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Rising Educational Divides in Attitudes: How Polarization across Cohorts Can Mask Age-Related Polarization

By on August 19, 2025 in Articles

Fabian Kratz

Sociological Science August 19, 2025
10.15195/v12.a21

Abstract

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The question of whether attitudes become more polarized over time has stimulated significant scientific and political debate. This study is the first to show that polarization processes can occur both across cohorts and with rising age and that cohort-based polarization may obscure age-related polarization. I introduce the age polarization and cohort polarization hypotheses, which propose that attitudes become increasingly polarized both as individuals age and across successive cohorts. I use multi-cohort panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and leverage one of its longest-running attitude measures: concerns about immigration. I show that education-specific differences in immigration concerns intensify both across cohorts and with rising age and that age related polarization only becomes apparent when cohort-based polarization is taken into account. These findings contribute to debates on polarization processes in attitudes over time and advance the literature on heterogeneity in the liberalizing effect of education.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Fabian Kratz: Department of Sociology, University of Munich, LMU. E-mail: fabian.kratz@lmu.de
Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Daniel Krähmer, Madison Garrett, Lena Jost, Philipp Lersch, Josef Brüderl, and participants at the RC28 Conference in Milan (2025) for their helpful comments.

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: STATA code for replication is available on the author’s Open Science Framework page: https://osf.io/um8f7/. The data sets were provided by the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Study at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). Access to the SOEP data requires signing a data assignment contract, which can be requested here: https://www.diw.de/en/diw_01.c.601584.en/data_access.html. For more information, visit https://www.diw.de/en/diw_01.c.838578.en/edition/soep-core_v37eu__data_1984-2020__eu-edition.html.

  • Citation: Kratz, Fabian. 2025. “Rising Educational Divides in Attitudes: How Polarization across Cohorts Can Mask Age-Related Polarization” Sociological Science 12: 486-510.
  • Received: May 23, 2025
  • Accepted: July 6, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Peter Bearman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a21

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What Age Is in a Name?

By on August 24, 2020 in Articles

Sasha Shen Johfre

Sociological Science August 24, 2020
10.15195/v7.a15

Abstract
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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.

Supplemental Material

  • 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


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Gender Convergence in Housework Time: A Life Course and Cohort Perspective

By on May 31, 2018 in Articles

Thomas Leopold, Jan Skopek, Florian Schulz

Sociological Science, May 31, 2018
10.15195/v5.a13

Abstract
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Knowledge about gender convergence in housework time is confined to changes studied across repeated cross-sections of data. This study adds a dynamic view that links broader social shifts in men’s and women’s housework time to individual life-course profiles. Using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (1985–2015), our analysis is the first to trace changes in housework time across the entire adult life course (ages 20–90) and across a large range of cohorts (1920–1990). The results revealed two types of gender convergence in housework time. First, the gender gap converged across the life course, narrowing by more than 50 percent from age 35 until age 70. Life-course profiles of housework time were strongly gendered, as women’s housework time peaked in younger adulthood and declined thereafter, whereas men’s housework time remained stably low for decades and increased only in older age. Second, the gender gap converged across cohorts, narrowing by 40 percent from cohorts 1940 until 1960. Cohort profiles of housework time showed strong declines in women and moderate increases in men. Both cohort trends were linear and extended to the most recently born, supporting the notion of continued convergence in housework time.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Thomas Leopold: Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, and State Institute for Family Research at the University of Bamberg
E-mail: t.leopold@uva.nl

Jan Skopek: Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin
E-mail: skopekj@tcd.ie

Florian Schulz: State Institute for Family Research at the University of Bamberg, and Department of Sociology, University of Bamberg
E-mail: florian.schulz@ifb.uni-bamberg.de

Acknowledgements: This study was supported by the German Research Foundation (grant number SCHU 3081/1-1). Replication files to this article are available at the authors’ websites: http://www.thomasleopold.eu, http://www.skopek.org, and http://www.floschulz.de.


  • Citation: Leopold, Thomas, Jan Skopek, and Florian Schulz. 2018. “Gender Convergence in Housework Time: A Life Course and Cohort Perspective.” Sociological Science 5: 281-303.
  • Received: March 29, 2018
  • Accepted: April 19, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a13

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