The Baltimore Sun reported this weekend on how, after years of straining to reach recruitment goals, the National Guard has raised entrance standards. In Maryland and around the country, recruiters now demand higher test scores an a minimum of a high school degree (no longer accepting GEDs). And although months ago the National Guard was accepting new recruits as old as 42, they have now set a cut-off age of 35. 

This seems a sharp turnaround for the National Guard, once a collection of sleepy neighborhood “camping clubs for men” intended to be used, if at all, in case of World War III.

The Sept. 11 attacks and the growing combat requirements of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars swiftly changed that. Guard units were spruced up with hard training and new gear, and deployed at a wartime pace, serving with distinction in some of the hardest fighting seen in a generation.

It was widely predicted, however, that these part-time soldiers – sent off to war for a year at a time while trying to hold on to full-time jobs and families back home – would quit in droves. 

Anticipating the worst, the Guard hired battalions of new recruiters and relaxed some of its standards, raising the maximum age, lowering minimum acceptable scores on entrance exams and bending rules to accept those with minor criminal and drug violations.

But the anticipated exodus never happened. Nationwide, the Guard is brimming with soldiers – it has about 10,000 more than its authorized limit of 358,200.

The sociological commentary…

Why the change? Even though the Guard is essentially a part-time job, it has “definitely benefited from the economy going down the toilet,” said David R. Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland.

Especially for midcareer soldiers, even a part-time paycheck can help make ends meet, he said.

Read more. 

A New York Times Style-section column by Michelle Slatalla caught my eye this morning, declaring that I should be a patriot and hire a housekeeper(???) I decided to peruse the column and saw that it was mostly devoted to Slatalla’s musings on ‘spring cleaning’ with her family. But I read on, and was pleased to learn that Slatalla had consulted a sociologist when she became exasperated trying to get herself and her family in gear for cleaning the house. She writes:

And that [cleaning grease from the stove and noticing the filthy baseboards] was when I finally gave up. I couldn’t do this on my own anymore. I needed the help of an expert to motivate my family.

“How am I going to get the rest of them to help me keep the house clean?” I asked Pamela J. Smock, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies how housework affects family relationships.

“Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Are you still able to afford to hire someone to clean your house?”

“ ‘Afford’ is a state of mind,” I said. “My household hasn’t lost income — yet — but my husband and I are journalists, the most endangered species there is outside of Detroit.”

I’m superstitious: Maybe if I appease the God of the Bad Economy with this offering — cutting my discretionary spending — I can ward off a worse fate.

That’s the wrong way to think, Professor Smock said.

“Right now, the bad economy is hurting people who clean houses for a living much more than it’s hurting the middle class,” she said. “So anybody who is solidly in the middle class or above should hire the cleaners back. Absolutely. Immediately. You’ll be serving your country.”

I stopped to consider this argument, which sounded, frankly, like the exact opposite of the old conventional wisdom.

“I used to feel guilty about hiring housecleaners,” I said. “Like I was selfishly relying on the hard labor of poorly paid workers to make it easier to pursue my own career without sacrificing my comfort.”

Forget that claptrap, said Professor Smock, who pays $110 for housecleaning twice a month.

“If I got a raise, I’d do it every week, and also hire the cleaning lady’s husband to install the underground sprinklers,” she said. “Right now, people need jobs. It’s a bad idea to cut back on things you used to do normally. Don’t do your own hedging. Don’t start mowing, either.”

Put that way, I saw she had a point. How could I have been so selfish? I called the cleaners right away, of course, and that made me feel so patriotic that I decided to do more.

Read more.

The Houston Chronicle reports today on new naturalization statistics indicating that Latinos are driving the recent record-level surge in United States, comprising nearly half of the one million new Americans in 2008.  The numbers:

Nearly half of the record-setting 1 million new U.S. citizens sworn in last year were Latino immigrants — a 95 percent increase among that ethnic group from the previous year, according to an analysis by an Hispanic advocacy organization.

Department of Homeland Security data shows the number of immigrants naturalized in the U.S. grew from about 660,000 in 2007 to more than 1 million in 2008 — an increase of roughly 58 percent. The Houston metropolitan area saw more than 28,000 naturalizations last year, an increase of roughly 54 percent from 2007.

