Young people have always tended to get into some trouble here and there. What’s shocking, though, is how often young Americans are being arrested–in fact, by the age 23, nearly a third of Americans will have been arrested for a crime other than a moving violation. This stat is reported by the New York Times and comes out of a study by Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the State University at Albany, and Robert Brame, a professor of criminal justice and criminology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Their work analyzed data from the federal government’s National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

Bushway and Brame found that the current arrest ratio (30.2 percent of young adults having been arrested for things other than a minor traffic violation) was a significant increase from 22 percent back in 1965. According to the researchers, this could be a result of an increasingly aggressive and punitive judicial system that has given rise to more drug related offenses and zero-tolerance policies in schools. According to Bushway:

This estimate provides a real sense that the proportion of people who have criminal history records is sizable and perhaps much larger than most people would expect.

Brame says that he hopes the study, which was appeared in the journal Pediatrics, could help alert physicians to signs that their young patients could be at risk. As he said in USA Today, “Arrest is a pretty common experience,” but still, “We know that arrest occurs in a context,” Brame told the Times. “There are other things going on in people’s lives at the time they get arrested, and those things aren’t necessarily good.” If doctors can intervene, he added, “It can have big implications for what happens to these kids after the arrest, whether they become embedded in the criminal justice system or whether they shrug it off and move on.”

Regardless of the study’s intended audience, the fact that nearly a third of young adults has an arrest record is a serious manner, especially in an era in which many employers routinely conduct criminal background checks and youth records that should be sealed are often found to be publicly available on the Internet.

Media attention around the Republican crop of presidential candidates, as well as a new ad campaign with the tagline “I am a Mormon,” have popularized discussion about the Church of Latter-day Saints. In Utah, however, new data shows Mormonism isn’t as prominent as it once was, especially among men. A report written by sociologists Rick Phillips (University of North Florida) and Ryan Cragun (University of Tampa) and released by Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut found that Utah’s Mormon majority is shrinking. It’s now down to 57 percent, and men account for only 40 percent of those Utah Mormons (down from 47.5 percent two decades ago).

In their paper, the Salt Lake Tribune reports, Phillips and Cragun suggest the reason for this widening gender gap might be that Utah’s men are abandoning their faith at higher rates than women. In the past, Mormon men remained tied to the church rather than lose their social standing in the community, argue Phillips and Cragun, both on the board of the Mormon Social Science Association. “However, declining Mormon majorities [in Utah] may have weakened that link, and Mormon men who lack a strong subjective religious commitment to the church are now free to apostatize without incurring sanctions in other social settings.”

Other scholars in the field, disagree with Phillips and Cragun’s interpretation of the data. David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, points out to the Salt Lake Tribune this shift isn’t necessarily due to men leaving the church, but could also be a result of more women joining. And Marie Cornwall, sociologist at Brigham Young University and editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, has her own criticism of Phillips and Cragun’s conclusions:

They have no way of knowing whether the growing gap reflects migration patterns—professional men and women leave the state to look for jobs and, given the lower rates of professional women, that may mean that men are leaving the state as much as it means that they are leaving the [LDS] Church.

As in so many other cases, the numbers can’t tell the whole story of why the population of Utah’s male Mormons seems to be shrinking.

The current political and cultural upheaval focused on the American economy has Wall Street under the microscope. The New York Times DealBook section recently reported on a study by CUNY Graduate Center sociologist Richard D. Alba which dissected some of the income stratification occurring within financial industry. His findings? Not surprisingly, Wall Street remains an old boys’ club. White men are making significantly more than their female or non-white coworkers:

The median compensation for a white man in the financial industry between 2005 and 2009 was $154,500, 55 percent percent more than that for a white woman, according to the study, which used United States Census data. He made 55 percent more than a Latino man, and 72 percent more than a black man. A typical white woman, with a salary of $100,000, made 59 percent more than a Latina woman, and 65 percent more than a black woman.

