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Homebound: The Long-Term Rise in Time Spent at Home Among U.S. Adults

By on August 2, 2024 in Articles

Patrick Sharkey

Sociological Science August 2, 2024
10.15195/v11.a20

Abstract

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The changes in daily life induced by the COVID-19 pandemic brought renewed attention to longstanding concerns about social isolation in the United States. Despite the links between the physical setting for individuals’ daily lives and their connections with family, friends, and the various institutions of collective life, trends in where American adults spend their time have been largely overlooked as researchers have focused on how and with whom they spend their time. This article analyzes data from the American Time Use Survey over a timeframe spanning nineteen years and argues that the changes in Americans’ daily routines induced by the COVID era should be seen as an acceleration of a longer-term trend: the rise of time spent at home. Results show that from 2003 to 2022, average time spent at home among American adults has risen by one hour and 39 minutes in a typical day. Time at home has risen for every subset of the population and for virtually all activities. Preliminary analysis indicates that time at home is associated with lower levels of happiness and less meaning, suggesting the need for enhanced empirical attention to this major shift in the setting of American life.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Patrick Sharkey: William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs
E-mail: psharkey@princeton.edu

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the March, 2024 cohort of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Residency Program. I began thinking about and working on this article during the residency, and my colleagues there provided insightful feedback, questions, and comments on the analysis. I thank Michael Maesano for excellent research assistance.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: All data files and code for replication are available here: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/R4P98D.

  • Citation: Sharkey, Patrick. 2024. “Homebound: The long-term rise in time spent at home among U.S. adults” Sociological Science 11: 553-578.
  • Received: May 15, 2024
  • Accepted: June 26, 2024
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Jeremy Freese
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a20


1

Colorism Revisited: The Effects of Skin Color on Educational and Labor Market Outcomes in the United States

By on June 10, 2024 in Articles

Mauricio Bucca

Sociological Science June 10, 2024
10.15195/v11.a19

Abstract

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Studies of colorism—the idea that racial hierarchies coexist with gradational inequalities based on skin color—consistently find that darker skin correlates with lower socioeconomic outcomes. Despite the causal nature of this debate, evidence remains predominantly associational. This study revisits the colorism literature by proposing a causal model underlying these theories. It discusses conditions under which associations may reflect contemporary causal effects of skin color and evaluates strategies for identifying these effects. Using data from the AddHealth and NLSY97 surveys and applying two identification strategies, the study estimates the causal effects of skin color on college degree attainment, personal earnings, and family income among White, Black, and Hispanic populations in the United States. Results show that darker skin correlates with poorer educational and economic outcomes within racial groups. However, evidence of contemporary causal effects of skin color is partial, limited to college attainment of Whites and family income of Hispanics. For Blacks, results suggest a generalized penalty associated with being Black rather than gradation based on skin tone. Methodologically, the article advocates using sensitivity analyses to account for unobserved confounders in models for skin color effects and uses sibling fixed-effects as a secondary complementary strategy.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Mauricio Bucca: Department of Sociology, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. E-mail: mebucca@uc.cl.

Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Fabrizio Bernardi, Kendra Bischoff, Lucas Drouhot, Matias Fernandez, Vida Maralani, Mario Molina, Ben Rosche, Daniela Urbina, Sebastian Urbina, Kim Weeden as well as audiences at the 2021 Population Association of America (PAA) Annual Meeting and the Comparative Life Course and Inequality Research Centre (CLIC) at the European University Institute in Florence for helpful comments and criticisms on earlier versions of the article. I am also grateful for financial support from FONDECYT Iniciación grant project No. 11221171 and ANID Milenio Labor Market Mismatch – Causes and Consequences, LM2C2 (NCS2022045). Direct correspondence to Mauricio Bucca, mebucca@uc.cl

Data: This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other fed- eral agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis. Access to restricted data through the National Institutes of Health Grant R01HD091125, led by Principal Investigator Kelly Musick.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: The code necessary for reproducing the data manipulation, modeling, and findings is accessible at https://osf.io/vm647/?view_only=5b6477b89c284a88 9d9e3c77fc6e8fe1.

  • Citation: Bucca, Mauricio. 2024. “Colorism Revisited: The Effects of Skin Color on Educational and Labor Market Outcomes in the United States.” Sociological Science 11: 517-552.
  • Received: February 23, 2024
  • Accepted: March 26, 2024
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Maria Abascal
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a19


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Intergenerational Social Mobility Among the Children of Immigrants in Western Europe: Between Socioeconomic Assimilation and Disadvantage

