What Age Is in a Name?

Sasha Shen Johfre

Sociological Science August 24, 2020
10.15195/v7.a15


Social scientists often describe fictional people in survey stimuli using first names. However, which name a researcher chooses may elicit nonrandom impressions, which could confound results. Although past research has examined how names signal race and class, very little has examined whether names signal age, which is a highly salient status characteristic involved in person construal. I test the perceived demographics of 228 American names. I find that most strongly signal age, with older-sounding names much more likely to be perceived as white than as black. Furthermore, participants’ perceptions of the age of a name poorly match with the true average birth year of people with that name, suggesting that researchers cannot simply use birth records as a proxy for perceived age. To assist researchers in name selection, I provide a set of candidate names that strongly signal a matrix of combined age, race, and gender categories.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Sasha Shen Johfre: Department of Sociology, Stanford University
E-mail: sjohfre@stanford.edu

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to David Pedulla, Jeremy Freese, Amy Johnson, Hesu Yoon, Jennifer Freyd, and Hannah Johfre Shen for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. This research was made possible through financial support from the Stanford Laboratory for Social Research and the Stanford Center on Longevity.

  • Citation: Johfre, Sasha Shen. 2020. “What Age Is in a Name?” Sociological Science 7: 367-390.
  • Received: May 16, 2020
  • Accepted: July 2, 2020
  • Editors: Gabriel Rossman, Arnout van de Rijt
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a15


0

Pretrial Detention and the Costs of System Overreach for Employment and Family Life

Sara Wakefield, Lars Højsgaard Andersen

Sociological Science August 17, 2020
10.15195/v7.a14


Using unique Danish register data that allow for comparisons across both conviction and incarceration status, this article analyzes the association between pretrial detention and work, family attachment, and recidivism. We find that pretrial detention may impose unique social costs, apart from conviction or additional punishments. Most notably, men who are detained pretrial experience poorer labor market trajectories than men who are convicted of a crime (but not incarcerated). Importantly, this result holds even for men who are detained pretrial but who are not convicted of the crime. Consistent with prior research, we also find that pretrial detention is unrelated to later family formation but might disrupt preexisting household arrangements. Finally, the associations between pretrial detention and work and family life are not counterbalanced by reductions in recidivism.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Sara Wakefield: School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, Newark
E-mail: sara.wakefield@rutgers.edu

Lars Højsgaard Andersen: ROCKWOOL Foundation Research Unit
E-mail: lha@rff.dk

Acknowledgments: We thank Robert Apel and Christopher Wildeman for helpful comments and the ROCKWOOL Foundation for their support of this research.

  • Citation: Wakefield, Sara, and Lars Højsgaard Andersen. 2020. “Pretrial Detention and the Costs of System Overreach for Employment and Family Life.” Sociological Science 7: 342-366.
  • Received: April 18, 2020
  • Accepted: June 20, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a14


0

The Influence of Changing Marginals on Measures of Inequality in Scholarly Citations: Evidence of Bias and a Resampling Correction

Lanu Kim, Christopher Adolph, Jevin D. West, Katherine Stovel

Sociological Science August 10, 2020
10.15195/v7.a13


Scholars have debated whether changes in digital environments have led to greater concentration or dispersal of scientific citations, but this debate has paid little attention to how other changes in the publication environment may impact the commonly used measures of inequality. Using Monte Carlo experiments, we demonstrate that a variety of inequality measures—including the Gini coefficient, the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, and the percentage of articles ever cited—are substantially biased downward by increases in the total number of articles and citations. We propose and validate a resampling-based correction for this “marginals bias” and apply this correction to empirical data on scholarly citation distributions using Web of Science data covering four broad scientific fields (health, humanities, mathematics and the computer sciences, and the social sciences) from 1996 to 2014. We find that in each field the bulk of the apparent decline in citation inequality in recent years is an artifact of marginals bias, as are most apparent interfield differences in citation inequality. Researchers using inequality measures to compare citation distributions and other distributions with many cases at or near the zero-bound should interpret these metrics carefully and account for the influence of changing marginals.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Lanu Kim: Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
E-mail: lanu@stanford.edu

Christopher Adolph: Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle
E-mail: cadolph@uw.edu

Jevin D. West: Information School, University of Washington, Seattle
E-mail: jevinw@uw.edu

Katherine Stovel: Department of Sociology, University of Washington, Seattle
E-mail: stovel@uw.edu

Acknowledgments: We thank Clarivate Analytics for providing the Web of Science data, and Elena Erosheva, Bas Hofstra, and Joe Cho for helpful conversations. This research was supported by National Science Foundation grant #1735194, Katherine Stovel primary investigator, Jevin West co–primary investigator.

