United Press International reports this morning on new work published in Research in the Sociology of Work, from Ithaca College sociologist Stephen Sweet, about how in our current dual-income economy, the loss of one person’s job can put a family at significant financial risk. The result is significant anxiety for some families trying to make it in a floundering economy.

“Nine in 10 dual-income couples in New York state feel there is some risk that one or both of their jobs might not exist in the next couple of years,” lead author sociologist Stephen Sweet of Ithaca College said in a statement.

“In the old economy, we largely depended on the male bread winner. The wife was a homemaker and the men were much more likely to have jobs that were secure; this is especially true for white middle-class families where job security increased with seniority.”

In the old economy, if the husband lost a job the wife was reserve labor and she could go out into the labor force and make ends meet, whereas to maintain a middle-class lifestyle in today’s economy, dual-income couples are the norm to make ends meet, Sweet added.

The study, published in Research in the Sociology of Work, described how the new economy dismantled the systems that made workers more confident they would hold their jobs as they aged and their family investments increased.

“Most working middle class families have next to no savings and the savings they do have are often in things they can’t touch, like their 401(k). They are often in debt so they are living paycheck to paycheck,” Sweet said.

Read more.

Yesterday the Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran a story on the state of teenage girls in the United States. The article featured the work of sociologist Mike Males, who is fighting the myth that these young women are floundering. Instead, he argues, they are doing better than ever.

Mike Males believes it, and he’s preaching that message to anybody willing to listen. All he needs now is a strong set of fins to propel him upstream. That’s because Males, a sociologist, author and senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, says popular culture prefers to keep tweener and teen girls in familiar boxes labeled vulnerable, shallow, mean, violent and depressed.

“Girls are doing spectacularly well,” said Males, who spoke to a packed house this month at a lecture sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s Konopka Institute for Best Practices in Adolescent Health.

But Males is quick to acknowledge that there are still many challenges facing teen girls in the US.

He doesn’t dismiss the challenges, whether eating disorders, substance abuse, bullying or pornography. “But these problems exist throughout adult society, as well,” he said. “To generalize these problems to all girls is simply wrong.”

Columnist Gail Roseblum asks, “Why such a discrepancy between belief and reality?”

Males says it could be because of racial stereotyping, (these shifts are occurring amid unprecedented racial diversity in this country); or sexism (we seem more comfortable with the idea of girls being “innately vulnerable”), or simple data manipulation. A new book, “The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls from Today’s Pressures,” for example, correctly reports that suicide rates among girls ages 10 to 14 increased 76 percent between 2003 and 2004. In real numbers, though, the jump was from 56 to 98 deaths, among nearly 10 million girls of that age group. While not dismissing the profound grief experienced by those families, Males said that “a high-schooler is three times more likely to suffer a parent’s suicide than the other way around.”

The biggest sin in his mind? Omission. We know the ugliest demon our girls face, Males said. We just don’t want to talk about it.

“Violence in the home is the Number 1 cause of injury to females,” Males said. “This issue is too important to trivialize, but the media gloss right over it.”

Read more.

With the recent panic about the salmonella poisonings resulting from tainted peanut butter, The Star Press (Central Indiana) ran a story about moms who struggle with deciding whether or not to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their children — once a household staple for meals and snacks.

Who better to quell this fear than a sociologist?

It’s reasonable for parents to react strongly to the initial news of the recalls, said Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California, but unnecessarily avoiding peanut butter in the long run could teach children to be afraid of food.

Many more children will die from being hit by lightning than tainted peanut butter, said Glassner, author of The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food is Wrong.

“Are you going to prohibit your child from going outside every time it rains?” he asked. “If you’re rational, what you’ll do is, if there’s lightning outside, you’ll keep them in, and when that’s done, you let them go out safely and go to school in the rain. I think this is the same thing. It’s very reasonable to take peanut butter off the menu until we knew what was going on, but then it’s not anymore.”

Read more.

USA Today ran a story yesterday about a new federally funded ad campaign about marriage. Reporter Sharon Jayson writes, “Marriage has turned into quite a quandary for many young adults. Should they or shouldn’t they? Can they escape divorce? Will moving in together forestall a breakup? These conflicted feelings haven’t gone without notice in Washington.”

The latest statistics have caused some concern among policymakers…

The average age at first marriage is now almost 26 for women and 28 for men. And a growing percentage of Americans aren’t marrying at all: Provisional federal statistics released Tuesday report 7.1 marriages per 1,000 people in 2008, down from 10 per 1,000 in 1986.

