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I present evidence that the release of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why—a fictional series about the aftermath of a teenage girl’s suicide—caused a temporary spike in emergency room (ER) visits for self-harm among teenage girls in the United States. I conduct an interrupted time series analysis using monthly counts of ER visits obtained from a large, nationally representative survey. I estimate that the show caused an increase of 1,297 self-harm visits (95 percent CI: 634 to 1,965) the month it was released, a 14 percent (6.5 percent, 23 percent) spike relative to the predicted counterfactual. The effect persisted for two months, and ER visits for intentional cutting—the method of suicide portrayed in the series—were unusually high following the show’s release. The findings indicate that fictional portrayals of suicide can influence real-life self-harm behavior, providing support for contagion-based explanations of suicide. Methodologically, the study showcases how to make credible causal claims when effect estimates are likely biased.

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

Chris Felton: Postdoctoral Fellow, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University. This study was completed while the author was a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research at Princeton University.
E-mail: christopher_felton@gse.harvard.edu

Acknowledgements: For helpful discussions and feedback relevant to this project, I thank (in reverse-alphabetical order) Brandon Stewart, Varun Satish, Momoko Nishikido, Ian Lundberg, Marielle Côté-Gendreau, Dalton Conley, members of the Stewart Lab, the editor, and the anonymous referees. Replication data and code can be found at https://github.com/cmfelton/13rw. All errors are my own.

Citation: Felton, Chris. 2023. “’13 Reasons Why’ Probably Increased Emergency Room Visits for Self-Harm among Teenage Girls.” Sociological Science 10: 930-963.
Received: March 15, 2023
Accepted: March 31, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Peter Bearman
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a33

Subjective Political Polarization

By Parker Webservices on November 27, 2023 in Articles

Hyunku Kwon, John Levi Martin

Sociological Science November 27, 2023
10.15195/v10.a32

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Although the political polarization literature has provided important insights in understanding the structure of political attitudes in the United States at the aggregate level, and how this has changed in recent years, few attempts have been made to examine how each individual subjectively perceives political space and how she locates herself vis-à-vis her political in/out groups at the individual level. To examine such subjective polarization, this paper proposes an approach that examines the trifold relationship between a political actor and the two major political parties. Such relational properties are studied by looking at how each individual locates herself in relation to political in/out groups. Using the American National Election Studies Dataset, this paper sheds new light on the patterns and trends of mass polarization in the United States and demonstrates that subjective polarization has a distinct contribution to partisan animus, or “affective polarization.”

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

Hyunku Kwon: Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
E-mail: hyunkukwon@uchicago.edu

John Levi Martin: Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
E-mail: jlmartin@uchicago.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank Eric J. Oliver, Elisabeth Clemens, Oscar Stuhler, Austin Kozlowski, Benjamin Rohr, and Jake Burchard for their comments and suggestions on the earlier draft. We also appreciate the input from the participants of Culture and Action Network. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the meetings of 2020 American Politics Workshop and Politics, History, and Society Workshop at the University of Chicago, and at the 2021 meeting of American Sociological Association.

Citation: Kwon, Hyunku, and John Levi Martin. 2023. “Subjective Political Polarization.” Sociological Science 10: 903–929.
Received: August 3, 2023
Accepted: August 23, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Peter Bearman
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a32

Does Schooling Affect Socioeconomic Inequalities in Educational Attainment? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Germany

By Parker Webservices on November 20, 2023 in Articles

Michael Grätz

Sociological Science November 20, 2023
10.15195/v10.a31

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Critical theories of education and the dynamics of skill formation model predict that the education system reproduces socioeconomic inequalities in educational attainment. Previous empirical studies comparing changes in socioeconomic inequalities in academic performance over the summer to changes in these inequalities during the school year have argued, however, that schooling reduces inequalities in educational performance. The present study highlights the question of whether schooling affects socioeconomic inequalities in educational attainment by analyzing a natural experiment that induces exogenous variation in the length of schooling and allowed me to investigate the causal, long-term effects of the length of schooling on inequalities in educational attainment. Some German states moved the school start from spring to summer in 1966/1967 and introduced two short school years, each of which was three months shorter than a regular school year. I use variation in the short school years across cohorts and states to estimate the causal effects of the length of schooling on socioeconomic inequalities in educational attainment based on two German panel surveys. Less schooling due to the short school years did not affect inequalities in educational attainment. This finding runs counter to the results from the summer learning literature and to the predictions of the dynamics of skill formation model and critical theories of education. I conclude by discussing the implications of this finding for our understanding of socioeconomic inequalities in educational attainment.