By on June 3, 2024 in Articles

Mauricio Bucca, Lucas G. Drouhot

Sociological Science June 3, 2024
10.15195/v11.a18

Abstract

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Are Western European countries successfully incorporating their immigrant populations? We approach immigrant incorporation as a process of intergenerational social mobility and argue that mobility trajectories are uniquely suited to gauge the influence of immigrant origins on life chances. We compare trajectories of absolute intergenerational mobility among second generation and native populations using nationally representative data in seven European countries and report two major findings. First, we document a master trend of native–immigrant similarity in mobility trajectories, suggesting that the destiny of the second generation — like that of their native counterpart — is primarily determined by parental social class rather than immigrant background per se. Secondly, disaggregating results by regional origins reveals heterogeneous mobility outcomes. On one hand, certain origin groups are at heightened risks of stagnation in the service class when originating from there and face some disadvantage in attaining the top social class in adulthood when originating from lower classes. On the other hand, we observe a pattern of second-generation advantage, whereby certain origin groups are more likely to experience some degree of upward mobility. Altogether, these results suggest that immigrant origins per se do not strongly constrain the socioeconomic destiny of the second generation in Western Europe.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Mauricio Bucca: Department of Sociology, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. E-mail: mebucca@uc.cl.

Lucas G. Drouhot: Department of Sociology, Utrecht University. E-mail: l.g.m.drouhot@uu.nl.

Acknowledgements: Both authors contributed equally to this article. We wish to thank Filiz Garip, Ineke Maas, Ben Rosche, Frank van Tubergen, Linda Zhao as well as audiences at the “Migration and Inequality” ECSR thematic workshop in Milan, the ECSR annual meeting in Lausanne, and the Migration and Social Stratification seminar at Utrecht University for helpful comments and criticisms on earlier versions of our article. Bucca gratefully acknowledges financial support from FONDECYT, Chile Iniciación grant project No. 11221171 and ANID Milenio Labor Market Mismatch – Causes and Consequences, LM2C2 (NCS2022-045). Direct correspondence to Lucas Drouhot, l.g.m.drouhot@uu.nl.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: A complete replication package including all data and code is available at the following link: https://osf.io/4tjfq/?view_only=2894f243dc524ba8b129153e150715e3.

  • Citation: Bucca, Mauricio, and Lucas G. Drouhot. 2024. “Intergenerational Social Mobility Among the Children of Immigrants in Western Europe: Between Socioeconomic Assimilation and Disadvantage.” Sociological Science 11: 489-516.
  • Received: January 12, 2024
  • Accepted: March 4, 2024
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Maria Abascal
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a18


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The Effects of Social Mobility

By on April 29, 2024 in Articles

Richard Breen, John Ermisch

Sociological Science April 29, 2024
10.15195/v11.a17

Abstract

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The question of how social mobility affects outcomes, such as political preferences, wellbeing, and fertility, has long been of interest to sociologists. But finding answers to this question has been plagued by, on the one hand, the non-identifiability of “mobility effects” as they are usually conceived in this literature, and, on the other, the fact that these “effects” are, in reality, partial associations which may or may not represent causal relationships. We advance a different approach, drawing on a causal framework that sees the destination categories as treatments whose effects may be heterogeneous across origin categories. Our view is that most substantive hypotheses have in mind a hypothetical within-person comparison, rather than a between-person comparison. This approach is not subject to many of the problematic issues that have beset earlier attempts to formulate a model of mobility effects, and it places the study of such effects on a more reliably causal footing. We show how our approach relates to previous attempts to model mobility effects and explain how it differs both conceptually and empirically. We illustrate our approach using political preference data from the United Kingdom.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Richard Breen: Nuffield College
E-mail: richard.breen@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

John Ermisch: Nuffield College
E-mail: john.ermisch@sociology.ox.ac.uk

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the editors, deputy editor and consulting editors for their helpful suggestions. We also thank Pablo Geraldo, and Guanhui Pan for comments on earlier drafts.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: A replication package for this article, called Mobility Effects, has been posted on OSF: https://osf.io/c34ta/.

  • Citation: Breen, Richard, and John Ermisch. 2024. “The Effects of Social Mobility.” Sociological Science 11: 467-488.
  • Received: January 8, 2024
  • Accepted: March 12, 2024
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Jeremy Freese
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a17


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When Do Haters Act? Peer Evaluation, Negative Relationships, and Brokerage

By on April 17, 2024 in Articles

Jason Greenberg, Christopher C. Liu, Leanne ten Brinke

Sociological Science April 17, 2024
10.15195/v11.a16

Abstract

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In many organizational settings, individuals make evaluations in the context of affect-based negative relationships, in which an evaluator personally dislikes the evaluated individual. However, these dislikes are often held in check by norms of professionalism that preclude the use of personal preferences in objective evaluations. In this article, we draw from social network theory to suggest that only individuals that are network brokers—those who have the cognitive freedom to flout organizational norms—act to down-evaluate the peers they dislike. We evaluate our theory using two complementary studies: one field site study and an experiment. Our results, consistent across two different methodologies, suggest that overlooking an evaluator’s negative relationships as well as the network positions that constrain or enable an individual’s actions may lead to distortions in ubiquitous organizational peer evaluations processes and outcomes.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Jason Greenberg: SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University
E-mail: Jg2459@cornell.edu

