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Literature suggests that sudden mass immigration can fuel xenophobic attitudes. However, there is a lack of reliable evidence on hostile actions, such as discrimination. In this study, we leverage the unexpected mass immigration of refugees to Germany in 2015 in combination with a two-wave field experiment to study the effect of immigration on ethnic discrimination. In 2015/2016, political and social tensions in the Middle East and North Africa led to a historic mass migration to European countries. We carried out a large-scale field experiment on ethnic housing market discrimination in Germany (paired e-mail correspondence test with ~5,000 e-mail applications to rental housing units in each wave) shortly before this “European refugee crisis” (1st wave). We repeated this experiment at the peak of the crisis (2nd wave of our experiment). By taking advantage of the unexpected refugee immigration between the two waves of our experiment and the quasi-random allocation of refugees across regions for causal identification, we find no credible evidence that the large influx of refugees changed the extent of ethnic discrimination of Turks in the rental housing market. This result holds regardless of the extent to which regions within Germany were already accustomed to immigration before the refugee crisis.

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

Katrin Auspurg: LMU Munich, Department of Sociology
E-mail: katrin.auspurg@lmu.de

Renate Lorenz: LMU Munich, Department of Sociology
E-mail: renate.lorenz@soziologie.uni-muenchen.de

Andreas Schneck: LMU Munich, Department of Sociology
E-mail: andreas.schneck@lmu.de

Acknowledgements: We thank the participants of the Annual Conference of Experimental Sociology (ACES) 2021, the Research Colloquium of the Doctoral School of Social Sciences at the University of Trento (2022) and the Social Science Research Colloquium at the TU Kaiserslautern (2022) for helpful suggestions. We are grateful for comments on earlier versions we received from Madison Garrett. Maximilian Sonnauer helped us compiling the database for the field experiments.

Citation: Auspurg, Katrin, Renate Lorenz, and Andreas Schneck. 2023. “Does Unprecedented Mass Immigration Fuel Ethnic Discrimination? A Two-Wave Field Experiment in the German Housing Market.” Sociological Science 10: 640-666.
Received: December 17, 2022
Accepted: April 17, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Maria Abascal
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a23

The Ethnic Lens: Social Networks and the Salience of Ethnicity in the School Context

By Parker Webservices on October 3, 2023 in Articles

Clemens Kroneberg, Mark Wittek

Sociological Science October 3, 2023
10.15195/v10.a22

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Research on ethnic segregation in schools regularly assumed that ethnic homophily—the tendency to befriend same-ethnic peers, above and beyond other mechanisms of tie formation—is associated with salient ethnic boundaries. We devise a more direct test of this assumption based on a novel measure of ethno-racial group perceptions. In a network study of more than 3000 students in 39 schools of a metropolitan region in Germany, we asked students to indicate which cliques they perceived in their school grade and to describe these groups in their own words. We find that ethno-racial labels are more likely directed at larger cliques that include a higher share of Muslim students or more students with stronger ethnic identification. Still, ethno-racial labels are rarely employed, both absolutely and relative to other modes of classification. Moreover, net ethnic segregation in friendships (“ethnic homophily”) and the reverse pattern in dislike relations (“ethnic heterophobia”) are not associated with a more frequent use of ethno-racial labels. Our results have substantive and methodological implications for the study of social networks and diversity in educational settings.

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

Clemens Kroneberg: Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Cologne
E-mail: c.kroneberg@uni-koeln.de

Mark Wittek: Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Cologne
E-mail: wittek@wiso.uni-koeln.de

Acknowledgements: Both authors contributed equally to this work. Earlier versions of the article were presented at the “Frontiers in Quantitative Migration Research” colloquium series at the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research and the Hertie School of Governance, at the 3rd Cultural Diversity, Migration, and Education Conference, Potsdam Center for Empirical Research on Inclusive Education, and at the 3rd Conference of the Academy of Sociology “Cohesive Societies?” at the University of Leipzig. We thank the various participants for their helpful feedback and especially Philipp Jugert who provided stimulating comments on a first version of this work. We would also like to thank Rosa Flore, Anna Bahß, Madita Zöll, Senami Viktoria Hotse, Katharina Burkart, Hannah Rose Tendal, Jan Nguyen, Alexandra Bothe, Zara Mansius, Juliane Reichelt, Mira Böing, Chiara Barfuß, and Agnes Tarnowski who helped in the coding of qualitative clique descriptions.

