{"id":697,"date":"2016-03-29T06:49:25","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T11:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=697"},"modified":"2016-03-29T09:47:51","modified_gmt":"2016-03-29T14:47:51","slug":"short-chat-on-family-inequality-with-philip-cohen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2016\/03\/29\/short-chat-on-family-inequality-with-philip-cohen\/","title":{"rendered":"Family Inequality with Philip Cohen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"cohen-philip\"<\/a>TSP<\/a> readers likely appreciate Philip Cohen<\/a> for his provocative blog, Family Inequality<\/a>, which\u2014based on a look at who retweets him\u2014regularly has material valued by undergraduates, senior scholars, data nerds, policy wonks, and journalists alike. Cohen is a Council on Contemporary Families<\/a> senior scholar and a professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland<\/a> in College Park, Maryland. His research focuses on the sociology of families, social demography, and social inequality. His family textbook, The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change<\/a>, was published in 2014. Cohen gave me these useful answers to my \u201c3q\u201d:<\/p>\n

Q: First, a challenge: What\u2019s one single thing you \u201cknow\u201d with certainty, after years of research into modern families?<\/p>\n

PC: Family inequality is remarkably resilient, but when it changes it does so under the influence of external forces. When women’s opportunities increase (or men’s decrease), when public investment in education increases, when the legal environment changes when technology permits reductions in household labor, when policies lighten (or compensate) the load of caring labor — that’s when inequality within families shifts. There is a dialectic here, and micro-level interactions within families matter, but these external forces are in the historical driver’s seat.<\/p>\n

Q: Give us the \u201cTwitter\u201d version of your current research\u2014in 140 characters (give or take), what are you working on now?<\/p>\n

PC: This is what I’m working on today, in 140 characters:\u00a0The culture wars over family politics always return to gender difference itself; it’s what’s at stake when left & right fight over families.<\/p>\n

Q: How would you encourage a scholar of family life to work to get their research into public life, affecting policy and challenging assumptions about \u201caverage families\u201d?<\/p>\n

PC: The public loves to argue about families. There are lots of opportunities to get your work out there and make it relevant. Unlike some areas of sociological research, if you’re working on families, almost everything has a potential angle — in fact, one of the challenges is to not<\/em> oversell the implications of our research. There is also a lot of translational work to do — interpreting and explaining new data and research as it comes out, helping people figure out what to make of the latest findings in the context of what we already know rather than participating in the whipsaw advice machine that thrives on contradicting conventional wisdom. I recommend that junior scholars get involved with the Council on Contemporary Families<\/a>, which helps organize and transmit new research responsibly and effectively, and to look for opportunities to publish popular pieces in online venues that encourage well-reasoned and empirically-grounding discussion and debate.<\/p>\n

\n

Molly McNulty is a CCF Public Affairs intern at Framingham State University. She is a joint Sociology and Education major.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TSP readers likely appreciate Philip Cohen for his provocative blog, Family Inequality, which\u2014based on a look at who retweets him\u2014regularly has material valued by undergraduates, senior scholars, data nerds, policy wonks, and journalists alike. Cohen is a Council on Contemporary Families senior scholar and a professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland in College […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1903,"featured_media":703,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38855],"tags":[34,70,55,13,85,26],"class_list":["post-697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-three-questions","tag-education","tag-family","tag-gender","tag-inequality","tag-politics","tag-public-sociology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/files\/2016\/03\/Screen-Shot-2016-03-29-at-9.45.59-AM.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=697"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":704,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697\/revisions\/704"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}