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

Michael Grätz: Swiss Centre for Expertise in Life Course Research LIVES, University of Lausanne, Swedish Institute for Social Research SOFI, Stockholm University
E-mail: michael.gratz@unil.ch

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) under grant agreements PZ00P1_180128 and TMSGI1_211627 and by the Forskningsrådet om Hälsa, Arbetsliv och Välfärd (Forte) under grant agreement 2016-0709. Earlier versions of this study were presented at the University of Berne, the University of Antwerp, the Annual Conference of the European Consortium for Sociological Research, and the conference of the Akademie für Soziologie in 2021 as well as the Research Committee 28 of the International Sociological Association conference in London in 2022. I thank these participants as well as my colleagues at the University of Lausanne and Stockholm University for their comments and suggestions. I am particularly grateful for detailed suggestions from Andreas Diemer, Jörg Dollmann, Chaïm LaRoi, and Richard Nennstiel. This paper uses data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS): Starting Cohort Adults doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC6:11.1.0). From 2008 to 2013, NEPS data were collected as part of the Framework Program for the Promotion of Empirical Educational Research funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). As of 2014, NEPS has been carried out by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) at the University of Bamberg in cooperation with a nationwide network. The SOEP data were collected by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW).

Citation: Grätz, Michael. 2023. “Does Schooling Affect Socioeconomic Inequalities in Educational Attainment? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Germany.” Sociological Science 10: 880–902.
Received: May 20, 2023
Accepted: September 10, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Jeremy Freese
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a31

Life-Course Differences in Occupational Mobility Between Vocationally and Generally Trained Workers in Germany

By Parker Webservices on November 14, 2023 in Articles

Viktor Decker, Thijs Bol, Hanno Kruse

Sociological Science November 14, 2023
10.15195/v10.a30

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Vocational education is considered beneficial to young workers entering the labor market but disadvantageous late in their careers. Many studies assume that late-career disadvantages stem from lower levels of occupational mobility, but do not explicitly study this mechanism. This study is the first to empirically assess whether and to what extent occupational mobility differs between workers with a general education and those with vocational training and to examine how these differences develop over workers’ life courses. Using multilevel linear probability models on panel data spanning 36 years of labor market participation in Germany, we find that vocationally educated workers are less mobile, but only in the first half of their careers. In the second half, mobility rates for vocationally and generally trained workers converge. Our findings support earlier research that links vocational education to less turbulent early careers. Yet, they do not support the notion of late-career mobility disparities between workers with different types of training. Implications for research on education-based differences in career outcomes are discussed.

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

Viktor Decker: Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam
E-mail: v.v.decker@uva.nl

Thijs Bol: Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam
E-mail: t.bol@uva.nl

Hanno Kruse: Institute of Political Science and Sociology, University of Bonn
E-mail: hkruse@uni-bonn.de

Acknowledgements: The research was supported by the ERC starting grant From School to Career: Towards A Career Perspective on the Labor Market Returns to Education (ID: 950189). Previous versions of this article were presented at the ISA RC28 conference 2022 at London School of Economics, the ECSR annual conference 2022 at University of Amsterdam, and at multiple events organized by the Dutch Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology.

Citation: Decker, Viktor, Thijs Bol, and Hanno Kruse. 2023. “Life-Course Differences in Occupational Mobility Between Vocationally and Generally Trained Workers in Germany.” Sociological Science 10: 857-879.
Received: May 3, 2023
Accepted: May 26, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Richard Breen
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a30

There's More in the Data! Using Month-Specific Information to Estimate Changes Before and After Major Life Events