Funding: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 716461). Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy—EXC 2126/1–390838866.

Citation: Kroneberg, Clemens, and Mark Wittek. 2023. “The Ethnic Lens: Social Networks and the Salience of Ethnicity in the School Context.” Sociological Science 10: 613-639.
Received: February 7, 2023
Accepted: March 14, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Wener Raub
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a22

Inclusive but Not Integrative: Ethnoracial Boundaries and the Use of Spanish in the Market for Rental Housing

By Parker Webservices on September 26, 2023 in Articles

Ariela Schachter, John Kuk, Max Besbris, and Garrett Pekarek

Sociological Science September 26, 2023
10.15195/v10.a21

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Increasing Spanish fluency in the United States likely shapes ethnoracial group boundaries and inequality. We study a key site for group boundary negotiations—the housing market—where Spanish usage may represent a key source of information exchange between landlords and prospective renters. Specifically, we examine the use of Spanish in advertisements for online rental housing and its effect on White, Black, and Latinx Americans’ residential preferences. Using a corpus of millions of Craigslist rental listings, we show that Spanish listings are concentrated in majority-Latinx neighborhoods with greater proportions of immigrant and Spanish-speaking residents. Furthermore, units that are advertised in Spanish tend be lower priced relative to non-Spanish ads in the same neighborhood. We then use a survey experiment to demonstrate that Spanish usage decreases White, Black, and non-Spanish-speaking Latinx Americans’ interest in a housing unit and surrounding neighborhood, whereas Spanish-speaking Latinx respondents are less affected. We discuss these findings in light of past work on neighborhood demographic preferences, segregation, and recent theorizing on within-category inequality.

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

Ariela Schachter: Department of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis
E-mail: ariela@wustl.edu

John Kuk: Department of Political Science, Michigan State University
E-mail: jskuk@msu.edu

Max Besbris: Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
E-mail: besbris@wisc.edu

Garrett Pekarek: Department of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis
E-mail: g.e.pekarek@wustl.edu

Acknowledgements: For their generous and thoughtful engagement with previous drafts, we gratefully acknowledge René Flores and Elizabeth Korver-Glenn. We thank Maddy Molina and Leslye Quintanilla for their support as research assistants. This work has been supported by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University and is based on work supported by National Science Foundation (grants 1947591 and 1947598).

Citation: Schachter, Ariela, John Kuk, Max Besbris, and Garrett Pekarek. 2023. “Inclusive but Not Integrative: Ethnoracial Boundaries and the Use of Spanish in the Market for Rental Housing.” Sociological Science 10: 585-612.
Received: March 6, 2023
Accepted: March 22, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Filiz Garip
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a21

Shattered Dreams: Paternal Incarceration, Youth Expectations, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage

By Parker Webservices on September 19, 2023 in Articles

Garrett Baker

Sociological Science September 19, 2023
10.15195/v10.a20

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Children’s expectations and aspirations have a substantial effect on a variety of life course outcomes, including their health, education, and earnings. However, little research to date has considered empirically how expectations and aspirations are shaped by adverse events—such as experiencing a parent be incarcerated. In this article, I leverage Add Health’s retrospective parental incarceration questions to employ an innovative analytic strategy that accounts for selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity above and beyond typical observational methods. Results indicate that paternal incarceration is associated with one-fourth to one-third of a standard deviation lower youth expectations and aspirations, and these results are robust to various methods and specifications. Given that paternal incarceration is both common and disproportionately experienced by disadvantaged youth, the large magnitude and robust nature of these results reveal an important pathway through which mass incarceration has contributed to the intergenerational transmission of inequality in the U.S. in recent decades.