  • Citation: Kim, Lanu, Christopher Adolph, Jevin D. West, and Katherine Stovel. 2020. “The Influence of Changing Marginals on Measures of Inequality in Scholarly Citations: Evidence of Bias and a Resampling Correction.” Sociological Science 7: 314-341.
  • Received: June 16, 2020
  • Accepted: July 3, 2020
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a13


0

Status and Vocal Accommodation in Small Groups

Joseph Dippong

Sociological Science August 3, 2020
10.15195/v7.a12


Sociological research on vocal dynamics demonstrates that as actors engage in conversation, their vocal frequencies tend to converge over time. Previous scholars have theorized that patterns of vocal accommodation serve as a mechanism through which speakers non-consciously communicate perceptions of each other’s relative status. In this article I discuss existing evidence linking vocal accommodation to status perceptions. Next, I report results from a laboratory experiment in which I test the proposed causal link between status and vocal accommodation by randomly assigning members of dyadic task groups to occupy either a higher or lower status position and assessing patterns of vocal accommodation. Results support the theorized causal relationship between group status structure and vocal accommodation. I argue that, as an unobtrusive and non-conscious indicator of status, vocal accommodation is a valuable, yet underused tool for assessing group status structures in a wide variety of situations and regarding many substantive sociological questions.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Joseph Dippong: Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
E-mail: jdippong@uncc.edu

Acknowledgments: The research reported here was funded in whole under award W911NF-17-1-0008 from the U.S. Army Research Office/Army Research Laboratory. The views expressed are those of the author and should not be attributed to the Army Research Office/Army Research Laboratory.

  • Citation: Dippong, Joseph. 2020. “Status and Vocal Accommodation in Small Groups.” Sociological Science 7: 291-313.
  • Received: May 6, 2020
  • Accepted: June 8, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Mario Small
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a12


0

Re-examining How Partner Co-presence and Multitasking Affect Parents’ Enjoyment of Childcare and Housework

Allison Dunatchik, Svetlana Speight

Sociological Science July 28, 2020
10.15195/v7.a11


Partner co-presence and multitasking are two contextual characteristics of time use that are commonly theorized to affect parental well-being. Although partner co-presence is often assumed to promote greater well-being, multitasking is frequently conceptualized as an indicator of time pressure. This study re-examines the relationship between these contextual characteristics and parents’ enjoyment of childcare and housework. Using data from the U.K. Time Use Survey (2014–2015), our results indicate that associations between partner co-presence, multitasking, and enjoyment of unpaid work vary substantively depending on the type of task carried out. They also vary by gender of the parent. Mothers reported greater enjoyment of housework and interactive childcare with a partner present; however, this association did not extend to other types of childcare. Fathers’ enjoyment varied little by partner co-presence. Similarly, multitasking was a varied experience depending on the types of activities parents combined. In some instances, combining unpaid work activities (e.g., housework with childcare) was associated with lower enjoyment; however, combining unpaid work with leisure was often associated with greater enjoyment. These results add nuance to prior research on how the contextual characteristics of time use relate to parental well-being and suggest that prior conceptualizations of partner co-presence and multitasking are incomplete.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Allison Dunatchik: The University of Pennsylvania, Department of Sociology
E-mail: adunat@sas.upenn.edu

Svetlana Speight: The National Centre for Social Research
E-mail: svetlana.speight@natcen.ac.uk

Acknowledgments: This research was funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council’s Secondary Data Analysis Initiative ES/R004854/1. We are grateful to Professor Oriel Sullivan for her comments on previous versions of this manuscript, which have greatly improved the article. We would also like to thank Robert Wishart, who provided analytical advice and expertise. Finally, we thank members of the project Advisory Group for their input and support throughout the project.

