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Racial Intermarriage in the Americas

By on April 23, 2019 in Articles

Edward Telles, Albert Esteve

Sociological Science, April 23, 2019
10.15195/v6.a12

Abstract
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We compare intermarriage in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States among the black, white, and mixed-race population using log-linear models with data from newly available anonymized and harmonized individual census microdata for the 2000 round of censuses. We find that black–white intermarriage is 105 times as likely in Brazil and 28 times as likely in Cuba compared to the United States; that Brazilian mulatos are four times as likely to marry whites than blacks, but Cuban mulatos are equally likely to marry whites and blacks; and negative educational gradients for black–white intermarriage for Cuba and Brazil but nonexistent or positive gradients in the United States. We propose a theory of intergenerational mixture and intermarriage and discuss implications for the role of preferences versus structure, universalism and education, and mulato escape-hatch theory.
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Edward Telles: Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
E-mail: etelles@soc.ucsb.edu

Albert Esteve: Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
E-mail: aesteve@ced.uab.es

Acknowledgements: The research conducted by Albert Esteve in this article has received funding from the following grants: ERC-2014-StG-637768 for the Equalize project and CRISFAM CSO2015-64713-R.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Telles, Edward, and Albert Esteve. 2019. “Racial Intermarriage in the Americas.” Sociological Science 6: 293-320.
  • Received: January 7, 2019
  • Accepted: February 5, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a12


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Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children’s Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis

By on April 16, 2019 in Articles

Jennie E. Brand, Ravaris Moore, Xi Song, Yu Xie

Sociological Science, April 16, 2019
10.15195/v6.a11

Abstract
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Mechanisms explaining the negative effects of parental divorce on children’s attainment have long been conjectured and assessed. Yet few studies of parental divorce have carefully attended to the assumptions and methods necessary to estimate causal mediation effects. Applying a causal framework to linked U.S. panel data, we assess the degree to which parental divorce limits children’s education among whites and nonwhites and whether observed lower levels of educational attainment are explained by postdivorce family conditions and children’s skills. Our analyses yield three key findings. First, the negative effect of divorce on educational attainment, particularly college, is substantial for white children; by contrast, divorce does not lower the educational attainment of nonwhite children. Second, declines in family income explain as much as one- to two-thirds of the negative effect of parental divorce on white children’s education. Family instability also helps explain the effect, particularly when divorce occurs in early childhood. Children’s psychosocial skills explain about one-fifth of the effect, whereas children’s cognitive skills play a minimal role. Third, among nonwhites, the minimal total effect on education is explained by the offsetting influence of postdivorce declines in family income and stability alongside increases in children’s psychosocial and cognitive skills.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Jennie E. Brand: Departments of Sociology and Statistics, University of California, Los Angeles; California Center for Population Research; and Center for Social Statistics
E-mail: brand@soc.ucla.edu

Ravaris Moore: Department of Sociology, Loyola Marymount University
E-mail: ravaris.moore@lmu.edu

Xi Song: Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
E-mail: xisong@uchicago.edu

Yu Xie: Department of Sociology, Princeton University
E-mail: yuxie@princeton.edu

Acknowledgements: Versions of this article were presented at Yale University; the University of Michigan; Stanford University; the University of Pennsylvania; Princeton University; Harvard University; the University of California, Irvine; the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28), and Population Association of America. We thank Elizabeth Thomson for useful comments on a prior version of this article. The National Institutes of Health (grant R01 HD07460301A1) provided financial support for this research. J. E. B. and R. M. benefited from facilities and resources provided by the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, which receives core support (P2C-HD041022) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The ideas expressed herein are those of the authors.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Brand, Jennie E., Ravaris Moore, Xi Song, and Yu Xie. 2019. “Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children’s Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis.” Sociological Science 6: 264-292.
  • Received: January 25, 2019
  • Accepted: February 24, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a11


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On Elastic Ties: Distance and Intimacy in Social Relationships