Christopher C. Liu: Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon
E-mail: chrisliu@uoregon.edu

Leanne ten Brinke: Department of Psychology, The University of British Columbia
E-mail: Leanne.tenbrinke@ubc.ca

Acknowledgements: We thank Anne Bowers, Gino Cattani, Sheen Levine, Andras Tilcsik, Catherine Turco, Ezra Zuckerman, and seminar participants at Harvard and NYU for useful feedback on an earlier draft. All errors and omissions are ours alone. This study was IRB approved: (a) NYU IRB HS#10-8124 and (b) Oregon IRB STUDY00001144.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: Our experiment was preregistered at (https://aspredicted.org/YHD_W9P). A replication package has been deposited at (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/4MOJVQ).

  • Citation: Greenberg, Jason, Christopher C. Liu, and Leanne ten Brinke. 2024. “When Do Haters Act? Peer Evaluation, Negative Relationships, and Brokerage.” Sociological Science 11: 439-466.
  • Received: October 20, 2023
  • Accepted: December 23, 2023
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Stephen Vaisey
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a16


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From Metallica to Mozart: Mapping the Cultural Hierarchy of Lifestyle Activities

By on April 12, 2024 in Articles

Mads Meier Jæger, Mikkel Haderup Larsen

Sociological Science April 12, 2024
10.15195/v11.a15

Abstract

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Theories of cultural stratification argue that a widely shared cultural hierarchy legitimizes status differences and inequality. Yet, we know little about this hierarchy empirically. To address this limitation, we collected survey data in Denmark and asked respondents to rate the implied social rank of 60 activities, genres, and objects belonging to six lifestyle domains (music, food, performing arts, leisure, sport, and literature). We use ratings of social rank to infer about the cultural hierarchy, arguing that higher ratings imply higher perceived status. First, respondents link activities often considered highbrow (e.g., opera, caviar, and golf) with higher social rank than activities often considered lowbrow (e.g., heavy metal, nuggets, and boxing), suggesting that a cultural hierarchy exists. Second, ratings of implied social rank differ little by respondents’ objective and subjective socioeconomic position, suggesting that the cultural hierarchy is widely shared. Third, respondents bundle the 60 activities in a perceived highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow lifestyle, suggesting that “brows” are salient in distinguishing lifestyles. Overall, our results support the idea that a cultural hierarchy exists.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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

Mikkel Haderup Larsen: Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen
E-mail: mhl@soc.ku.dk

Acknowledgements: We have presented earlier versions of this article at the 2023 ECSR conference in Prague, the RC28 Spring Meeting in Paris, the 2023 CEPDISC Conference in Aarhus, and at seminars at the University of Utrecht, University of Copenhagen, the Danish National Centre for Social Research, the Rockwool Foundation, and the European Commission. We thank participants at these events for constructive comments. The research presented in this article was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation (grant number CF21-325) and the Rockwool Foundation (grant number 934121, “Lifestyle Discrimination and Inequality”).

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: All data used are publicly available at https://osf.io/y9hiq/ and https://osf.io/kaqi5/. A replication package with R code is available at https://osf.io/j5wxu/

  • Citation: Jæger, Mads Meier, and Mikkel Haderup Larsen. 2024. “From Metallica to Mozart: Mapping the Cultural Hierarchy of Lifestyle Activities.” Sociological Science 11: 413-438.
  • Received: November 21, 2023
  • Accepted: March 4, 2024
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Stephen Vaisey
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a15


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Implicit Terror: A Natural Experiment on How Terror Attacks Affect Implicit Bias

By on April 9, 2024 in Articles

Filip Olsson

Sociological Science April 9, 2024
10.15195/v11.a14

Abstract

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Sociology has recently seen a surge of interest in implicit culture, which refers to knowledge, habits, and feelings that are largely automatic and habitual. In this article, I argue that certain expressions of implicit culture may be more contextual and malleable than previously thought. The argument is illustrated by showing how terror attacks in France affect implicit bias toward Arab Muslims. By analyzing the longevity and specificity of this effect, I also detail when and why implicit bias might change. The article consists of two studies. Study 1 shows that the attacks significantly increased implicit bias in France (n = 449), whereas Study 2 shows that the attacks had a similar effect globally (n = 25795). There was no corresponding effect on explicit bias in either study. I discuss the implications of the findings for research on terror attacks, implicit bias, and implicit culture.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Filip Olsson: Department of Sociology, Stockholm University
E-mail: filip.olsson@sociology.su.se

Acknowledgements: I am thankful to Magnus Bygren, Moa Bursell, and Daniel Ritter for insightful comments and suggestions.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: All data used are publicly available at https://osf.io/y9hiq/ and https://osf.io/kaqi5/. A replication package with R code is available at https://osf.io/j5wxu/

  • Citation: Olsson, Filip. 2024. “Implicit Terror: A Natural Experiment on How Terror Attacks Affect Implicit Bias.” Sociological Science 11: 379-412.
  • Received: January 17, 2024
  • Accepted: March 6, 2024
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Stephen Vaisey
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a14