  • Citation: Dunatchik, Allison, and Svetlana Speight. 2020. “Re-examining How Partner Copresence and Multitasking Affect Parents’ Enjoyment of Childcare and Housework.” Sociological Science 7: 268-290.
  • Received: March 1, 2020
  • Accepted: May 24, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Mario Small
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a11


0

It's All about the Parents: Inequality Transmission across Three Generations in Sweden

Per Engzell, Carina Mood, Jan O. Jonsson

Sociological Science June 1, 2020
10.15195/v7.a10


A recent literature studies the role of grandparents in status transmission. Results have been mixed, and theoretical contributions highlight biases that complicate the interpretation of these studies. We use newly harmonized income tax records on more than 700,000 Swedish lineages to establish four empirical facts. First, a model that includes both mothers and fathers and takes a multidimensional view of stratification reduces the residual three-generation association in our population to a trivial size. Second, data on fathers’ cognitive ability show that even extensive controls for standard socioeconomic variables fail to remove omitted variable bias. Third, the common finding that grandparents compensate poor parental resources can be attributed to greater difficulty of observing parent status accurately at the lower end of the distribution. Fourth, the lower the data quality, and the less detailed the model, the greater is the size of the estimated grandparent coefficient. Future work on multigenerational mobility should pay less attention to the size and significance of this association, which depends heavily on arbitrary sample and specification characteristics, and go on to establish a set of more robust descriptive facts.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Per Engzell: Nuffield College and Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, University of Oxford; Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University
E-mail: per.engzell@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

Carina Mood: Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University; Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm
E-mail: carina.mood@sofi.su.se

Jan O. Jonsson: Nuffield College and Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, University of Oxford; Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University; Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm
E-mail: janne.jonsson@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

Acknowledgments: This work received funding from the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life, and Welfare (FORTE), grant no. 2016-07099. The first author also acknowledges support from Nuffield College and the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, The Leverhulme Trust. Previous versions of this study have been circulated under the title “Putting the Grandparents to Rest: False Positives in Multigenerational Mobility Research” and presented at the Swedish Institute for Social Research, the European Consortium for Sociological Research (ECSR) Conference in Paris 2018, and the Population Association of America (PAA) Annual Meeting in Austin 2019. We thank participants at these occasions, in particular Robert Erikson, Sara Kjellsson, Simon Hjalmarsson, Are Skeie Hermansen, and Florencia Torche, for helpful comments and criticism. Thanks also to the Editor, Deputy Editor, and Consulting Editor at Sociological Science who handled our manuscript. Any errors remain our own.

  • Citation: Engzell, Per, Carina Mood, and Jan O. Jonsson. 2020. “It’s All about the Parents: Inequality Transmission across Three Generations in Sweden.” Sociological Science 7: 242-267.
  • Received: March 24, 2020
  • Accepted: April 13, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a10


0

The Small-World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus

Kim A. Weeden, Benjamin Cornwell

Sociological Science May 27, 2020
10.15195/v7.a9


To slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, many universities shifted to online instruction and now face the question of whether and how to resume in-person instruction. This article uses transcript data from a medium-sized American university to describe three enrollment networks that connect students through classes and in the process create social conditions for the spread of infectious disease: a university-wide network, an undergraduate-only network, and a liberal arts college network. All three networks are “small worlds” characterized by high clustering, short average path lengths, and multiple independent paths connecting students. Students from different majors cluster together, but gateway courses and distributional requirements create cross-major integration. Connectivity declines when large courses of 100 students or more are removed from the network, as might be the case if some courses are taught online, but moderately sized courses must also be removed before less than half of student-pairs are connected in three steps and less than two-thirds in four steps. In all simulations, most students are connected through multiple independent paths. Hybrid models of instruction can reduce but not eliminate the potential for epidemic spread through the small worlds of course enrollments.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Kim A. Weeden: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: kw74@cornell.edu

Benjamin Cornwell: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: btc49@cornell.edu

Acknowledgments: Dr. Weeden and Dr. Cornwell contributed equally to this project. The authors thank the Cornell University administration, and in particular Dr. Lisa Nishii, for facilitating access to the data; Lauren Griffin and Alec McGail for research assistance; and Jake Burchard, Scott Feld, John Schneider, Demival Vasques Filho, Barry Wellman, Erin York Cornwell, and two anonymous reviewers for comments and advice. Cornell University had no role in the study design, data analysis, or preparation of the report.