By on April 9, 2019 in Articles

Stacy Torres

Sociological Science, April 9, 2019
10.15195/v6.a10

Abstract
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Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork among older adults in a New York City neighborhood, I present empirical data that complement survey approaches to social isolation and push our understanding of social ties beyond weak and strong by analyzing relationships that defy binary classification. Usual survey items would describe these participants as isolated and without social support. When questioned, they minimize neighborhood relationships outside of close friends and family. But ethnographic observations of their social interactions with neighbors reveal the presence of “elastic ties.” By elastic ties, I mean nonstrong, nonweak relations between people who spend hours each day and share intimate details of their lives with those whom they do not consider “confidants.” Nonetheless, they provide each other with the support and practical assistance typically seen in strong-tie relationships. These findings show how people’s accounts may not accurately reflect the character and structure of their social ties. Furthermore, they demonstrate how a single social tie can vary between strong and weak depending on the social situation. Many social ties fall outside weak and strong; they are elastic in allowing elders (and other marginal groups) to connect and secure informal support while maintaining their distance and preserving their autonomy.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Stacy Torres: Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco
E-mail: stacy.torres@ucsf.edu

Acknowledgements: I thank Kathleen Gerson, Colin Jerolmack, Lynne Haney, Steven Lukes, Dalton Conley, Ronald Breiger, Anthony Paik, and Claude Fischer for their guidance and feedback on earlier versions of this article. A special thanks to my study participants, who shared their lives with me for several years. Support for data collection and project write-up was funded in part by fellowships from New York University, the American Sociological Association Minority Fellowship Program (cosponsored by Sociologists for Women in Society), the Ford Foundation, and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. Publication is made possible in part by support from the UCSF Open Access Publishing Fund.

  • Citation: Torres, Stacy. 2019. “On Elastic Ties: Distance and Intimacy in Social Relationships.” Sociological Science 6: 235-263.
  • Received: November 15, 2018
  • Accepted: February 18, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Mario Small
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a10


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The Structure of Negative Social Ties in Rural Village Networks

By on March 6, 2019 in Articles

Alexander Isakov, James H. Fowler, Edoardo M. Airoldi, Nicholas A. Christakis

Sociological Science, March 6, 2019
10.15195/v6.a8

Abstract
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Negative (antagonistic) connections have been of longstanding theoretical importance for social structure. In a population of 24,696 adults interacting face to face within 176 isolated villages in western Honduras, we measured all connections that were present, amounting to 105,175 positive and 16,448 negative ties. Here, we show that negative and positive ties exhibit many of the same structural characteristics. We then develop a complete taxonomy of all 138 possible triads of two-type relationships. Consistent with balance theory, we find that antagonists of friends and friends of antagonists tend to be antagonists; but, in an important empirical refutation of balance theory, we find that antagonists of antagonists also tend to be antagonists, not friends. Finally, villages with comparable levels of animosity tend to be geographically proximate. Similar processes, involving social contact, give rise to both positive and negative social ties in rural villages, and negative ties play an important role in social structure.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Alexander Isakov: Yale Institute for Network Science, Yale University; Department of Sociology, Yale University
E-mail: alexander.isakov.11@gmail.com

James H. Fowler: Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego; Political Science Department, University of California, San Diego
E-mail: fowler@ucsd.edu

Edoardo M. Airoldi: Department of Statistical Science, Fox School of Business, Temple University; Department of Statistics and Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, Harvard University
E-mail: airoldi@fas.harvard.edu

Nicholas A. Christakis: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University; Department of Statistics and Data Science, Yale University
E-mail: nicholas.christakis@yale.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank Emily Erikson, Dan Gilbert, David Rand, Yongren Shi, Hiro Shirado, Maggie Traeger, Tom Snijders, Gijs Huitsing, and Arnav Tripathy for their helpful comments. We are also grateful to the data collection and software teams for the Honduras project, including Rennie Negron, Liza Nicoll, and Mark McKnight. This research was supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Tata Group, the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (grant P30-AG034420), the National Science Foundation (grant IIS-1409177), and the Office of Naval Research (grants N00014-17-1-2131). The authors declare no competing interests.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Isakov, Alexander, James H. Fowler, Edoardo M. Airoldi, and Nicholas A. Christakis. 2019. “The Structure of Negative Social Ties in Rural Village Networks.” Sociological Science 6: 197-218.
  • Received: January 16, 2019
  • Accepted: February 10, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a8