By Parker Webservices on November 9, 2023 in Articles

Ansgar Hudde, Marita Jacob

Sociological Science November 9, 2023
10.15195/v10.a29

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Sociological research is increasingly using survey panel data to examine changes in diverse outcomes over life course events. Most of these studies have one striking similarity: they analyze changes between yearly time intervals. In this article, we present a simple but effective method to model such trajectories more precisely using available data. The approach exploits month-specific information regarding interview and life event dates. Using fixed effects regression models, we calculate monthly dummy estimates around life events and then run nonparametric smoothing to create smoothed monthly estimates. We test the approach using Monte Carlo simulations and Socio-economic Panel (SOEP) data. Monte Carlo simulations show that the newly proposed smoothed monthly estimates outperform yearly dummy estimates, especially when there is rapid change or discontinuities in trends at the event. In the real data analyses, the novel approach reports an amplitude of change that is roughly twice as large as the yearly estimates showed. It also reveals a discontinuity in trajectories at bereavement, but not at childbirth; and remarkable gender differences. Our proposed method can be applied to several available data sets and a variety of outcomes and life events. Thus, for research on changes around life events, it serves as a powerful new tool in the researcher’s toolbox.

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

Ansgar Hudde: University of Cologne, Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology, Germany
E-mail: hudde@wiso.uni-koeln.de

Marita Jacob: University of Cologne, Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology, Germany
E-mail: marita.jacob@uni-koeln.de

Acknowledgements: Replication files are available here: https://osf.io/rhd8y/.

Citation: Hudde, Ansgar, and Marita Jacob. 2023. “There’s More in the Data! Using Month-Specific Information to Estimate Changes Before and After Major Life Events.” Sociological Science 10: 830-856.
Received: June 5, 2023
Accepted: July 27, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Vida Maralani
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a29

Feasible Peer Effects: Experimental Evidence for Deskmate Effects on Educational Achievement and Inequality

By Parker Webservices on November 6, 2023 in Articles

Tamás Keller, Felix Elwert

Sociological Science November 6, 2023
10.15195/v10.a28

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Schools routinely employ seating charts to influence educational outcomes. Dependable evidence for the causal effects of seating charts on students’ achievement levels and inequality, however, is scarce. We executed a large pre-registered field experiment to estimate causal peer effects on students’ test scores and grades by randomizing the seating charts of 195 classrooms (N=3,365 students). We found that neither sitting next to a deskmate with higher prior achievement nor sitting next to a female deskmate affected learning outcomes on average. However, we also found that sitting next to the highest-achieving deskmates improved the educational outcomes of the lowest-achieving students; and sitting next to the lowest-achieving deskmates lowered the educational outcomes of the highest-achieving students. Therefore, compared to random seating charts, achievement-discordant seating charts would decrease inequality; whereas achievement concordant seating charts would increase inequality. We discuss policy implications.

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

Tamás Keller: HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, Computational Social Science – Research Center for Educational and Network Studies, Budapest, Hungary HUN-REN Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Institute of Economics, Budapest, Hungary. TÁRKI Social Research Institute, Budapest, Hungary
E-mail: keller.tamas@tk.hu

Felix Elwert: Department of Sociology & Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
E-mail: elwert@wisc.edu

Acknowledgements: The authors thank Carlo Barone, Dorottya Baross, Steven Durlauf, Edina Gábor, Eric Grodsky, Judit Kerek, Gábor Kertesi, Gábor Kézdi, Andreas Kotsadam, Xinran Li, Károly Takács, Jeffrey Smith, and audiences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Chicago, ISA RC28 Spring Meeting in Frankfurt am Main, the Annual Meeting of the International Network of Analytical Sociologists (INAS) in St. Petersburg, the Meeting of the Economics of Education Association (AEDE) in Las Palmas, the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, and the European Research Network on Transitions in Youth (TiY) in Mannheim for valuable discussions. This research was funded by grants from the Hungarian National Research, Development, and Innovation Office (NKFIH), grant number K-135766; a János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, #BO/00569/21/9; the New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Culture and Innovation, #ÚNKP- 23-5-CORVINUS-149; and a Romnes Fellowship and a Vilas Midcareer Faculty Award, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Direct correspondence to Tamás Keller (keller.tamas@tk.hu) and Felix Elwert (elwert@wisc.edu).