  • Citation: Weeden, Kim A., and Benjamin Cornwell. 2020. “The Small-World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus.” Sociological Science 7: 222-241.
  • Received: April 17, 2020
  • Accepted: May 7, 2020
  • Editors: Mario Small
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a9


0

The U.S. Occupational Structure: A Social Network Approach

Andrés Villarreal

Sociological Science May 18, 2020
10.15195/v7.a8


We propose a new approach to study the structure of occupational labor markets that relies on social network analysis techniques. Highly detailed transition matrices are constructed based on changes in individual workers’ occupations over successive months of the Current Population Survey rotating panels. The resulting short-term transition matrices provide snapshots of all occupational movements in the U.S. labor market at different points in time and for different sociodemographic groups. We find a significant increase in occupational mobility and in the diversity of occupational destinations for working men over the past two decades. The occupational networks for black and Hispanic men exhibit a high overall density of ties resulting from a high probability of movement among a limited set of occupations. Upward status mobility also increased during the time period studied, although there are large differences by race and ethnicity and educational attainment. Finally, factional analysis is proposed as a novel way to explore labor market segmentation. Results reveal a highly segmented occupational network in which movement is concentrated within a limited number of occupations with markedly different levels of occupational status.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Andrés Villarreal: Department of Sociology, University of Maryland-College Park
E-mail: avilla4@umd.edu

  • Citation: Villarreal, Andrés. 2020. “The U.S. Occupational Structure: A Social Network Approach.” Sociological Science 7:187-221.
  • Received: November 22, 2019
  • Accepted: March 31, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a8


0

Self-Citation, Cumulative Advantage, and Gender Inequality in Science

Pierre Azoulay, Freda B. Lynn

Sociological Science May 6, 2020
10.15195/v7.a7


In science, self-citation is often interpreted as an act of self-promotion that (artificially) boosts the visibility of one’s prior work in the short term, which could then inflate professional authority in the long term. Recently, in light of research on the gender gap in self-promotion, two large-scale studies of publications examine if women self-cite less than men. But they arrive at conflicting conclusions; one concludes yes whereas the other, no. We join the debate with an original study of 36 cohorts of life scientists (1970–2005) followed through 2015 (or death or retirement). We track not only the rate of self-citation per unit of past productivity but also the likelihood of self-citing intellectually distant material and the rate of return on self-citations with respect to a host of major career outcomes, including grants, future citations, and job changes. With comprehensive, longitudinal data, we find no evidence whatsoever of a gender gap in self-citation practices or returns. Men may very well be more aggressive self-promoters than women, but this dynamic does not manifest in our sample with respect to self-citation practices. Implications of our null findings are discussed, particularly with respect to gender inequality in scientific careers more broadly.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Pierre Azoulay: MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and National Bureau of Economic Research
E-mail: pazoulay@mit.edu

Freda B. Lynn: Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Iowa
E-mail: freda-lynn@uiowa.edu

Acknowledgements: Address all correspondence to freda-lynn@uiowa.edu. Azoulay acknowledges the financial support of the National Science Foundation through its SciSIP Program (Award SBE-1460344). Soomi Kim provided exceptional research assistance. We thank Ezra Zuckerman for useful discussions. The authors contributed equally, and all errors are our own.

  • Citation: Azoulay, Pierre, and Freda B. Lynn. 2020. “Self-Citation, Cumulative Advantage, and Gender Inequality in Science.” Sociological Science 7:152-186.
  • Received: March 23, 2020
  • Accepted: March 29, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a7


0

Effects of Public School Closures on Crime: The Case of the 2013 Chicago Mass School Closure