Nationally, Latino naturalizations jumped 95 percent from about 237,000 in 2007 to 461,000 in 2008, according to the analysis released Tuesday by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. NALEO used data from the DHS’ Office of Immigration Statistics, counting immigrants who hailed from predominantly Spanish-speaking countries as Latinos.

And the sociologist weighs in…

Nestor Rodriguez, a sociology professor at the University of Texas, said the growth in naturalization applicants was expected based on the level of legal immigration to the U.S. in the 1990s. More than 9.7 million people were admitted as legal permanent residents during that decade, he said, roughly 80 percent of them from Latin America and Asia. Although it takes only five years for a green-card holder to be eligible for citizenship, many historically have waited to take the oath.

“This is like a boa constrictor that eats something, and it makes its way through the body,” Rodriguez said. “This is the bump that’s going down the body.”

Rodriguez added that some new citizens may have been spurred to action by the fee increase that took effect in July 2007 and raised the cost of a citizenship application from $330 to $595.

And another sociologist…

Tom Janoski, an associate professor of sociology from the University of Kentucky who has researched international naturalization trends, said some new citizens may have been driven to apply because of a fear of deportation in many immigrant communities.

“One factor that causes people to naturalize is that they’re scared,” Janoski said.

Immigration officials conducted a series of high-profile work-site enforcement raids and targeted home raids in 2007 and 2008 that prompted protests. Unlike citizens, legal permanent residents convicted of crimes can be stripped of their legal status and put into deportation proceedings.

Read more.

The Vancouver Sun (Canada) reports this morning on new work from University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby about The Emerging Millenials. The Sun suggests, “The kids are all right. Better than all right — in fact, they just keep getting more and more virtuous in their behavior and optimistic in their expectations. Maybe too optimistic. When teens see their futures, they see large, happy families, stable marriages and the jobs they want — not just merely ‘good jobs’ — according to a major survey of 4,500 teens.”

In a forthcoming book based on the survey, called The Emerging Millennials, University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby notes that today’s teens expect a very bright future — 95 per cent say they will get to where they want to be in life. They expect things will just keep on getting better, said Bibby, who has tracked adolescent trends since 1984.

“In large part, it’s because they are showing signs of having learned much from us about the good things they want to pursue and the not-so-good things they don’t want to repeat.”

Overall, teens reported to being very close to their parents, with almost eight in 10 teens saying they received a high level of enjoyment from their mothers and more than seven in 10 saying the same about their fathers (although a quarter are concerned their parents are too busy.) Teens are rewarding their vigilant parents with good behavior, said Bibby. They are less likely to smoke, drink or take drugs than they were eight years ago. And 56 per cent of teens have never had sex, up from 51 per cent in 2000.

“Given the resources we’ve been directing toward teens, I think we should be shocked if things have not been improving over time,” he notes. “I’d like to think after all these decades and the money we’ve been spending that some of the message finally is taking.”

But it’s not all good news…

Sometimes their expectations don’t match up with reality, and Bibby says their expectations “seem to be nothing short of naive in thinking that little is needed by way of job adjustments in order to make optimum family life possible.”

For example, though about 70 per cent thought good benefits were “very important” in a job, only half thought flexible hours were important.

And Bibby was disappointed to find that only about half of the girls and slightly less of the boys identified a “good job” as one that would let them take family responsibilities into account, well below the work being interesting or the job itself paying well.

Bibby suggests ‘millennials’ need to have a chat with their Baby Boomer parents about having it all.

Read more.

The Columbia Daily Tribune (Missouri) ran a story on Friday about sociologist Maria Kefalas’ work on how “poor women find redemption in having a baby.”

When Maria Kefalas started visiting low-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia to interview the young, single and often welfare-dependent mothers who lived there, many of the grandmothers were her age. When one mother heard Kefalas, at 32, had just become pregnant with her first child, she said, “Isn’t it wonderful that the doctors were proved wrong and you were able to get pregnant?”

The woman, who had her own first child in her teens, assumed Kefalas had been trying without success to have a baby since 19 or 20. This wasn’t true, of course. In her early 20s, Kefalas had college to think about. Summer vacations spent traveling. Her future career. But this was still an assumption she encountered in these neighborhoods while conducting research with another sociologist. One 14-year-old told her, “I’ve been trying to have a baby ever since I could.”

As Kefalas puts it, childbirth has very little “competition” in these women’s lives.

