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'13 Reasons Why' Probably Increased Emergency Room Visits for Self-Harm among Teenage Girls

By on December 11, 2023 in Articles

Chris Felton

Sociological Science December 11, 2023
10.15195/v10.a33

Abstract

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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.
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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.

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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Subjective Political Polarization

By on November 27, 2023 in Articles

Hyunku Kwon, John Levi Martin

Sociological Science November 27, 2023
10.15195/v10.a32

Abstract

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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.”
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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.

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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

By on November 20, 2023 in Articles

Michael Grätz

Sociological Science November 20, 2023
10.15195/v10.a31

Abstract

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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.
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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).

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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

By on November 14, 2023 in Articles

Viktor Decker, Thijs Bol, Hanno Kruse

Sociological Science November 14, 2023
10.15195/v10.a30

Abstract

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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.
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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.

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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

By on November 9, 2023 in Articles

Ansgar Hudde, Marita Jacob

Sociological Science November 9, 2023
10.15195/v10.a29

Abstract

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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.
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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/.

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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

By on November 6, 2023 in Articles

Tamás Keller, Felix Elwert

Sociological Science November 6, 2023
10.15195/v10.a28

Abstract

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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.
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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).

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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

By 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

Abstract

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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.
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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

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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

By on October 31, 2023 in Articles

Ohjae Gowen, Ethan Fosse, Christopher Winship

Sociological Science October 31, 2023
10.15195/v10.a26

Abstract

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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.
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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.

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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Institutional Survival under Extreme State Repression and Subsequent Revival

By on October 24, 2023 in Articles

Hongwei Xu, Litao Zhao

Sociological Science October 24, 2023
10.15195/v10.a25

Abstract

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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.
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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


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The Inequality of Lifetime Pensions

By on October 17, 2023 in Articles

Jiaxin Shi, Martin Kolk

Sociological Science October 17, 2023
10.15195/v10.a24

Abstract

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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.
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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).

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Shi, Jiaxin, and Martin Kolk. 2023. “The Inequality of Lifetime Pensions” Sociological Science 7: 667-693.
  • Received: May 24, 2023
  • Accepted: July 31, 2023
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Stephen Vaisey
  • DOI: 10.15195/v10.a24


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Does Unprecedented Mass Immigration Fuel Ethnic Discrimination? A Two-Wave Field Experiment in the German Housing Market

By on October 10, 2023 in Articles

Katrin Auspurg, Renate Lorenz, Andreas Schneck

Sociological Science October 10, 2023
10.15195/v10.a23

Abstract

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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.
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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.

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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

By on October 3, 2023 in Articles

Clemens Kroneberg, Mark Wittek

Sociological Science October 3, 2023
10.15195/v10.a22

Abstract

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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.
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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.

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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

By on September 26, 2023 in Articles

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

Sociological Science September 26, 2023
10.15195/v10.a21

Abstract

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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.
Creative Commons LicenseThis 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).

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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

By on September 19, 2023 in Articles

Garrett Baker

Sociological Science September 19, 2023
10.15195/v10.a20

Abstract

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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.
Creative Commons LicenseThis 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.

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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

By on September 18, 2023 in Articles

Jascha Dräger, Klaus Pforr, Nora Müller

Sociological Science September 18, 2023
10.15195/v10.a19

Abstract

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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.
Creative Commons LicenseThis 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.

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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

By on September 11, 2023 in Articles

Laura Doering, Jan Doering, András Tilcsik

Sociological Science September 11, 2023
10.15195/v10.a18

Abstract

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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.
Creative Commons LicenseThis 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.

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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

By on September 6, 2023 in Articles

Michael J. Rosenfeld, Sonia Hausen

Sociological Science September 6, 2023
10.15195/v10.a17

Abstract

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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.
Creative Commons LicenseThis 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.

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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"Looking for It in Genetix": Response to Comment

By on July 10, 2023 in Articles

Mads Meier Jæger, Stine Møllegaard

Sociological Science July 10, 2023
10.15195/v10.a16

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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


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”

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

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