demography

The Los Angeles Times reported this weekend on how some multiracial families see Barack Obama as ‘Other’ like them — meaning that Obama’s multiracial identity, not fitting into a single “racial category,” is sometimes best described by the term ‘Other.’ The article tells the stories of several multiracial families who provide commentary on the difficulty of assigning themselves to a single racial category on forms like college applications. The LA Times reports:

Race, however, continues to be a stubborn puzzle. It wasn’t until 2000 that Americans were allowed to check more than one box for race on U.S. census forms. At that time, about 6.83 million people, or 2.4%, checked two or more races on census forms out of a population of about 281 million.

Additional commentary from a sociologist and a demographer helps to clarify this new trend…

Carolyn Liebler, a sociology professor specializing in family, race and ethnicity at the University of Minnesota, said she expected that the numbers of people identifying as multiracial would be higher in 2010 than they were in 2000 “because the number of mixed-raced marriages are going up” and because of Obama.

Tom W. Smith, an expert on race and demographics at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, calls it the “Obama effect.” “He’s made being multiracial salient,” Smith said.

Read more.

A reader of the Crawler recently brought to my attention a report from the World Health Organization (WHO) about health inequalies around the world. This Crawler fan also pointed out that sociologists are becoming increasingly concerned with problems of health inequality, as illustrated in a 2007 Annual Review of Sociology article (Volume 33, Number 1) by Kathryn Neckerman and Florencia Torche titled, “Inequality: Causes and Consequences,” which highlights this trend in the discipline. 

The WHO report, from the Commission on Social Determinants of Health, is titled “Closing the Gap in a Generation.”  From the World Health Organization:

What is the Commission on Social Determinants of Health?
The Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH) is a global network of policy makers, researchers and civil society organizations brought together by the World Health Organization (WHO) to give support in tackling the social causes of poor health and avoidable health inequalities (health inequities).

What was it expected to do?
The CSDH had a three year directive to gather and review evidence on what needs to be done to reduce health inequalities within and between countries and to report its recommendations for action to the Director-General of WHO. Building partnerships with countries committed to comprehensive, cross-government action to tackle health inequalities was integral to this. Experts were brought together to gather evidence, and civil society organizations also participated in the process.

Read more about the Commission on Social Determinants of Health. 

As sociologists study these inequalities, the opportunities for collaboration and the development of policy proposals and program initiatives seems limitless, but there is work to be done in the U.S. as well. 

Health inequalities are not limited to the wide disparities between countries described in the WHO report, but can also be present within countries, even the United States. An article published by the Independent (UK) this summer reports:

The United States of America is becoming less united by the day. A 30-year gap now exists in the average life expectancy between Mississippi, in the Deep South, and Connecticut, in prosperous New England. Huge disparities have also opened up in income, health and education depending on where people live in the US, according to a report published yesterday.

The American Human Development Index has applied to the US an aid agency approach to measuring well-being – more familiar to observers of the Third World – with shocking results. The US finds itself ranked 42nd in global life expectancy and 34th in survival of infants to age. Suicide and murder are among the top 15 causes of death and although the US is home to just 5 per cent of the global population it accounts for 24 per cent of the world’s prisoners.

…Despite the fact that the US spends roughly $5.2bn (£2.6bn) every day on health care, more per capita than any other nation in the world, Americans live shorter lives than citizens of every western European and Nordic country, bar Denmark..

Check out these interactive maps from the American Human Development Project — the group who published the report referenced in the article above.

NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday featured a report on the results of a new collaborative study from some of our country’s premier immigration scholars — John Mollenkopf, Mary C. Waters, and Philip Kasinitz.

Margot Adler of NPR reports:

In much of the debate over immigration, there is an underlying question: Are today’s immigrants assimilating into the mainstream as easily as past generations? The answer, at least in New York City, is an unqualified “yes,” according to the results of a 10-year study involving more than 3,000 young men and women, most of them in their 20s.

John Mollenkopf, a professor at City University of New York and an author of the study, says that if you look at the children of immigrants, “the kids are doing well compared to their parents and also doing well compared to the native-born comparison groups.”

Link to the story.

EurWeb.com reported on a study presented at the American Sociological Association meetings earlier this month about how the dramatic increase in the prison population since the early 1970s may be having significant demographic consequences that “disproportionately affect black males.” 

The study from Becky Pettit and Bryan Sykes of the Univeristy of Washington found that “the jump in incarceration rates represents ‘a massive intervention’ in Black families and may be responsible for lowered rates of fertility, increased and involuntary migration to rural areas as well as greater exposure to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and AIDS.”

EurWeb.com adds:

According to Pettit, the justice system “has become more punitive” and one result is that 1 of every 100 Americans is currently behind bars and nearly 60 percent of those are young, most low-income Black males. This fact, she suggest, has led to an increased number of men not producing children and the resulting drop in the Black fertility rate.

Full story.

USA Today reports that new Census data released this week suggest that 6.4 million opposite sex couples live together (as of 2007), up from less than one million thirty years ago. This means that cohabiting couples now make up nearly 10% of all opposite sex couples, including those who are married. 

In comparison, the Census bureau reported 5 million unmarried, opposite-sex households in 2006, but that figure was based on a question that many respondents found to be unclear. In the 2007 supplemental survey sample of 100,000 households, the Census questions asked more directly whether respondents had “a boyfriend/girlfriend or partner in the household” and found 1.1 million more couples.

The USA Today article included comments from two sociologists:

Pamela Smock,. a sociologist at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who studies cohabitation, says the new data gets closer to the truth, but because it’s a point-in-time survey, it still misses the extent of cohabitation in today’s society.

“It’s a snapshot,” she says. “It’s not telling you how many people have ever cohabited, which is much more than that.” …

Sociologist Linda Waite of the University of Chicago, who has done extensive research into marriage and cohabitation, says living together in the USA isn’t very stable or long-term, compared to some Scandinavian countries where it’s more likely to be a long-term committed relationship.

But in the USA, she says, it’s become “part of the life course.” “It’s something people do that leads to somewhere,” she says. “If it doesn’t lead to marriage, it leads to splitsville.”

The full story.

Reuters reports that the likelihood of a person entering a nursing home or another type of long-term care facility is elevated immediately following the death of a spouse according to recent research from Elina Nihtila, of the department of sociology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Nihtila suggested several reasons behind this pattern.

The Times Colonist reports on Nihtila’s interview with Reuters Health:

“It may be related to the loss of social and instrumental support, in the form of care and help with daily activities such as help in cooking, cleaning, and shopping formerly shared with the deceased spouse,” Nihtila told Reuters Health.

“Second, grief and spousal loss may cause various symptoms, such as depression and anxiety, loss of appetite, sleep disturbances, fatigue and loss of concentration that could increase the need for institutional care. Furthermore, grief may cause increased susceptibility to physical diseases.”

After reviewing an ESPN report on the hometowns of professional basketball players, demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution concluded that the “NBA is much more of a suburban population than most would have thought.” The average player hails from a city that is 59% white, which is significantly lower than the nation as a whole. On other dimensions, however, NBA players’ hometowns are quite comparable to U.S. averages: their average population is 112,017, 79% of their adult residents have a high school degree, and their average income is $38,127. Professor Frey concludes, “there’s a broad spectrum of areas the players come from, and a significant number come from white, middle class suburbs.”