Citation: Keller, Tamás, and Felix Elwert. 2023. “Feasible Peer Effects: Experimental Evidence for Deskmate Effects on Educational Achievement and Inequality” Sociological Science 7: 806-829.
Received: July 12, 2023
Accepted: May 2, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Peter Bearman
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a28

The Refugee Advantage: English-Language Attainment in the Early Twentieth Century

By Parker Webservices on November 3, 2023 in Articles

Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Peter Catron, Dylan Connor, Rob Voigt

Sociological Science November 3, 2023
10.15195/v10.a27

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The United States has admitted more than 3 million refugees since 1980 through official refugee resettlement programs. Scholars attribute the success of refugee groups to governmental programs on assimilation and integration. Before 1948, however, refugees arrived without formal selection processes or federal support. We examine the integration of historical refugees using a large archive of recorded oral history interviews to understand linguistic attainment of migrants who arrived in the early twentieth century. Using fine-grained measures of vocabulary, syntax and accented speech, we find that refugee migrants achieved a greater depth of English vocabulary than did economic/family migrants, a finding that holds even when comparing migrants from the same country of origin or religious group. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that refugees had greater exposure to English or more incentive to learn, due to the conditions of their arrival and their inability to immediately return to their origin country.

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

Ran Abramitzky: Department of Economics, Stanford University and National Bureau of Economic Research
E-mail: ranabr@stanford.edu

Leah Boustan: Department of Economics, Princeton University and National Bureau of Economic Research
E-mail: lboustan@princeton.edu

Peter Catron: Department of Sociology, University of Washington
E-mail: catron@uw.edu

Dylan Connor: School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University
E-mail: d.c@asu.edu

Rob Voigt: Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University
E-mail: robvoigt@northwestern.edu

Acknowledgements: We acknowledge the excellent research assistance of Victoria Angelova, Harriet Brookes Gray, Sarah Frick, Myera Rashid, and Noah Simon. Sima Biondi, Alicia Liu, Lori Mitrano, Lorenzo Rosas, Antigone Xenopoulos and Adam Zhang helped to collect variables from the oral history interviews. Jared Grogan, Bailey Palmer and James Reeves coded the interviews for accented speech. Tom Zohar oversaw audio transcription of missing transcripts. We appreciate suggestions from audiences at Universitat Automoma de Barcelona, UC-Berkeley, European Social Science History Association, Harvard, University of Nottingham, Pompeu Fabra, University of Chicago, and University College, London. All data and replication files may be found here: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/HMMGJ5

Citation: Abramitzky et al. 2023. “The Refugee Advantage: English-Language Attainment in the Early Twentieth Century.” Sociological Science 10: 769-805.
Received: June 23, 2023
Accepted: August 23, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Filiz Garip
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a27

Cross-Group Differences in Age, Period, and Cohort Effects: A Bounding Approach to the Gender Wage Gap

By Parker Webservices on October 31, 2023 in Articles

Ohjae Gowen, Ethan Fosse, Christopher Winship

Sociological Science October 31, 2023
10.15195/v10.a26

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For decades, researchers have sought to understand the separate contributions of age, period, and cohort (APC) on a wide range of outcomes. However, a major challenge in these efforts is the linear dependence among the three time scales. Previous methods have been plagued by either arbitrary assumptions or extreme sensitivity to small variations in model specification. In this article, we present an alternative method that achieves partial identification by leveraging additional information about subpopulations (or strata) such as race, gender, and social class. Our first goal is to introduce the cross-strata linearized APC (CSL-APC) model, a re-parameterization of the traditional APC model that focuses on cross-group variations in effects instead of overall effects. Similar to the traditional model, the linear cross-strata APC effects are not identified. The second goal is to show how Fosse and Winship’s (2019) bounding approach can be used to address the identification problem of the CSL-APC model, allowing one to partially identify cross-group differences in effects. This approach often involves weaker assumptions than previously used techniques and, in some cases, can lead to highly informative bounds. To illustrate our method, we examine differences in temporal effects on wages between men and women in the United States.

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

Ohjae Gowen: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
E-mail: ohjaegowen@g.harvard.edu

Ethan Fosse: Department of Sociology, University of Toronto
E-mail: ethan.fosse@utoronto.ca

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

Acknowledgements: The authors thank Derick S. Baum for his invaluable assistance in the early stages of the analysis. This article also benefited from a presentation at the 2023 annual meeting of the Population Association of America, New Orleans, LA.

