a Name?

By Parker Webservices on August 24, 2020 in Articles

Sasha Shen Johfre

Sociological Science August 24, 2020
10.15195/v7.a15

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Social scientists often describe fictional people in survey stimuli using first names. However, which name a researcher chooses may elicit nonrandom impressions, which could confound results. Although past research has examined how names signal race and class, very little has examined whether names signal age, which is a highly salient status characteristic involved in person construal. I test the perceived demographics of 228 American names. I find that most strongly signal age, with older-sounding names much more likely to be perceived as white than as black. Furthermore, participants’ perceptions of the age of a name poorly match with the true average birth year of people with that name, suggesting that researchers cannot simply use birth records as a proxy for perceived age. To assist researchers in name selection, I provide a set of candidate names that strongly signal a matrix of combined age, race, and gender categories.

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

Sasha Shen Johfre: Department of Sociology, Stanford University
E-mail: sjohfre@stanford.edu

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to David Pedulla, Jeremy Freese, Amy Johnson, Hesu Yoon, Jennifer Freyd, and Hannah Johfre Shen for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. This research was made possible through financial support from the Stanford Laboratory for Social Research and the Stanford Center on Longevity.

Citation: Johfre, Sasha Shen. 2020. “What Age Is in a Name?” Sociological Science 7: 367-390.
Received: May 16, 2020
Accepted: July 2, 2020
Editors: Gabriel Rossman, Arnout van de Rijt
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a15

Pretrial Detention and the Costs of System Overreach for Employment and Family Life

By Parker Webservices on August 17, 2020 in Articles

Sara Wakefield, Lars Højsgaard Andersen

Sociological Science August 17, 2020
10.15195/v7.a14

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Using unique Danish register data that allow for comparisons across both conviction and incarceration status, this article analyzes the association between pretrial detention and work, family attachment, and recidivism. We find that pretrial detention may impose unique social costs, apart from conviction or additional punishments. Most notably, men who are detained pretrial experience poorer labor market trajectories than men who are convicted of a crime (but not incarcerated). Importantly, this result holds even for men who are detained pretrial but who are not convicted of the crime. Consistent with prior research, we also find that pretrial detention is unrelated to later family formation but might disrupt preexisting household arrangements. Finally, the associations between pretrial detention and work and family life are not counterbalanced by reductions in recidivism.

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

Sara Wakefield: School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, Newark
E-mail: sara.wakefield@rutgers.edu

Lars Højsgaard Andersen: ROCKWOOL Foundation Research Unit
E-mail: lha@rff.dk

Acknowledgments: We thank Robert Apel and Christopher Wildeman for helpful comments and the ROCKWOOL Foundation for their support of this research.

Citation: Wakefield, Sara, and Lars Højsgaard Andersen. 2020. “Pretrial Detention and the Costs of System Overreach for Employment and Family Life.” Sociological Science 7: 342-366.
Received: April 18, 2020
Accepted: June 20, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a14

The Influence of Changing Marginals on Measures of Inequality in Scholarly Citations: Evidence of Bias and a Resampling Correction

By Parker Webservices on August 10, 2020 in Articles

Lanu Kim, Christopher Adolph, Jevin D. West, Katherine Stovel

Sociological Science August 10, 2020
10.15195/v7.a13

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Scholars have debated whether changes in digital environments have led to greater concentration or dispersal of scientific citations, but this debate has paid little attention to how other changes in the publication environment may impact the commonly used measures of inequality. Using Monte Carlo experiments, we demonstrate that a variety of inequality measures—including the Gini coefficient, the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, and the percentage of articles ever cited—are substantially biased downward by increases in the total number of articles and citations. We propose and validate a resampling-based correction for this “marginals bias” and apply this correction to empirical data on scholarly citation distributions using Web of Science data covering four broad scientific fields (health, humanities, mathematics and the computer sciences, and the social sciences) from 1996 to 2014. We find that in each field the bulk of the apparent decline in citation inequality in recent years is an artifact of marginals bias, as are most apparent interfield differences in citation inequality. Researchers using inequality measures to compare citation distributions and other distributions with many cases at or near the zero-bound should interpret these metrics carefully and account for the influence of changing marginals.

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

Lanu Kim: Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
E-mail: lanu@stanford.edu

Christopher Adolph: Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle
E-mail: cadolph@uw.edu

Jevin D. West: Information School, University of Washington, Seattle
E-mail: jevinw@uw.edu

Katherine Stovel: Department of Sociology, University of Washington, Seattle
E-mail: stovel@uw.edu

Acknowledgments: We thank Clarivate Analytics for providing the Web of Science data, and Elena Erosheva, Bas Hofstra, and Joe Cho for helpful conversations. This research was supported by National Science Foundation grant #1735194, Katherine Stovel primary investigator, Jevin West co–primary investigator.

Citation: Kim, Lanu, Christopher Adolph, Jevin D. West, and Katherine Stovel. 2020. “The Influence of Changing Marginals on Measures of Inequality in Scholarly Citations: Evidence of Bias and a Resampling Correction.” Sociological Science 7: 314-341.
Received: June 16, 2020
Accepted: July 3, 2020
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a13

Status and Vocal Accommodation in Small Groups

By Parker Webservices on August 3, 2020 in Articles

Joseph Dippong

Sociological Science August 3, 2020
10.15195/v7.a12

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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.