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Every Forest Has Its Shadow: The Demographics of Concealment in the United States

By on April 5, 2024 in Articles

Maria S. Grigoryeva, Blaine G. Robbins

Sociological Science April 5, 2024
10.15195/v11.a13

Abstract

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This article examines what people conceal, who conceals from whom, and whether there are demographic differences in how much and what people conceal. We map concealment using a two-wave probability survey and behavioral experiment of U.S. adults (N = 1,281). Our survey measures self-reports of 37 different concealable attitudes, behaviors, and characteristics over a 12-month period, whereas the experiment provides a concrete behavioral measure of concealment. These data yield four principal findings. First, misinformation is commonplace in the United States, but it varies depending on what is being concealed. Second, certain demographic characteristics, such as age, predict rates of concealment, the proportion of things concealed, and lying in a behavioral experiment. Third, most demographic groups are similar in how much they conceal, but all demographic groups differ in what they conceal. Fourth, although some types of strong ties are more likely to be targets of concealment than weak ties, there is greater heterogeneity in concealment across different kinds of strong ties than between strong ties and weak ties, with spouses and partners being concealed from the least, on average. We conclude by discussing implications for theory and research on concealment.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Maria S. Grigoryeva: Division of Social Science, New York University Abu Dhabi
E-mail: mg5446@nyu.edu

Blaine G. Robbins: Division of Social Science, New York University Abu Dhabi
E-mail: bgr3@nyu.edu

Acknowledgements: The research reported here was financially supported by the Center for Behavioral Institutional Design and Tamkeen under the NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute Award CG005. We would like to thank Ozan Aksoy, Elisa Bienenstock, Sergio Lo Iacono, Jennifer Glanville, Craig Rawlings, Arnout van de Rijt, Tobias Rüttenauer, Burak Sonmez, Martina Testori, and the external reviewer for their comments and suggestions, and John Dombrowski and Stefan Subias of the National Opinion Research Center for their research assistance. An earlier version of this manuscript was presented to the Advanced Quantitative Group at the University College London and the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: Data, code, the self-report concealment survey, and instructions for the sender-receiver game have been deposited in the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/293aw/).

  • Citation: Grigoryeva, Maria S., and Blaine G. Robbins. 2024. “Every Forest Has Its Shadow: The Demographics of Concealment in the United States.” Sociological Science 11: 340-378.
  • Received: December 15, 2023
  • Accepted: February 14, 2024
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Cristobal Young
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a13


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Identity from Symbolic Networks: The Rise of New Hollywood

By on April 2, 2024 in Articles

Katharina Burgdorf, Henning Hillmann

Sociological Science April 2, 2024
10.15195/v11.a12

Abstract

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To what extent may individual autonomy persist under the constraints of group identity? This dualism is particularly salient in new movements that value individual creativity above all, and yet have to muster community cohesion to establish a new style. Using the case of New Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s, the authors show how this movement reconciled the demands of collective identity and collaboration in film production with their commitment to the individual filmmaker’s artistic autonomy. Using information from the Internet Movie Database on 17,425 filmmakers who were active between 1930 and 1999, the authors show that a cohesive symbolic network, in which New Hollywood filmmakers shared references to a canon of revered films, served as a foundation for the collective identity of this new artistic movement. References include allusions to iconic scenes, settings, and shots of classic films. In contrast, collaborations in film projects yielded a fragmented network that did little to support the creative enterprise of New Hollywood. The evidence suggests that symbolic ties through shared citations allowed New Hollywood filmmakers to realize their vision of autonomous auteur filmmaking and to draw symbolic boundaries that separated them from the old Hollywood studio system.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Katharina Burgdorf: Department of Sociology, University of Bremen
E-mail: burgdorf@uni-bremen.de

Henning Hillmann: Department of Sociology, University of Mannheim
E-mail: hillmann@uni-mannheim.de

Acknowledgements: We thank Peter Bearman, Jennifer Lena, and Christina Gathmann for their detailed comments on earlier drafts. We also wish to thank Philipp Brandt, Mark Wittek, Elias Strehle, Florian Keusch, Rachel Skaggs, Tania Aparicio, Gillian Gualtieri, Philippa Chong, Laura Garbes, Etienne Ollion and participants of the CREST seminar, Sunbelt, NetGloW, and EUSN conference for their helpful feedback during various stages of this project.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: All raw and prepared data and the code can be accessed via https://dataverse.harvard.edu/privateurl.xhtml?token=c81114da-6e97-44bb-9272-f19b302afcb9.

