Citings and Sightings

The Washington Post reports on how the idea of America as an ‘ideological melting pot’ – in the context of the progress marked by the inauguration of our 44th President – may not be entirely true. This article highlights how researchers find that people want to live in diverse communities, but clump together with those most like them…

“Americans tell survey researchers they prefer to live in diverse communities, but this country’s residential patterns suggest otherwise,” said Paul Taylor, who directs the Pew Research Center’s Social and Demographic Trends Project. The question is why.

“Do some people gravitate toward communities so they can be among neighbors who share their political views?” Taylor and his colleague Richard Morin asked in a recent report. “Alternatively, does living in a politically homogeneous community diminish people’s appetite for diversity?”

And sociologists?

Sociologists have a term for this birds-of-a-feather-flocking-together phenomenon: Homophily. Some explanations for America’s political homophily suggest that a president who is determined to be a uniter might be able to help the nation reverse course; other theories suggest that the forces of polarization are beyond the powers of any individual to influence.

Sociologist Michael W. Macy at Cornell University argues that political homophily is largely the result of network dynamics: Neighborhoods coalesce around certain viewpoints because people don’t want to feel at odds with those around them. As views in a neighborhood become more homogenous, outliers feel like outcasts. They move if an opportunity arises, leaving their old neighborhood less politically diverse.

Read more.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune posted a podcast today about holiday spirituality, which included a discussion of new work from Mark Chaves, a Duke University sociologist studying churches in the United States. Technology is the opiate of the masses…

One of the biggest changes in churches over the past decade is a huge increase in the use of computer technology to keep in touch with current members and to reach out to new ones, according to a Duke University study that was released — appropriately enough — in the online version of the journal Sociology of Religion.

An average of 10,000 church websites are being launched every year, according to the National Congregations Study, Wave II, a follow-up to a 1998 study. In the earlier study only a handful of churches used e-mail to communicate with members. Now 60 percent are doing it.

Researchers conducted interviews with 1,500 congregations representing a cross-section of religious traditions. For the follow-up study, they went back to the same churches.

“This is the first study that has tracked change over time in a nationally representative sample of congregations,” said Mark Chaves, a professor of sociology, religion and divinity and the lead researcher. “We’ve never been able to do that before. This research tells us what is changing and what is staying the same.”

Read the full story.

Thursday morning USA Today reported on a new findings from a study of the Pew Research Center’s survey data, which shows that Americans are feeling pulled closer to home. 

USA Today reports:

The majority of U.S.-born adults (56%) have not lived outside their birth state, suggests research out Wednesday, and of the 37% who have stayed in their hometown, three-quarters say the main reason is because they want to be near family. Fifteen percent have lived in four or more states.

Pew Research Center’s survey paints a vivid portrait about how Americans feel about their hometowns at a time when geographic mobility is at the lowest levels since the government began keeping statistics in 1948. Pew cites government that data shows 13.2% moved from 2006 to 2007, down from a high of 21.2% in 1951. Census figures to be released in 2009 confirm the trend, showing a dip to 11.9%.

The sociological commentary…

Duke University sociologist Angela O’Rand says economic uncertainty causes people to dig in where they are, making them less likely to risk moving. ”Family provides in an uncertain world some level of safety and certainty,” O’Rand says.

Adam Liptak’s ‘Sidebar‘ column in the New York Times ran the following opening line yesterday: “Two years after Exxon was hit with a $5 billion punitive damages award for the Exxon Valdez disaster, Prof. William R. Freudenburg’s phone rang. The call propelled him, the professor said the other day, into ‘an ethical quagmire of the bottomless pit variety.’”

Freudenburg, a sociologist, explains how the phone call was from an engineer at Exxon who wanted to fund him to carry out a study with a ‘dim view of punitive damages.’ The engineer said the study was imperative as the case would eventually reach the Supreme Court and empirical evidence establishing a negative stance on punitive damages would prove useful… especially if published in an academic journal.

Professor Freudenburg, who now teaches sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, took Exxon’s money and conducted preliminary research. Exxon stopped supporting the study when the early findings did not point in a direction helpful to the company. But Exxon did help pay for several studies critical of punitive damages that appeared in places like The Yale Law Journal and The Columbia Law Review.

The evidence ended up in the Supreme Court proceedings…

As the engineer predicted, the case did reach the Supreme Court. In a 5-to-3 decision in June, the court said the appropriate punishment for dumping 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989 was no more than about $500 million, a tenth of what the jury had awarded. But the court also addressed the aggressive effort to reshape the academic debate over punitive damages. “Because this research was funded in part by Exxon,” Justice David H. Souter wrote in a footnote that has rocked the legal academy, “we decline to rely on it.”

Read on… what do you think? What are a sociologist’s ethical obligations in this situation?

Science Daily reports on a new study from sociologist Rob Ford about the decline in racial prejudice in Britain since the 1980s, which the research suggests is attributable to the tolerance of younger generations.

Dr. Rob Ford from The University of Manchester says that social contact with black or Asian Britons is becoming increasingly unremarkable to white people in their 20s and 30s.

The study published in next month’s British Journal of Sociology found that while 60% of people born in the 1910s opposed marriage between white relatives and ethnic minorities, this figure falls to 25% for people born in the 1970s.

The study draws upon data from the British Social Attitudes Survey conducted in the 1980s and 90s.

“The marked decline in racial prejudice is backed by further data points in 2006, 2004 and 2003 so the results here are pretty emphatic: we are becoming a more tolerant society. The attitudes of older cohorts reflect the fact that their perceptions were shaped by growing up in an ethnically homogeneous Britain before mass immigration began,” he said. “Those cohorts express much more hostility about social contact with minority groups than their children and grandchildren.”