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How Much Do You Have to Publish to Get a Job in a Top Sociology Department? Or to Get Tenure? Trends over a Generation

By on February 27, 2019 in Articles

John Robert Warren

Sociological Science, February 27, 2019
10.15195/v6.a7

Abstract
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Many sociologists suspect that publication expectations have risen over time—that how much graduate students have published to get assistant professor jobs and how much assistant professors have published to be promoted have gone up. Using information about faculty in 21 top sociology departments from the American Sociological Association’s Guide to Graduate Departments of Sociology, online curricula vitae, and other public records, I provide empirical evidence to support this suspicion. On the day they start their first jobs, new assistant professors in recent years have already published roughly twice as much as their counterparts did in the early 1990s. Trends for promotion to associate professor are not as dramatic but are still remarkable. I evaluate several potential explanations for these trends and conclude that they are driven mainly by changes over time in the fiscal and organizational realities of universities and departments.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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

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

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


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

By on February 20, 2019 in Articles

Tina Baier, Volker Lang

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

Abstract
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The relative importance of genes and shared environmental influences on stratification outcomes has recently received much attention in the literature. We focus on education and the gene-environmental interplay. Specifically, we investigate whether—as proposed by the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis—genetic influences are more important in advantaged families. We argue that the social stratification of family environments affects children’s chances to actualize their genetic potential. We hypothesize that advantaged families provide more child-specific inputs, which enhance genetic expression, whereas the rearing environments of children in disadvantaged families are less adapted to children’s individual abilities, leading to a suppression of genetic potential. We test this relationship in Germany, which represents an interesting case due to its highly selective schooling system characterized by early tracking and the broad coverage of part-time schools. We use novel data from the TwinLife panel, a population-register–based sample of twins and their families. Results of ACE-variance decompositions support the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis: Shared environmental influences on education matter only in disadvantaged families, whereas genetic influences are more important in advantaged families. Our findings support the growing literature on the importance of the gene-environmental interplay and emphasize the role of the family environment as a trigger of differential genetic expression.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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

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

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

Supplemental Material

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


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

By on February 13, 2019 in Articles

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

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

Abstract
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In this study, we propose and test a mechanism for the effect of neighborhood of residence on school outcomes: absenteeism that results from exposure to danger on the way to school. We first determine the most efficient route to school using public transportation for 4,200 first-time freshmen in Baltimore City public high schools. Then, we link the specific streets along the most efficient route to incident-level crime data from the Baltimore Police Department. We find that students whose estimated routes require walking along streets with higher violent-crime rates have higher rates of absenteeism throughout the year. We also show that absenteeism is not associated with exposure to dangerous streets while riding on public transit and exposure to property crime.These conclusions hold with and without adjustments for student demographic characteristics, prior school attendance, violent crime around homes and schools, and unobserved differences related to school preference and neighborhood selection.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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

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

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

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

Supplemental Material

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


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

By on February 6, 2019 in Articles

Trenton D. Mize

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

Abstract
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Many effects of interest to sociologists are nonlinear. Additionally, many effects of interest are interaction effects—that is, the effect of one independent variable is contingent on the level of another independent variable. The proper way to estimate, interpret, and present these two types of effects individually are well known. However, many analyses that combine these two—that is, tests of interaction when the effects of interest are nonlinear—are not properly interpreted or tested. The consequences of approaching nonlinear interaction effects the way one would approach a linear interaction effect are severe and can often result in incorrect conclusions. I cover both nonlinear effects in the context of linear regression, and—most thoroughly—nonlinear effects in models for categorical outcomes (focusing on binary logit/probit). My goal in this article is to synthesize an evolving methodological literature and to provide straightforward advice and techniques to estimate,interpret, and present nonlinear interaction effects.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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

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

Supplemental Material

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


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

By on January 24, 2019 in Articles

Paul T. von Hippel, Caitlin Hamrock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supplemental Material

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


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