networks

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.

This weekend the Calgary Herald reported on a new study about the effects of the internet on social relationships. 

…A new Statistics Canada study has found that far from promoting social isolation, the Internet is enhancing relationships with family and friends. The study delves into the social and civic uses of the Internet in Canada, with one of its authors, Statistics Canada analyst Ben Veenhof, calling the results a “two sided tale of how social cohesion is being transformed through technology.”

This two sided tale suggests that heavy internet users spend less time with family and friends in person, but that the internet can also serve as a ‘social device,’ meaning that participation in social organizations and involvement with community members can also be a benefit of web use. 

Meanwhile, a University of Toronto professor of sociology, who is one of the authors of the study, says research knocks down the myth that people are living their lives only on the Internet. “We find that very, very few people are online only,” Barry Wellman said. “Almost always it’s a mixed relationship –that they’re making arrangements or talking with their friends in between actually seeing them face-to-face.”

Wellman said almost all relationships people have online are with those they already know. In fact, he says, it’s generally more social people who are greater Internet users.

Read more.

If you enjoyed the Crawler’s first look at the new study from Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and co-author James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, about the transmission of happiness, take a look at the latest installment courtesy of this weekend’s New York Times. 

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

In fact, said his co-author, James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, their research found that “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

Read on.

This weekend the New York Times ran a very flattering review of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book ‘Outliers: The Story of Success.’ Times contributor Stephen Kotkin writes, “Malcolm Gladwell has a rare ability: he can transform academic research into engaging fables spotlighting real people.”

In the book Gladwell disputes the idea of the self-made man and focuses on the fact that success is fundamentally ‘social.’

…Mr. Gladwell promotes a cultural explanation for success no matter how indirect the causal mechanisms. Although the individuals that Mr. Gladwell cites are exceptional, their success, he argues, does not flow from their natural gifts but from their unusual cultural legacies, the uncanny opportunities that come their way, and their really, really hard work.

But Kotkin offers some critique…

…Often the examples are unsatisfying, as in his discussion of the KIPP academy in the Bronx, where 90 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches but do as well in math as privileged suburban children. Why? Supposedly because the academy abolished long summer vacations. Mr. Gladwell, following the research of the sociologist Karl Alexander, contends that virtually the entire educational performance difference between better-off and poorer children derives from what some students do not learn when school’s out.

Read the full review, here.

The November issue of The Atlantic has an article by psychologist Paul Bloom called, ‘First Person Plural.’ In the piece Bloom explores a number of new ideas about ‘the self.’ He writes, “An evolving approach to the science of pleasure suggests that each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self bind another self if the two want different things? Are you always better off when a Good Self wins? And should outsiders, such as employers and policy makers, get into the fray?”

In the piece Bloom draws upon work by sociologist Sherry Turkle about online avatars:

Sometimes we get pleasure from sampling alternative selves. Again, you can see the phenomenon in young children, who get a kick out of temporarily adopting the identity of a soldier or a lion. Adults get the same sort of kick; exploring alternative identities seems to be what the Internet was invented for. The sociologist Sherry Turkle has found that people commonly create avatars so as to explore their options in a relatively safe environment. She describes how one 16-year-old girl with an abusive father tried out multiple characters online—a 16-year-old boy, a stronger, more assertive girl—to try to work out what to do in the real world. But often the shift in identity is purely for pleasure. A man can have an alternate identity as a woman; a heterosexual can explore homosexuality; a shy person can try being the life of the party.

Read the full story.

Science Daily News reports on a new national study from two sociologists out of Brigham Young University which concluded that religious involvement makes teenagers half as likely to use marijuana. The findings from the study are available in the October volume of the Journal of Drug Issues – allegedly settling a question scholars have traditionally disagreed upon.

Science Daily News:

“Some may think this is an obvious finding, but research and expert opinion on this issue have not been consistent,” said BYU sociology professor Stephen Bahr and an author on the study. “After we accounted for family and peer characteristics, and regardless of denomination, there was an independent effect that those who were religious were less likely to do drugs, even when their friends were users.”

The study, co-authored by BYU sociologist John Hoffmann, also found individual religiosity buffered peer pressure for cigarette smoking and heavy drinking.

What is it about religiousity?

The term religiosity as used in the study has to do with people’s participation in a religion and not the particular denomination. Hoffmann said the protective effect of church and spirituality supplements the influence of parents.

“Parents shouldn’t force it, but they can encourage spirituality and religion in their families, which in itself becomes a positive influence in their children’s lives,” Hoffmann said.

Read more.

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…

Sociologist Duncan Watts is getting some press for his challenge to science journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s famous “Tipping Point” argument, in particular Gladwell’s “Law of the Few”: the idea that a few well-connected people, dubbed “Influentials,” make or break trends.

Fast Company’s Clive Thompson describes Watts’ work:

[Watts] has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Ars Technica’s Julian Sanchez recounts an interview with Watts from 2004:

“We knew 50 years ago that this model was wrong. After the fact, and this is why Gladwell’s book is so beguiling, you see that crime rates dropped or Hush Puppies took off and then you can always find the people with whom it started,” he told me. “But if it’s something about them, why aren’t they driving all the other trends? What turns out to be the deciding factor is not the ‘influentials’ but the people who are easily influenced. You might have someone who influences five times as many people as the average, but the total numbers relative to a population are still very small. Almost all of the action is away from the center.”