  • Citation: Burgdorf, Katharina, and Henning Hillmann. 2024. “Identity from Symbolic Networks: The Rise of New Hollywood.” Sociological Science 11: 297-339.
  • Received: June 30, 2023
  • Accepted: October 13, 2023
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Stephen Vaisey
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a12


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The Effect of Workplace Raids on Academic Performance: Evidence from Texas

By on March 28, 2024 in Articles

Sofia Avila

Sociological Science March 28, 2024
10.15195/v11.a11

Abstract

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Workplace raids are visible and disruptive immigration enforcement operations that can result in the detention of hundreds of immigrants at one time. Despite concerns about the impact of raids on children’s well-being, there is limited research on how these tactics affect their academic performance. Using school-level testing data from 2015 to 2019, I compare changes in the performance of Hispanic students in schools close to a workplace raid to white students in the same schools and Hispanic students at control schools. I find exposure to a raid lowered the scores and passing rates of Hispanic students in standardized tests taken 40 days after the operation. I further find that students in schools closer to the raid experienced more pronounced drops in performance, but I do not detect strong evidence that performance decreases were caused by interruptions to schooling. These findings provide new evidence on the spillover effects of workplace raids, underscoring the potential role of immigration enforcement in generating disparities in Hispanic children’s educational outcomes.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Sofia Avila: Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research, Princeton University
E-mail: sofiaavila@princeton.edu

Acknowledgements: I am grateful for the helpful comments provided by Chris Felton, David Grusky, Max Pienkny, Brandon Stewart, Andres Villarreal, and Yu Xie. A very special thanks to Michelle Jackson for her guidance and advice.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: Replication data and code can be found at https://osf.io/n7xzy/.

  • Citation: Avila, Sofia. 2024. “The Effect of Workplace Raids on Academic Performance: Evidence from Texas.” Sociological Science 11: 258-296.
  • Received: November 3, 2023
  • Accepted: January 23, 2023
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Vida Maralani
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a11


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Can't Catch a Break: Intersectional Inequalities at Work

By on March 25, 2024 in Articles

Kristen Harknett, Charlotte O’Herron, Evelyn Bellew

Sociological Science March 25, 2024
10.15195/v11.a10

Abstract

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The labor market is the site of longstanding and persistent inequalities across race and gender groups in hiring, compensation, and advancement. In this paper, we draw on data from 13,574 hourly service-sector workers to extend the study of intersectional labor market inequalities to workers’ experience on the job. In the service sector, where workers are regularly expected to be on their feet for long hours and contend with intense and unrelenting workloads, regular break time is an essential component of job quality and general well-being. Yet, we find that Black women are less likely than their counterparts to get a break during their work shift. Although union membership and laws mandating work breaks are effective in increasing access to breaks for workers overall, they do not ameliorate the inequality Black women face in access to work breaks within the service sector. A sobering implication is that worker power and labor protections can raise the floor on working conditions but leave inequalities intact. Our findings also have implications for racial health inequalities, as the routine daily stress of the service sector takes a disproportionate toll on the health of Black women.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Kristen Harknett: Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California San Francisco
E-mail: kristen.harknett@ucsf.edu

Charlotte O’Herron: Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Harvard University
E-mail: charlotteoherron@fas.harvard.edu

Evelyn Bellew: Harvard Kennedy School
E-mail: evelyn@bellew.net

Acknowledgements: The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the National Institute on Aging (Grant No. R01AG066898), the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Grant No. U19OH012293), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We received excellent research assistance from Connor Williams and Elizabeth Kuhlman. We are grateful for feedback from members of the California Labor Lab, Laura Dresser, and other participants in the Labor Employment Relations annual meeting.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: Data and code for replication are available at Harvard’s Dataverse repository, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NJABRM.

  • Citation: Harknett, Kristen, Charlotte O’Herron and Evelyn Bellew. 2024. “Can’t Catch a Break: Intersectional Inequalities at Work.” Sociological Science 11: 233-257.
  • Received: April 28, 2023
  • Accepted: September 29, 2023
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Filiz Garip
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a10


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Bridging the Digital Divide Narrows the Participation Gap: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment

By on March 21, 2024 in Articles

Vincenz Frey, Delia S. Baldassarri, Francesco C. Billari

Sociological Science March 21, 2024
10.15195/v11.a9

Abstract

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Socio-economic inequality in access to the internet has decreased in affluent societies. We investigate how gaining access to the internet affected the civic and political participation of relatively disadvantaged late adopters by studying a quasi-natural experiment related to the American National Election Studies. In 2012, when about 80% of the U.S. population was already connected to the internet, the ANES face-to-face study was for the first time supplemented with a sample of online respondents. Our design exploits the fact that the firm (KnowledgePanel) that conducted the web survey and provided the prerecruited respondents had equipped offline sample households with free laptop computers and internet access. The findings show that gaining internet access promotes late adopters’ civic participation and turnout, whereas there is no evidence for effects on the likelihood of political activism. These findings indicate that the closing of the digital divide alleviated participatory inequality.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Vincenz Frey: Department of Sociology, University of Groningen
E-mail: v.c.frey@rug.nl

Delia S. Baldassarri: Department of Sociology, New York University
E-mail: db1794@nyu.edu