Historically, white males have dominated the financial sector, and their wage superiority has remained consistent despite growing diversity within the field:

In 2000, more than 67 percent of older workers were white men, the study shows. In the period between 2005 and 2009, that dominance showed signs of eroding, as white men were less than 46 percent of the youngest workers, those just starting out on Wall Street.

While Wall Street has been quick to adapt to complicated new financial instruments and markets, according to Alba, it shows few signs of adapting to an already-changed labor market.

The most recent marital meltdown making headlines involves the rapid “I don’t” of entrepreneur Kim Kardashian and pro basketball player Kris Humphries. While their split’s every detail is dissected everywhere from tabloids to 24 hour news networks, the Des Moines Resister took a different angle on the issue: they talked to some sociologists.

Susan Stewart, associate professor of sociology at Iowa State University, and Tony Paik, associate professor the University of Iowa’s Department of Sociology, helped explain some of the broader societal issues affecting early divorce and how we perceive flame-out marriages. Stewart maintains that although people generally don’t talk about their own divorces, it’s fair game to critique others’. This appears to especially be true for the nearly 1 in 4  U.S. marriages that end within the first 5 years.

“We are fascinated when people crash and burn,” Stewart said. “It’s a way to work through [our own issues]: ‘They are way worse off than I am.’ ”

Stewart believes age is often a determining factor in early divorce, but short engagement periods and contrasting religious or family backgrounds also come into play. And Paik presents data showing that earlier intercourse, surprisingly, may also be a determinant of short-lived marriages: according to Paik’s analysis, of those who remain abstinent until age 18, only 15 percent will divorce within the first 5 years of marriage. Those who have sex before 18 are shown to divorce at at rate of 31 percent.

Paik hasn’t determined why this might be, but he speculates that sex at a young age may lead to other possible divorce determinants, including premarital pregnancy, permissiveness toward non-marital sex, and premarital cohabitation–each of which seems to lose relevance over time, particularly when it comes to the Kardashian-Humphries union, which, so far as the prurient public knows, included none of these factors.

With over 800 million active users, Facebook must be affecting our relationships—some even wonder if acquiring hundreds, even thousands, of online companions is helping or hindering our “real life” connections to others. It’s no surprise that new research on this topic by Cornell sociologist Matthew Brashears is making a splash in media outlets from ABC News to The Times of India and The Telegraph. Brashears work asks, even in this hyper-connected world, do we have as many close friends as we think we do?

In short: no. According to Brashears’ longitudinal research (which looked at over 2,000 adults from 1985 to 2010 and was published in the journal Social Networks), the average number of close friends—people with whom respondents said they’d discussed important matters with during the past six months—most of us report is two. Just 25 years ago, the average was closer to three. Brashears is quick to point out that we’re not becoming asocial. He thinks we’re getting better at being careful in selecting our confidants. Perhaps we now favor a smaller, tighter network for our true support system even while we enjoy more casual, diffuse online networks.

ABC News went a bit further to ask whether Facebook was actually to blame for this culling of comrades. The news outlet turned to a Pew Research Center report written by another sociologist, Keith Hampton of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Hampton took a rosier view in a blog post on the subject:

Internet users in general, but Facebook users even more so, have more close relationships than other people. Facebook users get more overall social support, and in particular they report more emotional support and companionship than other people.

Different networks, we know, fulfill different needs. Facebook reports that its average user has 130 friends—as of this writing, there’s just no separate category for “real friends.”

The Occupy Wall Street protests are in full swing across the nation, and reporters are doing their best to navigate and explain the growing, and sometimes ambiguous, movement. Not surprisingly, sociologists are helping journalists make sense of the phenomenon for viewers and readers. To help shed light on the Occupy Boston protests, FOX 25 Boston turned to Tufts University sociology professor Sarah Sobieraj. In a relatively short TV interview, Sobieraj was asked to cover a lot of territory, including explaining reasons for the movement’s popularity, addressing the breadth of its message, and identifying connections to other famous American protests.