Noli Brazil

Sociological Science April 28, 2020
10.15195/v7.a6


Public school closures are increasing in number and size in U.S. cities. In response, parents, teachers, and public school advocates argue that closures carry negative consequences for multiple institutions across a wide set of outcomes. One such institution is the local neighborhood, and a negative consequence that is frequently raised is increased crime. I test this claim by using the 2013 Chicago mass school closure as a case study. Rather than conceiving of a school closure as a binary event (closed or not closed) I break it out according to a school’s status after closure: vacant, repurposed, and merged with an existing school. I find that vacancy and repurposing into a nonschool are associated with decreased crime. In contrast, merging a closed school with an existing school is associated with increased crime. The vacancy and repurposing effects are spatiotemporally localized, concentrated in the 75-meter area surrounding the school and disappearing after a year, whereas the student merger effect persisted over time across larger spatial scales. My results suggest that the relationship between closure and neighborhood crime is not straightforward, varying by postclosure land use status and spatiotemporal factors.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Noli Brazil: Department of Human Ecology, University of California, Davis
E-mail: nbrazil@ucdavis.edu

Acknowledgements: I thank Luis Guarnizo, Andrew Papachristos, and Jenna Stearns for generously reading previous versions and providing invaluable feedback. I also thank Enrica Jiang for data collection and research assistance. Any remaining errors are mine alone.

  • Citation: Brazil, Noli. 2020. “Effects of Public School Closures on Crime: The Case of the 2013 Chicago Mass School Closure.” Sociological Science 7: 128-151.
  • Received: January 9, 2020
  • Accepted: February 22, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a6


0

Selective Enrollment Public Schools and District-Level Achievement Outcomes from 3rd to 8th Grade

Véronique Irwin

Sociological Science April 2, 2020
10.15195/v7.a5


Fierce local debates throughout the United States surround the equity of admitting students to public schools using academic criteria. Although research has evaluated the central assumption of these debates—that Selective Enrollment Public (SEP) schools enhance the welfare of students who attend them—none has addressed the district-level outcomes associated with these schools. This is important because the selectivity and scope of SEP schools produce tiered school systems (SEP districts). This district-level process, in turn, calls for an analysis of district-level achievement outcomes. To address this gap, I compile an original list of SEP schools using an innovative web scraping procedure. I combine these data with newly available district-level measures of third to eighth grade achievement from the Stanford Education Data Archive. Analyses follow a difference-in-differences design, using grade level as the longitudinal dimension. This approach facilitates a falsification test, using future treated districts, to reject spurious causation. I find evidence of overall slower growth in mean math achievement in SEP districts and for white, black, and Latinx racial/ethnic groups separately. SEP districts also see an increase in the white–Latinx math achievement gap. This work highlights the importance of considering SEP schools as part of a differentiated school system.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Véronique Irwin: Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
E-mail: virwin@berkeley.edu

Acknowledgements: I thank Samuel Lucas, Daniel Schneider, Anthony Jack, and Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana for their thoughtful comments. This work also benefited from excellent feedback at the Improving Education and Reducing Inequality Conference at the Russell Sage Foundation and was supported by funding from Russell Sage Foundation Grant #83-18-14.

  • Citation: Irwin, Véronique. 2020. “Selective Enrollment Public Schools and District-Level Achievement Outcomes from 3rd to 8th Grade.” Sociological Science 7: 100-127.
  • Received: September 24, 2019
  • Accepted: February 27, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a5


0

School Choice, Neighborhood Change, and Racial Imbalance Between Public Elementary Schools and Surrounding Neighborhoods

Kendra Bischoff, Laura Tach

Sociological Science March 25, 2020
10.15195/v7.a4


The expansion of school choice in recent years has potentially generated demographic imbalances between traditional public schools and their residential attendance zones. Demographic imbalances emerge from selective opting out, when families of certain racial and/or ethnic backgrounds disproportionately choose not to enroll in their neighborhood-based public schools. In this article, we use a unique data set of school attendance zones in 21 large U.S. school districts to show how changes in neighborhood conditions and school choice options influence race-specific enrollments in locally zoned public elementary schools from 2000 to 2010. We find that the presence of more school-choice options generates racial imbalances between public elementary schools and their surrounding neighborhoods, but this association differs by type of choice-based alternative. Private schools, on average, reduce the presence of non-Hispanic white students in locally zoned schools, whereas charter schools may reduce the presence of nonwhite students in locally zoned schools. Increases in neighborhood-school racial imbalances from 2000 to 2010 were concentrated in neighborhoods undergoing increases in socioeconomic status, suggesting that parents’ residential and school decisions are dynamic and sensitive to changing neighborhood conditions. Selective opting out has implications for racial integration in schools and the distribution of familial resources across educational contexts.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Kendra Bischoff: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: kbischoff@cornell.edu