“The stylish careers, fulfilling relationships and exceptional educations that will occupy middle- and upper class women’s twenties and thirties are unattainable dreams to the women driving the non-marital childbearing trend,” she writes on her blog on the Huffington Post. She sees children out of wedlock not as a decline in family values in poverty-stricken areas but as yet another symptom of the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots in the United States.

In a phone interview, Kefalas said she believes talking to these women allowed her to dig past survey and statistical data that provide information but few answers. When the question “Why do poor women have children outside of marriage?” comes up, society responds that individuals in low-income neighborhoods don’t believe in marriage.

The innovative and important contribution of this work…

Kefalas and Edin’s research doesn’t refute the notion that repairing family structures will help end welfare dependency by stabilizing homes. But it does challenge the assumption that the women living in Philadelphia’s worst neighborhoods didn’t care about marriage. In fact, the young women they met cared deeply about it.

“Everyone’s notions of marriage have changed in society,” Kefalas said. The difference is, “upper-class young couples are able to achieve those raised” expectations, although “among low income couples you see the raised standards like everybody else, but actually more diminished opportunities to achieve those goals.”

For example, if the dream for marriage is a stable, dependable husband, these women had little hope of finding him. Many don’t go to college and remain in the neighborhood where they grew up. The men around them are engaged in high-risk behavior and are often involved in the drug economy. Many spend some time in prison. Seen in this light, marriage is far from a stabilizer. The relationships are very “volatile,” and the divorce rate for these low-income couples is significantly higher than the national rate.

Having a child, however, does seem to provide new sense of purpose for the women Kefalas interviewed. It can act as a stabilizer in a neighborhood, family or financial situation that is otherwise chaos.

“Having a child offers a source of redemption,” Kefalas said. “You go from being this teenager who is wild and out of control to being this young woman with a baby, and if your baby’s clean, people stop you on the street and say, ‘You’re such a wonderful mother.’

“These young women say, ‘Having a baby saved my life.’ ”

Read more.

Newswise, a press release service, brought to my attention interesting new research out of Vanderbilt University by Sandra Barnes suggesting that, “churches with predominantly black congregations are thriving in urban and suburban areas, and the most successful churches employ a variety of sophisticated marketing and programming strategies to draw members.”

The research offers insights into what successful black churches have in common today, when parishioners have more choices and expect more from their churches than they have in the past.

“Contrary to expectations, I found that the black church is still a very important part of the lives of many African Americans,” Barnes said. “Those churches that market themselves, make sophisticated use of technology, offer practical sermons and programs for families and children over and above typical Bible studies are most likely to draw and keep new parishioners.”

People are expecting more from their churches…

Barnes found that today’s parishioners are “religiously savvy” and expect more from their church service, such as sermons and Bible studies relevant to everyday life, activities for individuals and families, and innovative worship services that incorporate dance and music.

“The broader societal change we have seen in consumerism is also manifesting in the religious arena. We expect more, bigger and better,” Barnes said. “As in the retail environment, today’s church goers are savvy shoppers. They are looking for a worship experience that meets their needs and programs that meet their needs and they’re willing to shop around to find it.”

This consumerism has led churches to use sophisticated marketing tools, specifically the Internet.

“Successful churches are very savvy when it comes to marketing. Word of mouth continues to be an important tool, but it is no longer the primary mechanism,” Barnes said. “Web sites, television ads and prime time exposure all play a role. Churches are using very intentional marketing strategies and much of it relies on technology.”

Read more.

Minnesota Public Radio ran a segment on ‘Midmorning’ yesterday about how men are increasingly feeling the conflicts that come out of trying to balance work and family. The segment was developed because of “a recent survey from the Families and Work Institute, which found that women in two-worker households are earning more money than their male partners, yet men are feeling more stress about the work-life balance.”

The show featured guests Ellen Galinsky, President and co-founder of Families and Work Institute, and Scott Coltrane, Sociologist and Dean of College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon.

Listen in…

The Christian Science Monitor ran an interesting story earlier this week in which a number of criminologists were consulted about whether recent shootings, murders, and other violent crimes could be linked to the economic downturn in the United States. The paper cites a number of cases that have made the headlines in recent weeks:  “Four Oakland, Calif., police officers shot down. An Alabama man strolling a small town with a rifle, looking for victims. Seven elderly people shot dead at a North Carolina nursing home. And on Sunday, six people, including four kids, died in an apparent murder-suicide in an upscale neighborhood in Santa Clara, Calif.”