Citation: Gowen, Ohjae, Ethan Fosse, and Christopher Winship. 2023. “Cross-Group Differences in Age, Period, and Cohort Effects: A Bounding Approach to the Gender Wage Gap.” Sociological Science 10: 731-768.
Received: February 9, 2023
Accepted: March 13, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Richard Breen
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a26

Institutional Survival under Extreme State Repression and Subsequent Revival

By Parker Webservices on October 24, 2023 in Articles

Hongwei Xu, Litao Zhao

Sociological Science October 24, 2023
10.15195/v10.a25

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This study examines institutional survival under conditions of extreme state repression. We argue that institutional values under these onditions become dormant in small “safe” social spaces such as families and small close-knit social groups. As state repression becomes increasingly violent, the suppressed groups within those spaces become more resilient in preserving “deviant” values and mitigating the negative long-term impact of state violence on institutional revival. We examine the extent to which pre-1949 entrepreneurial families served as institutional carriers for private entrepreneurship in the Mao era (1949-1978) of China, especially in the context of the political violence of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and shaped individuals’ entry into private entrepreneurship in the post-1978 reform era. We find that entrepreneurial transmission was suppressed at the family level by communist repression. Where more severe political violence occurred, pre-1949 entrepreneurial families could better mitigate the deterrent effect on institutional revival of the number of deaths that occurred locally during the Cultural Revolution. Stigmatized pre-1949 entrepreneurial families—those with “bad” class origins—mitigated the effects better than their nonstigmatized counterparts. We test to control for public sector job opportunities at the individual and municipal levels and find that these opportunities are unlikely to drive our results.

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

Hongwei Xu: Odette School of Business, University of Windsor
E-mail: hongwei.xu@uwindsor.ca

Litao Zhao: East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore
E-mail: eaizlt@nus.edu.sg

Acknowledgements: We thank Donald Treiman and Andrew Walder for making publicly available their data sets on China. We are also grateful to Philip Anderson, Glenn Carroll, Zhi Huang, Martin Ruef, Chunlei Wang, and Hong Zhang for providing helpful suggestions on earlier drafts.

Citation: Xu, Hongwei, and Litao Zhao. 2023. “Institutional Survival under Extreme State Repression and Subsequent Revival.” Sociological Science 10: 694-730.
Received: February 24, 2023
Accepted: March 13, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Andreas Wimmer
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a25

The Inequality of Lifetime Pensions

By Parker Webservices on October 17, 2023 in Articles

Jiaxin Shi, Martin Kolk

Sociological Science October 17, 2023
10.15195/v10.a24

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At older ages, most people are supported by pension systems that provide payments based on prior contributions. An important, but neglected, aspect of inequality in how much people receive in pensions is the number of years they live to receive their pension. We examine inequality in lifetime-accumulated pensions and show the importance of mortality for understanding inequalities in pension payments, and contrast it to inequalities in working-age earnings and yearly pension payments among older adults. In contrast to most previous research on old-age inequality comparing different social groups, we focused on total-population-level inequality. Using Swedish register data covering the retired population born from 1918–1939, we found that lifetime pensions are much more unequal than pre-retirement earnings and yearly pensions. Our findings also show that mortality explains more than 50 percent of the inequality of lifetime pensions within cohorts, and plays an important role in explaining changes in inequality across cohorts (192 percent among men and 44 percent among women). Pension policies can affect lifetime pension inequality, but such effects are limited in magnitude unless they directly affect the number of years of receiving pensions.

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

Jiaxin Shi: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany. Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science & Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom. Demographic Unit, Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
E-mail: shi@demogr.mpg.de

Martin Kolk: Demography Unit, Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. Institute for Future Studies, Stockholm, Sweden. Åbo Akademi University, Vaasa, Finland
E-mail: martin.kolk@sociology.su.se

Acknowledgements: We thank Jenn Dowd, Christian Dudel, John Ermisch, Martin Hällsten, Robert Hummer, Guanghui Pan, Fabian Pfeffer, Yifan Shen, Joshua Wilde, Alyson van Raalte, and participants at the Oxford Sociology Monday Meeting for their helpful feedback on previous drafts. Jiaxin Shi was supported by the European Research Council (grant no. 716323) and a Leverhulme Trust Grant (Grant RC-2018-003) for the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford. Jiaxin Shi gratefully acknowledges the resources provided by the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science (IMPRS-PHDS). Martin Kolk was supported by the Swedish Research Council (grant no. 2019-02552 and 2022-02314) and the Swedish Research Council for Health,Working Life andWelfare (FORTE, grant no. 2016-07115).