Laura Tach: Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University
E-mail: lmt88@cornell.edu

Acknowledgements: This project was funded by the Cornell Center for Social Sciences. Bischoff was also supported by a National Academy of Education–Spencer Foundation fellowship. We would like to thank Salvatore Saporito for generously sharing the school attendance boundary data he collected for the 1999–2000 school year. This project would not have been possible without it. We also thank Chenoa Flippen, Peter Rich, Steven Alvarado, Matt Hall, Anna Haskins, and Erin York Cornwell for their comments on previous versions of this article.

  • Citation: Bischoff, Kendra, and Laura Tach. 2020. “School Choice, Neighborhood Change, and Racial Imbalance Between Public Elementary Schools and Surrounding Neighborhoods.” Sociological Science 7: 75-99.
  • Received: July 1, 2019
  • Accepted: January 16, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a4


0

"A Situation Where There Aren't Rules": Unwanted Sex for Gay, Bisexual, and Questioning Men

Jessie V. Ford, Andréa Becker

Sociological Science March 9, 2020
10.15195/v7.a3


Although college gay and bisexual men report elevated rates of sexual victimization, their accounts have received less scholarly attention. This article examines 18 gay, bisexual, and questioning (GBQ) men’s narratives about their experiences of unwanted sex in college. Our findings suggest that men are motivated to have unwanted sex while trying to navigate ambiguous sexual scripts amid male power dynamics, sexual inexperience, and ubiquitous heteronormativity and homophobia. Due to less defined sexual scripts and/or inexperience, men sometimes overlaid a heterosexual script onto encounters, resulting in an expectation that the “top” should have an orgasm. The stigma of being gay (or its potential) also entered into sexual interactions, pushing people to have sex in secrecy, in remote locations, or with closeted people who use force or threats to obtain sex. Together, these gendered and homophobic social pressures combine to leave GBQ men grappling with a double bind. As part of this double bind, GBQ men feel pressure to have sex in order to perform properly as a man—and specifically as a gay or bisexual man. They also fear losing control in a sexual situation, which could result in emasculation.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Jessie V. Ford: Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University
E-mail: Jf3179@cumc.columbia.edu

Andréa Becker: Graduate Center, City University of New York
E-mail: abecker@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Drs. Paula England and Lynn Chancer for their feedback and support in putting together this article. We’d also like to thank our research assistant Joe Sullivan for his brilliant insight into the ideas presented here.

  • Citation: Ford, Jessie V., and Andréa Becker. 2020. “”A Situation Where There Aren’t Rules”: Unwanted Sex for Gay, Bisexual, and Questioning Men” Sociological Science 7: 57-74.
  • Received: January 6, 2020
  • Accepted: February 4, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Mario Small
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a3


0

Gender Flexibility, but not Equality: Young Adults’ Division of Labor Preferences

Brittany N. Dernberger, Joanna R. Pepin

Sociological Science January 21, 2020
10.15195/v7.a2


Rising acceptance of mothers’ labor force participation is often considered evidence of increased support for gender equality. This approach overlooks perceptions of appropriate behavior for men and gender dynamics within families. We use nationally representative data of 12th-grade students from Monitoring the Future surveys (1976 to 2014) to evaluate changes in youths’ preferred division of labor arrangements. Over this period, contemporary young people exhibited greater openness to a variety of division of labor scenarios for their future selves as parents, although the husband-as-earner/wife-as-homemaker arrangement remained most desired. Using latent class analysis, we identify six configurations of gender attitudes: conventionalists, neotraditionalists, conventional realists, dual earners, intensive parents, and strong intensive parents. There are no gender egalitarian configurations—exhibiting equal support for both parents’ time at work and time at home. Our findings indicate researchers must distinguish between adoption of gender egalitarian principles and gender flexibility in dividing time at work and at home.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Brittany N. Dernberger: Department of Sociology, University of Maryland
E-mail: bdernber@terpmail.umd.edu

Joanna R. Pepin: Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin
E-mail: JPepin@prc.utexas.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank Kelly Raley, Melissa Milkie, Philip Cohen, and Sarah Flood for generously reading previous versions and providing invaluable feedback. This article was presented at the University of Maryland’s Gender,Work, and Family/Stratification working group, the Family Demography working group at the University of Texas, and at the 2018 American Sociological Association’s annual conference. We thank all the audience participants for their thoughtful comments. Replication code for data access and all paper analyses are available at https://osf.io/m3xwy/.