The details in all these cases are still emerging. In most, the exact motive has yet to be determined – or may never be fully understood. On a broader level, however, such incidents may be happening more often because an increasing number of Americans feel desperate pressure from job losses and other economic hardship, criminologists say.

“Most of these mass killings are precipitated by some catastrophic loss, and when the economy goes south, there are simply more of these losses,” says Jack Levin, a noted criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.

Direct correlation between economic cycles and homicides is difficult to prove, cautions Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the University at Albany in New York. But an economic downturn of this breadth and depth hasn’t been seen since data began to be collected after World War II, he also points out. “This is not the average situation,” Mr. Bushway says.

Still, criminologists do say that certain kinds of violent crimes have risen during specific economic downturns. The recession in the early 1990s “saw a dramatic increase in workplace violence committed by vengeful ex-workers who decided to come back and get even with their boss and their co-workers through the barrel of an AK-47,” Mr. Levin says.

Read more.

The Guardian (UK) ran a story this weekend about bullying in the UK. New research suggests that “clever children are saving themselves from being branded swots at school by dumbing down and deliberately falling behind.”

The Guardian’s Jessica Shepherd reports:

Schoolchildren regarded as boffins may be attacked and shunned by their peers, according to Becky Francis, professor of education at Roehampton University, who carried out a study of academically gifted 12- and 13-year-olds in nine state secondary schools.

The study, to be published in the Sociological Review next year, shows how difficult it is for children, particularly boys, to be clever and popular. Boys risk being assaulted in some schools for being high-achievers. To conform and escape alienation, clever boys told researchers they may “try to fall behind” or “dumb down”.

One boy told researchers: “It is harder to be popular and intelligent. If the subject comes naturally … then I think it makes it easier. But if the subject doesn’t come naturally, they work hard and other people see that and then you get the name-calling.” This may in part explain boys’ perceived underachievement, Francis said.

Clever girls, meanwhile, can be seen as less attractive and less popular in some schools than girls who manage average grades.

One girl told the researchers: “My friends are all really nice people and have [a] really good sense of humour, and they’re all really pretty and stuff, but because they do well in school they’re not popular.” But clever girls were, on the whole, under less pressure to fall behind deliberately.

What counts as a swot varies from school to school, but the threshold for what is constituted “boffin behaviour” tended to be lower at poorer-performing schools.

Read more.

USA Today ran a story yesterday about how we are starting to see a shift in conflict in the work-life balance associated with gender roles.

Sharon Jayson of USA Today reports on new data from a telephone interview survey by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute, suggesting that we have reached a ‘tipping point’ in attitudes toward gender roles and the balance of work responsibilities and family life.

Women in two-earner couples are contributing more to family income, but it’s the men who are feeling more conflicted over the work-life balance, according to a survey of 3,500 workers released today.

Asked how much jobs and family life interfere with each other, 59% of fathers in dual-income families reported conflict in 2008, while just 35% did in 1977. For mothers, reported conflict increased from 40% to 45%.

The sociological interpretation…

“It does signal more equality of expectations — that men are no longer let off the hook,” says Scott Coltrane, a sociologist at the University of Oregon. Up until the past decade, “men weren’t doing enough to add stress to their lives,” he says.

Since then, men have been spending more time with their children and more time caretaking, which the survey finds has elevated the inner strife.

“What we see here is that the conflict for women hasn’t increased as fast because it was already so high,” says sociologist Kathleen Gerson of New York University. Other findings show:

•Annual income contributed by women in dual-income couples rose to 44% in 2008; 26% of such women earned at least 10% more than their partners.

•Traditional gender roles have lost favor among both sexes. About 60% of men and women say they disagree with the idea that men should earn the money and women should take care of the children.

•Women under age 29 are just as likely as men to want greater work responsibility, regardless of whether they have children.

“When you get men and women feeling the same, maybe it is a sea change,” says Ellen Galinsky, the institute’s president.

Sociologist Brian Powell of Indiana University, however, says even though “there probably has been real change, I have the sense there’s been more of a change in terms of people’s view that there should be equal division. That’s probably farther ahead of the actual behavior.”

Read more.