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

Garrett Baker: Duke University Department of Sociology and Sanford School of Public Policy
E-mail: garrett.baker@duke.edu

Acknowledgements: I am especially grateful to Chris Wildeman for his immense patience and continued guidance as this article evolved over the years. I would also like to thank Brielle Bryan, Anna Gassman-Pines, Sarah Komisarow, Martin Ruef, and Steve Vaisey for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Participants at the 2022 American Sociological Association (ASA) Annual Meeting, the 2022 Population Association of America (PAA) Annual Meeting, and the 2022 American Society of Criminology (ASC) Annual Meeting also provided helpful feedback. This research uses data from Add Health, funded by grant P01 HD31921 (Harris) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Add Health is currently directed by Robert A. Hummer and funded by the National Institute on Aging cooperative agreements U01 AG071448 (Hummer) and U01AG071450 (Aiello and Hummer) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Add Health was designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Citation: Baker, Garrett. 2023. “Shattered Dreams: Paternal Incarceration, Youth Expectations, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage.” Sociological Science 10: 559-584.
Received: February 21, 2023
Accepted: March 27, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Peter Bearman
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a20

Why Net Worth Misrepresents Wealth Effects and What to Do About It

By Parker Webservices on September 18, 2023 in Articles

Jascha Dräger, Klaus Pforr, Nora Müller

Sociological Science September 18, 2023
10.15195/v10.a19

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Wealth plays an important role in social stratification but the results that can be obtained when analyzing wealth as a predictor variable depend on modeling decisions. Although wealth consists of multiple components it is often operationalized as net worth. Moreover, wealth effects are likely non-linear, but the functional form is often unknown. To overcome these problems, we propose to 1) split up net worth into gross wealth and debt and evaluate their joint effect and 2) use non-parametric Generalized Additive Models. We show in a simulation study that this approach describes systematic wealth differences in more detail and overfits less to random variation in the data than standard approaches. We then apply the approach to re-analyze wealth gaps in educational attainment in the US. We find that the operationalization of wealth as net worth results in a misclassification of which children have the best and the worst educational prospects. Not negative net worth is associated with the worst educational prospects but only the combination of low gross wealth and low debt. The most advantaged group are not only children with high net worth but all children with high gross wealth independent of the households’ amount of debt.

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

Jascha Dräger: Strathclyde Institute of Education, University of Strathclyde
E-mail: Jascha.draeger@web.de

Klaus Pforr: Department of Data and Research on Society, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
E-mail: klaus.pforr@gesis.org

Nora Müller: Department of Data and Research on Society, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
E-mail: nora.mueller@gesis.org

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under Grant No. 403547843. We thank Barbara Felderer, Max Thaning, Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez, Øyvind Wiborg, the reviewer, and the editor for their helpful comments. Replication files can be found via https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/187561/version/V1/view.

Citation: Dräger, Jascha, Klaus Pforr, and Nora Müller. 2023. “Why Net Worth Misrepresents Wealth Effects and What to Do About It.” Sociological Science 10: 534-558.
Received: January 26, 2023
Accepted: March 28, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Cristobal Young
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a19

"Was It Me or Was It Gender Discrimination?" How Women Respond to Ambiguous Incidents at Work

By Parker Webservices on September 11, 2023 in Articles

Laura Doering, Jan Doering, András Tilcsik

Sociological Science September 11, 2023
10.15195/v10.a18

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Research shows that people often feel emotional distress when they experience a potentially discriminatory incident but cannot classify it conclusively. In this study, we propose that the ramifications of such ambiguous incidents extend beyond interior, emotional costs to include socially consequential action (or inaction) at work. Taking a mixed-methods approach, we examine how professional women experience and respond to incidents that they believe might have been gender discrimination, but about which they feel uncertain. Our interviews show that women struggle with how to interpret and respond to ambiguous incidents. Survey data show that women experience ambiguous incidents more often than incidents they believe were obviously discriminatory. Our vignette experiment reveals that women anticipate responding differently to the same incident depending on its level of ambiguity. Following incidents that are obviously discriminatory, women anticipate taking actions that make others aware of the problem; following ambiguous incidents, women anticipate changing their own work habits and self-presentation. This study establishes ambiguous gendered incidents as a familiar element of many women’s work lives that must be considered to address unequal gendered experiences at work.