Ford cautions against the assumption that racial prejudice will disappear in the immediate future. He notes, “…while prejudice is therefore likely to be less of a problem in the future, it is unlikely to disappear overnight. Cohort replacement is a slow process and significant levels of hostility to ethnic minorities remain even in the youngest cohorts surveyed here.”

Read more.

A Newswise press release posted on Friday about a study from University of Maryland sociologists has hit the headlines of papers around the world including the UK, India, and Bulgaria as well as the United States. The new study suggests that unhappy people watch more television, while happy people spend more time reading and socializing. The investigators at the University of Maryland analyzed three decades of data from time-use studies and social attitudes surveys (nationally representative). Their study indicates that spending more time watching TV contributes to happiness in the moment, but may result in fewer positive effects in the long term.

“TV doesn’t really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does,” says University of Maryland sociologist John P. Robinson, the study co-author and a pioneer in time-use studies. “It’s more passive and may provide escape – especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself. The data suggest to us that the TV habit may offer short-run pleasure at the expense of long-term malaise.”

Robinson suggests that we might see a significant increase in TV viewing over the coming months and years as the economy worsens…

“Through good and bad economic times, our diary studies, have consistently found that work is the major activity correlate of higher TV viewing hours,” Robinson says. “As people have progressively more time on their hands, viewing hours increase.”

But Robinson cautions that some of that extra time also might be spent sleeping. “As working and viewing hours increase, so do sleep hours,” he says. “Sleep could be the second major beneficiary of job loss or reduced working hours.”

Read the full story.

Science Daily reports today on a new study from sociologists Mark Levels, Jaap Dronkers and Gerbert Kraaykamp, which suggests that factors like country of origin, destination country, and qualities of immigrant communities play a significant role in educational outcomes for immigrant children.  

The research, which looked at the mathematical literacy scores of thousands of 15-year-old immigrants to 13 Western nations from 35 different native countries, indicates that economic development and political conditions in an immigrant’s home country impact the child’s academic success in his or her destination country. Counter-intuitively, immigrant children from countries with lower levels of economic development have better scholastic performance than comparable children who emigrate from countries with higher levels of economic development.

Children of immigrants from politically unstable countries have poorer scholastic performance compared to other immigrant children. “Adult political immigrants are known to face serious negative consequences that can be related to the political situations in their origin countries,” said sociologist Mark Levels, junior researcher in the Department of Sociology at Radboud University, Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. “We found that these consequences carry across generations to affect their children’s educational chances as well. Our findings therefore have urgent implications in countries that receive a large number of these immigrants.”

Mark Levels, one of the primary investigators told Science Daily, ”Specific educational programs designed to counter the negative effects of political migration may be essential to ensure that the children of politically motivated immigrants achieve their full potential.”

Read more here.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning on an ongoing debate as to the validity of a 2006 study which concluded that Americans have become significantly more socially isolated over the last 25 years. 

David Glenn reports, “In the summer of 2006, several major news outletsgave prominent coverage to a sociological study with a grim message: Americans’ social isolation had increased radically since the 1980s. Whereas in 1985 Americans reported that, on average, they had 2.94 friends or family members with whom they could discuss important matters, by 2004 that number had dropped to 2.08. A quarter of Americans had no close confidants at all. Those findings were …[even] startling to the study’s authors, who are sociologists at Cornell University, Duke University, and the University of Arizona, [J. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Brashears].”

UC Berkeley sociologist and social networks scholar Claude Fisher has some concerns:

The [previous] study’s portrait of collapsing social networks, Mr. Fischer writes, is at odds with other recent findings by social scientists. What’s more, he says, some of the 2006 paper’s data seem internally inconsistent or simply implausible. For example, among people who reported belonging to four or more organizations—presumably a highly sociable bunch—14.9 percent reported having no confidants. And what about married people? Surely they discuss important matters with their spouses, if no one else. In 1985 only 6.6 percent of married respondents reported having no confidants, but in 2004, 22.2 percent did so.

Fisher claims that such errors could be due to errors during data collection or coding. Now the original study’s authors have responded…

ScienceNews.com reports today on a recent sociological investigation into attitudes about global warming. Pollsters from Gallup asked groups of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents about whether they believe that ‘global warming poses a serious threat to the American way of life.’ The emerging results suggest that over the last 10 years, Democrats have increasingly said ‘yes’ (49% today as opposed to 31% ten years ago) while the share of Republicans saying ‘yes’ has grown more slowly (now 26% and previously 20%).

Science News reports: 

… While virtually half of Democrats currently view global warming as posing a serious threat within their lifetimes, only one-quarter of Republicans feel similarly, report Oklahoma State University sociologist Riley E. Dunlap (who’s also a Scholar for the Environment at the Gallup Organization) and sociologist Aaron M. McCright of Lyman Briggs Collegeand Michigan State University.

The pair argue that the polling data suggest Republicans and Democrats are becoming “more ideologically polarized,” at least on the issue of global warming. They attribute the increasingly divergent views on this issue to “party sorting” — that is, people choosing a party on the basis of its general views on this issue, or people within a party increasingly assuming the views on this issue that are espoused by leaders of their party.

Dunlap and McCright find that the tight correlation between party affiliation and attitudes about climate hold even after accounting statistically for other potentially confounding demographic factors such as gender, age, race, income and education. Moreover, they observe, throughout the past decade, “Republicans and Democrats who believe they understand global warming reasonably well [have been holding] more divergent views compared with their presumably less-informed counterparts.”

The bottom line? Democrats’ views about global warming have reflected scientific conclusions on climate change, while Republicans dismiss the scientific assessments.

Read on.