Francesco C. Billari: Department of Social and Political Sciences and “Carlo F. Dondena” Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy, Bocconi University
E-mail: francesco.billari@unibocconi.it

Acknowledgements: We thank KnowledgePanel and Matthew DeBell of ANES for making available the information which respondents of the web survey had been furnished with free internet access. We acknowledge comments by Nicoletta Balbo, Valentina Rotondi, Luca Stella, the editorial team of Sociological Science (Ari Adut and an anonymous Deputy Editor), and participants of the ‘Annual Conference of Experimental Sociology’ (Florence) and the ‘Akademie für Soziologie’ meeting on ‘Digital Societies.’ Funding: This project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program (grant agreement no. 694262), project ‘DisCont.’

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: A replication package including all analysis code is available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/vq34k/).

  • Citation: Frey, Vincenz, Delia S. Baldassarri, and Francesco C. Billari. 2024. “Bridging the Digital Divide Narrows the Participation Gap: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment.” Sociological Science 11: 214-232.
  • Received: June 30, 2023
  • Accepted: October 19, 2023
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Peter Bearman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a9


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Educational Tracking and the Polygenic Prediction of Education

By on March 18, 2024 in Articles

Hannu Lahtinen, Pekka Martikainen, Kaarina Korhonen, Tim Morris, Mikko Myrskylä

Sociological Science March 18, 2024
10.15195/v11.a8

Abstract

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Educational systems that separate students into curriculum tracks later may place less emphasis on socioeconomic family background and allow individuals’ personal skills and interests more time to manifest. We tested whether postponing tracking from age 11 to 16 results in stronger genetic prediction of education across a population, exploiting the natural experiment of the Finnish comprehensive school reform between 1972 and 1977. The association between polygenic score of education and achieved education strengthened after the reform by one-third among men and those from low-educated families. We observed no evidence for reform effect among women or those from high-educated families. The first cohort experiencing the new system had the strongest increases. From the perspective of genetic prediction, the school reform promoted equality of opportunity and optimal allocation of human capital. The results also suggest that turbulent circumstances, including puberty or ongoing restructuring of institutional practices, may strengthen genetic associations in education.
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Hannu Lahtinen: Population Research Unit, University of Helsinki; Max Planck – University of Helsinki Center for Social Inequalities in Population Health, Helsinki, Finland
E-mail: hannu.lahtinen@helsinki.fi

Pekka Martikainen: Population Research Unit, University of Helsinki; Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany; Max Planck – University of Helsinki Center for Social Inequalities in Population Health, Helsinki, Finland
E-mail: pekka.martikainen@helsinki.fi

Kaarina Korhonen: Population Research Unit, University of Helsinki; Max Planck – University of Helsinki Center for Social Inequalities in Population Health, Helsinki, Finland
E-mail: kaarina.korhonen@helsinki.fi

Tim Morris: Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Social Research Institute, University College London
E-mail: t.t.morris@ucl.ac.uk

Mikko Myrskylä: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany; University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; Max Planck – University of Helsinki Center for Social Inequalities in Population Health, Rostock, Germany and Helsinki, Finland
E-mail: myrskyla@demogr.mpg.de

Acknowledgements: Special thanks for Aysu Okbay for providing education GWAS summary results excluding overlapping samples. We also thank the Finnish National Agency for Education for providing municipal-specific school-reform implementation years. The genetic samples used for the research were obtained from the THL Biobank (study number: THLBB2020_8), and we thank all study participants for their generous participation in the THL Biobank.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: Instructions for data access and code to reproduce the analysis can be found at https://github.com/halahti/SocSci23

  • Citation: Lahtinen, Hannu, Pekka Martikainen, Kaarina Korhonen, Tim Morris, and Mikko Myrskylä. 2024. “Educational tracking and the polygenic prediction of education.” Sociological Science 11: 186-213.
  • Received: September 19, 2023
  • Accepted: October 31, 2023
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Nan Dirk de Graaf
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a8


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Validating the White Flight Hypothesis: Neighborhood Racial Composition and Out-Migration in Two Longitudinal Surveys

By on March 14, 2024 in Articles

Peter Mateyka, Matthew Hall

Sociological Science March 14, 2024
10.15195/v11.a7

Abstract

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Empirical research assessing the link between neighborhood racial composition and out-migration has largely relied on a single sample from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). In this article, we validate these models by comparing estimates from the PSID to estimates from identical models based on internal Census data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Doing so serves two purposes: (1) as a replication exercise for findings with major implications for racial/ethnic inequality and (2) as an expansion of the scope of ‘flight’ models to test mobility models among contemporary samples of white, black, Latino, and Asian households. Results from these models indicate that white households’ migration responses to minority racial concentrations are substantively similar in SIPP and PSID, with the likelihood of out-migration among whites increasing as minority shares grow, albeit weaker in SIPP than the PSID. Results for black householders are comparable across samples, with blacks demonstrating a tendency to leave Hispanic neighborhoods. Results for Hispanic households are, however, divergent between the SIPP and PSID, potentially reflecting differences in the representativeness of the samples. Lastly, the results from SIPP reveal that the mobility behaviors of Asian households are largely indifferent to neighborhood racial composition.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Peter Mateyka: Department of Housing and Urban Development, Policy Development and Research
E-mail: peter.j.mateyka@hud.gov