This research was supported by grant P2CHD042849, Population Research Center, and grant T32HD007081, Training Program in Population Studies, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin; and grant P2CHD041041, Maryland Population Research Center, awarded to the University of Maryland, by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

  • Citation: Dernberger, Brittany N., and Joanna R. Pepin. 2020. “Gender Flexibility, but not Equality: Young Adults’ Division of Labor Preferences.” Sociological Science 7: 36-56.
  • Received: November 20, 2019
  • Accepted: December 14, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a2


0

Stereotypical Gender Associations in Language Have Decreased Over Time

Jason J. Jones, Mohammad Ruhul Amin, Jessica Kim, Steven Skiena

Sociological Science January 7, 2020
10.15195/v7.a1


Using a corpus of millions of digitized books, we document the presence and trajectory over time of stereotypical gender associations in the written English language from 1800 to 2000. We employ the novel methodology of word embeddings to quantify male gender bias: the tendency to associate a domain with the male gender. We measure male gender bias in four stereotypically gendered domains: career, family, science, and arts. We found that stereotypical gender associations in language have decreased over time but still remain, with career and science terms demonstrating positive male gender bias and family and arts terms demonstrating negative male gender bias. We also seek evidence of changing associations corresponding to the second shift and find partial support. Traditional gender ideology is latent within the text of published English-language books, yet the magnitude of traditionally gendered associations appears to be decreasing over time.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Jason J. Jones: Department of Sociology and Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook University
E-mail: Jason.J.Jones@stonybrook.edu

Mohammad Ruhul Amin: Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University
E-mail: moamin@cs.stonybrook.edu

Jessica Kim: Department of Sociology, Stony Brook University
E-mail: jessica.a.kim@stonybrook.edu

Steven Skiena: Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University
E-mail: skiena@cs.stonybrook.edu

Acknowledgements: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grants IIS-1546113 and IIS-1927227. The authors would like to thank Stony Brook Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure as well as the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University for access to the highperformance SeaWulf computing system, which was made possible by a $1.4 million National Science Foundation grant (#1531492).

  • Citation: Jones, Jason J., Mohammad Ruhul Amin, Jessica Kim, and Steven Skiena. 2019. “Stereotypical Gender Associations in Language Have Decreased Over Time.” Sociological Science 7: 1-35.
  • Received: August 13, 2019
  • Accepted: October 31, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a1


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Which Mothers Pay a Higher Price? Education Differences in Motherhood Wage Penalties by Parity and Fertility Timing

Catherine Doren

Sociological Science December 19, 2019
10.15195/v6.a26


Upon becoming mothers, women often experience a wage decline—a “motherhood wage penalty.” Recent scholarship suggests the penalty’s magnitude differs by educational attainment. Yet education is also predictive of when women have children and how many they have, which can affect the wage penalty’s size too. Using fixed-effects models and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I estimate heterogeneous effects of motherhood by parity and by age at births, considering how these relationships differ by education. For college graduates, first births were associated with a small wage penalty overall, but the penalty was larger for earlier first births and declined with higher ages at first birth. Women who delayed fertility until their mid-30s reaped a premium. Second and third births were associated with wage penalties. Less educated women instead faced a wage penalty at all births and delaying fertility did not minimize the penalty.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Catherine Doren: Office of Population Research and Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, Princeton University
E-mail: cdoren@princeton.edu

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by a core grant to the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (P2C HD047873) and a training grant (T32 HD07014) awarded to the Center for Demography and Ecology by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development. Thanks to Christine Schwartz, Myra Marx Ferree, Eric Grodsky, Sasha Killewald, Kathy Lin, Sara McLanahan, Christine Percheski, and Tim Smeeding for helpful feedback on past drafts of this article.