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

Laura Doering: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
E-mail: laura.doering@rotman.utoronto.ca

Jan Doering: Department of Sociology, University of Toronto
E-mail: jan.doering@utoronto.ca

András Tilcsik: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
E-mail: andras.tilcsik@rotman.utoronto.ca

Acknowledgements: For their feedback on previous drafts, we thank Anne Bowers, Clayton Childress, Stefan Dimitriadis, Angelina Grigoryeva, Wyatt Lee, Sida Liu, Ryann Manning, Kim Pernell-Gallagher, Lauren Rivera, Patrick Rooney, Sameer Srivastava, and Ezra Zuckerman, and the Toronto Group of Seven, as well as seminar audiences at Cornell University, McGill University, and the University of Toronto. We gratefully acknowledge research assistance from Abigail Alebachew, Claire Corsten, Pablo Guzmán Lizardo, Branchie Mbofwana, Kristen McNeill, Priyanka Saini, and Vincent Zhang. This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Institute for Gender and the Economy.

Citation: Doering, Laura, Doering, Jan, and Tilcsik, András. 2023. “‘Was It Me or Was It Gender Discrimination?’ How Women Respond to Ambiguous Incidents at Work” Sociological Science 10: 501-533.
Received: March 8, 2023
Accepted: April 29, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Kristen Schilt
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a18

Resilience and Stress in Romantic Relationships in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Parker Webservices on September 6, 2023 in Articles

Michael J. Rosenfeld, Sonia Hausen

Sociological Science September 6, 2023
10.15195/v10.a17

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We measure the perceived effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on romantic relationships in the United States. We contrast Family Stress theories emphasizing potential harms of the pandemic with Family Resilience Theory suggesting that crises can lead couples to build meaning and strengthen their relationships. We examine closed-ended and open-ended questions about relationship responses to the pandemic from the How Couples Meet and Stay Together surveys from 2017, 2020 and 2022. We analyze potential correlates of relationship outcomes including education, children at home, gender, time spent together and pre-pandemic relationship quality. Subjects were three times as likely to describe pandemic relationship benefits compared to harms. Couples in high quality relationships were especially resilient to pandemic stresses, and derived benefits from more time together. Couples made meaning out of the pandemic and used the normalcy of their domestic situations to make a common front against an external threat.

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

Michael J. Rosenfeld: Stanford University
E-mail: mrosenfe@stanford.edu

Sonia Hausen: Stanford University

Responsibilities: The article grew from conversations between Rosenfeld and Hausen. Rosenfeld wrote the grants to gather the data. Hausen had primary responsibility for coding the open-ended question about how the pandemic affected relationships. Rosenfeld performed the analyses and wrote the article with feedback from Hausen.

Acknowledgements: Data were gathered through the support of the National Science Foundation grant SES 2030593 (funding HCMST 2020 and 2022), and a grant from the United Parcel Service endowment at Stanford University (funding HCMST 2017). An earlier version of the article was presented at the Population Association of America meetings, 2022. For feedback, thanks to Kimberly Higuera, Hannah Tessler, Stanford’s Graduate FamilyWorkshop, and to anonymous reviewers. Replication statement: The HCMST 2017-2022 data, documentation, and a replication package for Tables 1-6 are available at https://data.stanford.edu/hcmst2017. The HCMST data and documentation have been deposited to and will eventually be available from ICPSR as well (timing subject to ICPSR’s production schedule for curated datasets). The open-ended text answers, in edited form, will be deposited to ICPSR and will be available as a restricted dataset addition to HCMST 2017-2022.

Citation: Rosenfeld, Michael J., and Sonia Hausen. 2023. “Resilience and Stress in Romantic Relationships in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic” Sociological Science 10:472-500.
Received: May 15, 2023
Accepted: June 12, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Kristen Schilt
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a17

"Looking for It in Genetix": Response to Comment

By Parker Webservices on July 10, 2023 in Articles

Mads Meier Jæger, Stine Møllegaard

Sociological Science July 10, 2023
10.15195/v10.a16

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Eurythmics or Xenakis? Cultural Tastes (Are Not Made of Genes): Comment on Jæger and Møllegaard, “Where Do Cultural Tastes Come From? Genes, Environments, or Experiences”

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Mads Meier Jæger: Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen
E-mail: mmj@soc.ku.dk