Matthew Hall: Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, Cornell Population Center, Cornell University
E-mail: mhall@cornell.edu

Acknowledgements: This work is released to inform interested parties of ongoing research and to encourage discussion of work in progress. Peter Mateyka completed his work on this project while employed at the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau has reviewed this data product for unauthorized disclosure of confidential information and has approved the disclosure avoidance practices applied. Census Bureau data privacy policy prohibits the sharing of data or code used in this analysis. Any views or opinions expressed in the article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development or the U.S. Census Bureau. Please direct correspondence to Peter Mateyka, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, PDR, 451 7th Street S.W.,Washington, DC 20410, or via email at peter.j.mateyka@hud.gov.


Replication Package: Programs to replicate the PSID analysis are available online at https://osf.io/3rvfa/. These files require authorization to use restricted-access PSID geocodes, managed by the University of Michigan (see https://simba.isr.umich.edu/restricted/RestrictedUse.aspx).
  • Citation: Mateyka, Peter, and Matthew Hall. 2024. “Validating the White Flight Hypothesis: Neighborhood Racial Composition and Out-Migration in Two Longitudinal Surveys.” Sociological Science 11: 164-185.
  • Received: July 20, 2023
  • Accepted: December 20, 2023
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Maria Abascal
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a7


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Differences in Academic Preparedness Do Not Fully Explain Black–White Enrollment Disparities in Advanced High School Coursework

By on March 11, 2024 in Articles

João M. Souto-Maior, Ravi Shroff

Sociological Science March 11, 2024
10.15195/v11.a6

Abstract

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Whether racial disparities in enrollment in advanced high school coursework can be attributed to differences in prior academic preparation is a central question in sociological research and education policy. However, previous investigations face methodological limitations, for they compare race-specific enrollment rates of students after adjusting for characteristics only partially related to their academic preparedness for advanced coursework. Informed by a recently-developed statistical technique, we propose and estimate a novel measure of students’ academic preparedness and use administrative data from the New York City Department of Education to measure differences in Advanced Placement (AP) mathematics enrollment rates among similarly prepared students of different races. We find that preexisting differences in academic preparation do not fully explain the under-representation of Black students relative to White students in AP mathematics. Our results imply that achieving equal opportunities for AP enrollment not only requires equalizing earlier academic experiences, but also addressing inequities that emerge from coursework placement processes.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

João M. Souto-Maior: The Institute of Human Development and Social Change, New York University
E-mail: jms1738@nyu.edu

Ravi Shroff: Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities, New York University
E-mail: ravi.shroff@nyu.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank Johann Gaebler, Sharad Goel, Jongbin Jung and L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy for helpful comments and feedback. This study was conducted with data obtained through the Research Alliance for New York City Schools. The findings and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Research Alliance.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: See the Data and Code Availability Statement on page 158.

  • Citation: Souto-Maior, João, and Ravi Shroff. 2024. “Differences in academic preparedness do not fully explain Black-White enrollment disparities in advanced high school coursework.” Sociological Science 11: 138-163.
  • Received: October 30, 2023
  • Accepted: December 19, 2023
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Jeremy Freese
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a6


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Classed Burdens: Habitus and Administrative Burden during the COVID-19 Pandemic

By on March 7, 2024 in Articles

Taylor Laemmli

Sociological Science March 7, 2024
10.15195/v11.a5

Abstract

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This paper shows how class shaped service workers’ experiences of administrative burdens during the COVID-19 pandemic. I use the pandemic and pandemic-related shutdowns as a pseudo natural experiment in which job loss was applied to a set of workers from different class backgrounds and with different class locations, workers who then turned to the state for assistance. Drawing on 46 interviews I conducted with service workers across the United States from May to October of 2020, I use Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus to show how class background shaped the administrative burdens workers encountered. Workers’ class origins left them with distinct approaches to bureaucracy that translated into disparate experiences of administrative burdens when workers sought unemployment insurance benefits. As a result, compared to workers from middle-class backgrounds, workers from working-class backgrounds more often experienced housing difficulties, dangerous work, and challenges to their sense of integrity.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Taylor Laemmli: Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
E-mail: laemmli@wisc.edu

Acknowledgements: I thank Chloe Haimson, Mustafa Emirbayer, and Ryan Ellis for valuable feedback. For helpful research assistance, I thank Morgan Barlin, Alexis Bernhardt, Novak He, Clara McKinney, Julia Mann, Siying Qu, and Damini Rao. The paper benefited from participants’ comments at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Laemmli, Taylor. 2024. “Classed Burdens: Habitus and Administrative Burden during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Sociological Science 11: 114-137.
  • Received: August 24, 2023
  • Accepted: October 13, 2023
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Kristen Schilt
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a5