These are all topics Sobieraj should feel pretty comfortable speaking on—after all, she wrote the book on media and protest (Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism). However, she isn’t the only academic with something to say about the Occupy protests. For instance, CUNY professor Héctor Cordero-Guzmán was asked by OWS itself to analyze the characteristics of occupywallst.org visitors and saw his results picked up by The New Yorker’s Rational Irrationality blog, while Columbia’s Todd Gitlin wrote about the difference between Tea Party and OWS protests in the New York Times and discussed the movement with National Public Radio’s Marketplace. These scholars are working as ambassadors for the discipline and proving to the broader public that sociological research can be timely and relevant for parsing current events. Let us know if you spot any particularly edifying articles in your daily news review.

The National Basketball Association and universities can sometimes have a strained relationship, especially in the case of “one-and-done” players—those athletes who make only a one-year pit stop at college before taking their talents to the big leagues. But now, an NBA lockout due to a collective labor dispute has led to the cancellation of at least the first two weeks of the upcoming NBA season, and players are making plans for their time off. Some are looking to play ball overseas, but the star point guard of the Golden State Warriors, Stephen Curry, is planning to head back to school. It seems the NBA’s sticky situation may be a boon to sociology.

That’s right: Curry has dusted off his backpack to return to Davidson College and finish his sociology degree. An article in the Charlotte Daily Observer detailed what it was like for the young star to be back in the classroom, pointing out that, if the lockout drags on until December, Curry will be able to finish the full semester. At that point, he’d be just one class and senior thesis away from earning his degree.

No player (or fan) wants to see the NBA cancel a season, but Curry can at least see the silver lining.

“I’d love to be playing basketball right now,” Curry said, “but if I don’t, it makes this degree pursuit a whole lot easier.”

While it remains to be seen whether Curry’s senior thesis will make an impact on the sociological community, Curry’s actions help legitimize time spent earning a college diploma to other young athletes considering whether to stick it out in college ball or head straight for the NBA. Of course, his move might also make one department’s intramural basketball team an early frontrunner this semester.

If you’d spent some time in the New York fashion scene and looked closely among the high heels, you might have spotted one model taking scrupulous field notes as seriously as she took the runway. Ashley Mears, assistant professor of sociology at Boston University and author of the book Pricing Beauty, immersed herself into the world of modeling by actually becoming a model. A recent New York Times’ T Magazine Blog interview with Mears got into what the world of fashion looks like through the eyes of and insider and the eyes of a sociologist.

Mears didn’t specifically set out to study fashion models, she claims: “Rather, I study questions of how cultural value gets translated into economic values.” In fact, she had only some limited teenaged experience in the field, and so it was a surprise when a “career” in modeling more or less fell into her lap—she was approached as she puzzled over her dissertation topic at a Starbucks.

From her life backstage, Mears was able to draw several conclusions on a lingering disconnect between traditional beauty and the type of look often revered on the catwalk. First and foremost, she says, fashion makes a distinction between mass appeal and cultural prestige:

The commercial end… [does the] kinds of jobs that are intended to sell things, to move merchandise. They have to resonate with a mass audience. The editorial end is the elite end, it’s by far the more prestigious end … And they look really strange. They don’t resonate with a mass audience, and that’s the point. They’re not intended to. That’s kind of a general principle that we take from the art world. The more people a specific piece of art is intended to make sense to, the less valuable on the whole it is.

And why do the elite modeling specifications require an extraordinarily tall, extraordinarily thin, white woman? For Mears, it all stems from class:

If you look at a historical trajectory of what, in Western society, elite culture values, it’s this prized aesthetic for women with extremely thin, taut, controlled bodies. A corpulent body, a body with rolls and with flesh, is a body that signals looseness, sexual availability, and is antithetical to a kind of “elite” body. You can see this in strip clubs as well. There’s some ethnographic work that shows that strip clubs that cater to higher-class audiences have thinner women, and whiter women. You see it reproduce in all kinds of different settings.

Whether in boxing clubs or factories or catwalks, sociologists have a rich history of this kind of embedded ethnography. To read more about Mears’s research, visit her Boston University website here or pick up a copy of her book.