Stine Møllegaard: The Danish Evaluation Institute
E-mail: SPE@eva.dk

Citation: Jæger, Mads Meier, and Stine Møllegaard. 2023. “‘Looking for It in Genetix’: Response to Comment.” Sociological Science 10: 467-471.
Received: March 1, 2023
Accepted: March 3, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a16

Where Do Cultural Tastes Come From? Genes, Environments, or Experiences

Eurythmics or Xenakis? Cultural Tastes (Are Not Made of Genes): Comment on Jæger and Møllegaard, "Where Do Cultural Tastes Come From? Genes, Environments, or Experiences"

By Parker Webservices on July 10, 2023 in Articles

Julien Larrègue, Frédéric Lebaron, Hervé Perdry, Nicolas Robette

Sociological Science July 10, 2023
10.15195/v10.a15

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Julien Larrègue: Département de sociologie, Université Laval – Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie, Quebec, Canada
E-mail: julien.larregue@ulaval.ca

Frédéric Lebaron: IDHES, CNRS, École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, and Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
E-mail: frederic.lebaron@ens-paris-saclay.fr

Hervé Perdry: CESP Inserm U1018, Université Paris-Saclay, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin, Villejuif, France
E-mail: herve.perdry@inserm.fr

Nicolas Robette: Laboratoire Printemps, UMR8085, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin, Guyancourt, France
E-mail: nicolas.robette@uvsq.fr

Where Do Cultural Tastes Come From? Genes, Environments, or Experiences

Citation: Larrègue, Julien, Frédéric Lebaron, Hervé Perdry, and Nicolas Robette. 2023. “Eurythmics or Xenakis? Cultural Tastes (Are Not Made of Genes): Comment on Jæger and Møllegaard, ‘Where Do Cultural Tastes Come From? Genes, Environments, or Experiences.'” Sociological Science 10: 454-466.
Received: November 18, 2022
Accepted: February 20, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Jeremy Freese
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a15

Money, Birth, Gender: Explaining Unequal Earnings Trajectories following Parenthood

By Parker Webservices on May 17, 2023 in Articles

Weverthon Machado, Eva Jaspers

Sociological Science May 17, 2023
10.15195/v10.a14

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Using population register data from the Netherlands, we analyze the child penalty for new parents in three groups of couples: different-sex and female same-sex couples with a biological child and different-sex couples with an adopted child. With a longitudinal design, we follow parents’ earnings from two years before to eight years after the arrival of the child and use event study models to estimate the effects of the transition to parenthood on earnings trajectories. Comparing different groups of couples allows us to test hypotheses related to three types of within-couple differences that are difficult to disentangle when studying only heterosexual biological parents: relative earnings, childbearing, and gender. Our results offer strong support for gender as the main driver of divergent child penalties. The gender of their partners is more consequential for mothers’ earnings trajectories than is childbearing or the pre-parenthood relative earnings in the couple.

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

Weverthon Machado: Corresponding author. Department of Sociology, Utrecht University
E-mail: w.barbosamachado@uu.nl

Eva Jaspers: Department of Sociology, Utrecht University
E-mail: e.jaspers@uu.nl

Acknowledgments: We are grateful for valuable feedback from members of the GENPARENT project, namely, Marie Evertsson, Maaike van der Vleuten, Ylva Moberg, Allison Geerts, and Madeleine Eriksson Kirsch. Previous versions of his article were presented at theWork and Family seminar of the Department of Sociology at Utrecht University, the Inter-university Working Group on Social Inequality and Life Courses (ISOL), the Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN) conference 2022, the European Population Conference (EPC) 2022, the European Consortium for Sociological Research (ECSR) conference 2022, and the ODISSEI Conference for Social Science in the Netherlands 2022. We thank participants in these sessions for their comments and suggestions.

Funding: This work was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, ERC Consolidator Grant (no. 771770) awarded to principal investigator Marie Evertsson. We also benefited from the support of ODISSEI, the Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations.

Data availability: We use population register data provided by Statistics Netherlands. The data are not publicly available, but interested researchers can, subject to eligibility, apply for access. See instructions at https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/onze-diensten/customised-services-microdata/microdata-conducting-your-own-research. Code for reproducing our analyses is available at https://osf.io/gmcjv/.