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Emerging Pronoun Practices After the Procedural Turn: Disclosure, Discovery, and Repair

By on March 1, 2024 in Articles

Julieta Goldenberg, Rogers Brubaker

Sociological Science March 1, 2024
10.15195/v11.a4

Abstract

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We examine emerging practices of pronoun disclosure, discovery, and repair after the procedural turn in pronoun politics, which shifted attention from the substantive question of which pronouns should be used to the procedural question of how preferred pronouns, whatever they might be, could be effectively communicated to others. Drawing on interviews with and observations of college students and recent graduates who are committed in principle to using preferred pronouns, we consider how they seek to do so in practice, focusing on practices of disclosure, discovery, and repair. We underscore the gap between the knowledge that is required in principle to use preferred pronouns consistently and the imperfect knowledge that pronoun-users have in practice, and we show how the use of preferred pronouns creates new forms of interactional accountability.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Julieta Goldenberg: Independent Scholar
E-mail: jgoldenberg@g.ucla.edu

Rogers Brubaker: Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
E-mail: brubaker@soc.ucla.edu

Acknowledgements:The authors thank Zsuzsa Berend and Wisam Alshaibi for working closely with Goldenberg on her thesis project; Zsuzsa Berend also provided helpful comments on a draft of the article.

The interview and observational data for this article were collected and analyzed by Goldenberg for her senior honors thesis, entitled “Pronoun Disclosure: Surveillance, Setting, and Repair.” Brubaker developed the overall framing of the argument of the article, whereas most of the specific arguments were developed in Goldenberg’s thesis. Brubaker drafted the article, incorporating and reworking material from Goldenberg’s thesis.

  • Citation: Goldenberg, Julieta, and Rogers Brubaker. 2024. “Emerging Pronoun Practices after the Procedural Turn: Disclosure, Discovery, and Repair.” Sociological Science 11: 91-113.
  • Received: December 1, 2023
  • Accepted: January 17, 2024
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Kristen Schilt
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a4


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Breaking Barriers or Persisting Traditions? Fertility Histories, Occupational Achievements, and Intergenerational Mobility of Italian Women

By on February 25, 2024 in Articles

Filippo Gioachin, Anna Zamberlan

Sociological Science February 25, 2024
10.15195/v11.a3

Abstract

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Women and men share comparable levels of intergenerational social mobility in all Western economies, except for Southern European countries, where women’s life chances appear less determined by their family background. This is puzzling given Southern European’s persistent familialism, lack of institutional support for mothers, and the strong influence of social origin. We examine the role of women’s social class of origin on occupational achievements across birth cohorts in Italy, focusing on the close link between fertility dynamics and social mobility opportunities. By leveraging nationally representative retrospective data, we observed that middle- and working-class women experienced upgraded occupational achievements across birth cohorts in conjunction with educational expansion. Conversely, upper-class women exhibited consistently lower occupational achievements, especially those becoming mothers at a comparatively younger age, facing a higher risk of intergenerational downward mobility. Notably, the poorer labor market achievements of recent generations of upper-class women compared to the previous generations already emerged at labor market entry, suggesting that adverse self-selection mechanisms in early motherhood might be largely responsible for Italian women’s greater overall relative mobility. In Italy, women’s higher social mobility than men’s more likely reflects persistent traditional work–family choices among the better-off than a signal of growing equality of opportunity.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Filippo Gioachin: Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento
E-mail: filippo.gioachin@unitn.it

Anna Zamberlan: Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento
E-mail: anna.zamberlan@unitn.it

Acknowledgements:Earlier versions of this study were presented at the 2022 ISA RC28 Spring Meeting in London, at the 2022 conference of the Italian Society for Economic Sociology (SISEC) in Bologna, and at the University of Konstanz. We would like to thank the participants for their valuable feedback. We are particularly grateful to Davide Gritti, Giorgio Cutuli, Stefani Scherer, Matteo Piolatto, and Michael Zaslavsky for their thorough reading and detailed suggestions. Furthermore, we wish to thank the Doctoral School of Social Sciences of the University of Trento for supporting our research. Any remaining errors are our responsibility.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: Access to the microdata is granted free of charge upon formal request for ‘scientific use files’ by members of a recognized research institution, as indicated on the following website: https://www.istat.it/en/analysis-and-products/microdata-files. Replication codes have been made public at: https://osf.io/7qey4/?view_only=.

  • Citation: Gioachin, Filippo, and Anna Zamberlan. 2024. “Breaking Barriers or Persisting Traditions? Fertility histories, occupational achievements, and intergenerational mobility of Italian women.” Sociological Science 11: 67-90.
  • Received: October 20, 2023
  • Accepted: December 12, 2023
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Maria Abascal
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a3


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