  • Citation: Doren, Catherine. 2019. “Which Mothers Pay a Higher Price? Education Differences in Motherhood Wage Penalties by Parity and Fertility Timing.” Sociological Science 6: 684-709.
  • Received: October 23, 2019
  • Accepted: November 18, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a26


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Gender Typicality and Academic Achievement among American High School Students

Jill E. Yavorsky, Claudia Buchmann

Sociological Science December 12, 2019
10.15195/v6.a25


This study is the first to use nationally representative data to examine whether differences in gender-typical behaviors among adolescents are associated with high school academic performance and whether such associations vary by race or socioeconomic status. Using wave I data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and linked academic transcript data from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement study, we find that boys who report moderate levels of gender atypicality earn the highest grade point averages (GPAs), but few boys score in this range. As gender typicality increases, boys’ GPAs decline steeply. In contrast, girls who practice moderate levels of gender typicality earn slightly higher GPAs than other girls. These patterns generally hold across race and socioeconomic status groups.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Jill E. Yavorsky: Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina Charlotte
E-mail: jyavorsk@uncc.edu

Claudia Buchmann: Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University
E-mail: buchmann.4@osu.edu

Acknowledgements: This research uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (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 federal agencies and foundations. 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. This research also uses data from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement study, which was funded by a grant (R01 HD040428-02, Chandra Muller, PI) from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and a grant (REC-0126167, Chandra Muller, PI, and Pedro Reyes, Co-PI) from the National Science Foundation. This research was also supported by grant 5 R24 HD042849, Population Research Center, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Health and Child Development. Opinions reflect those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agencies. We thank the reviewers and editor for their helpful comments. We also are grateful to Yue Qian, Paula England, Tom DiPrete, and participants in the Seminar Series at the Center for the Study of Wealth and Inequality at Columbia University and participants in the University of Michigan Department of Sociology Seminar Series.

  • Citation: Yavorsky, Jill E., and Claudia Buchmann. 2019. “Gender Typicality and Academic Achievement among American High School Students.” Sociological Science 6: 661-683.
  • Received: October 8, 2019
  • Accepted: November 13, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a25


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Robust Discourse and the Politics of Legitimacy: Framing International Intervention in the Syrian Civil War, 2011–2016

Eric W. Schoon, Scott W. Duxbury

Sociological Science, November 25, 2019
10.15195/v6.a24


Legitimacy is widely invoked as a master frame in international political discourse. During episodes of contention, this frame is used by opposing sides to advance competing interpretations of the same social problems. Through an analysis of elite political discourses surrounding international intervention in the Syrian Civil War, we examine what distinguishes the effectiveness of actors’ framing efforts when they use a shared frame to advance conflicting agendas. We show how features of the objects (i.e., what or who) being framed shape the resonance and stability of the framing. Moreover, we show how framing objects that can be coherently interpreted in multiple ways facilitate the cultivation of discourses that are consistent despite changing social conditions and the evolution of framers’ goals. We refer to this as robust discourse and elaborate on the implications of this concept.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Eric W. Schoon: Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University
E-mail: schoon.1@osu.edu

Scott W. Duxbury: Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University
E-mail: duxbury.5@osu.edu

Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank Colin Beck, Robert Braun, Nicole Fox, Steve Lopez, Aliza Luft, Andrew Martin, Dana Moss, Corey Pech, Vinnie Roscigno, and Mike Vuolo for their comments, feedback, and advice at various stages during the research process. This work also benefited greatly from feedback at the War and Society Workshop at Northwestern University and the Koç University College of Administrative Sciences and Economics colloquium. Any errors remain the sole responsibility of the authors. Please direct correspondence to Eric Schoon, Department of Sociology, 238 Townshend Hall, The Ohio State University, 1885 Neil Avenue Mall, Columbus, OH 43210-1222. E-mail: Schoon.1@osu.edu.

  • Citation: Schoon, Eric W., and Scott W. Duxbury. 2019. “Robust Discourse and the Politics of Legitimacy: Framing International Intervention in the Syrian Civil War, 2011–2016.” Sociological Science 6: 635-660.
  • Received: September 16, 2019
  • Accepted: October 16, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a24


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