This new campaign seeks to change that… with the help of a sociologist….

Faced with such numbers, the federal government is funding a $5 million national media campaign that launches this month, extolling the virtues of marriage for those ages 18 to 30.

“We’re not telling people ‘Get married’ but ‘Don’t underestimate the benefits of marriage,’ ” says Paul Amato, a Pennsylvania State University sociologist and adviser to the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center, which is spearheading the campaign.

The resource center, a federally funded virtual clearinghouse, works under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families.

Research suggests a bevy of benefits for those who marry, including better health, greater wealth and more happiness for the couple, and improved well-being for children.

Amato’s comments:

“These are people who are in the prime marrying age. A lot of them have not had good role models about how to have a successful marriage,” says Amato, co-author of the 2007 book Alone Together: How Marriage in America Is Changing.

“Marriage has become more optional, and it’s a different world out there. That’s why we think it’s important to focus on this group of young people, because the rules are less clear.”

Read more.

The New York Times blog City Room, ran a story this week about a sociologist’s new book about graffiti…

Gregory J. Snyder, a Baruch College sociologist, spent years hanging out with graffiti writers, earning their trust and conducting scores of interviews. The new book based on his studies, “Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York’s Urban Underground,” reveals that he became more than an observer in that decade and a half: On very few occasions he wrote graffiti himself, scrawling his tag perhaps seven times.

The books discusses the origin of graffiti culture as well as the diversity amongst those who engage in in…

Professor Snyder, 40, argues that while graffiti culture emerged around the same time as hip-hop, in the early 1970s, graffiti in fact comes from a variety of cultural sources:

Whatever their class, race, ethnicity, religion, or age, writers define themselves not by what they look like, or what language they speak, or what clothes they wear, but by what they do. Their identities are as writers first, and as members of ethnic, religious, and other subgroups second.

He adds, “In its purest form, graffiti is a democratic art form that revels in the American Dream.”

The book, just published by New York University Press, argues that graffiti culture has, in some ways, been uniquely democratic. “What is lost sometimes in the cacophony of the debate over whether graffiti is art or vandalism is that when it’s art, it is free art,” he writes. “You don’t need money, or special knowledge, or the right outfit, or a car, or an ID to see it. This is why the graffiti subculture has inspired such a diversity of young people.”

Snyder addresses the where and why…

A provocative map in the book points out that unlike other “quality of life” crimes, graffiti does not tend to be focused in poor neighborhoods with high rates of violent crime. Professor Snyder writes:

Graffiti writers write in order to get fame and respect for their deeds, and therefore they write in places where their work is more likely to be seen by their intended demographic. It is not the amount of disorder that determines a good spot to write graffiti, but the number of potential viewers and the unlikelihood that the graffiti will be painted over. These spots tends to be where young people from all over the city are likely to congregate, and thus the East Village, the Lower East Side, and SoHo are the places where most of the illegal New York City graffiti can be found. These are not poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Indeed, he adds, “Despite all of the negativity associated with graffiti, it remains one of SoHo’s selling points, literally.”

Read more.

US News & World Report presents the findings from a new study suggesting that when the economy is in a significant downturn, members of minority groups are more likely to be the victims of crime than others. The study, from sociologist Karen Heimer and criminologist Janet Lauritsen makes use of longitudinal data to establish the trend beyond our current recession…

National crime statistics from 1973 to 2005 show an increase in violent, non-lethal crime against blacks and Latinos during and after periods of recession, according to research that was scheduled for presentation Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Chicago.

“Minorities experience substantially higher rates of violent victimization than non-Latino whites in the United States,” researcher Karen Heimer, a University of Iowa sociology professor, said in a news release issued by her school. “Our study shows that the higher rates of poverty, urban residence and differential age distributions of non-Latino blacks and Latinos help to explain these groups’ higher victimization rates.”

By knowing this trend, law enforcement officials, criminal justice policy-makers and those who offer help and services to victims can better prepare against fluctuations in crime during the current recession, said Heimer, who worked on the study with Janet Lauritsen, a professor in the criminology and criminal justice department of the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Read more.

Yesterday the Columbus Dispatch ran a story exploring whether thefts and break-ins rise in hard times – the answer is yes, but it may not be clearly linked to the state of the economy. Reporter Elizabeth Gibson calls on sociologist Richard Rosenfeld for a more in-depth interpretation of this trend.

The paper reports:

More people struggling with the economy means more people turning to crime just to put bread on the table. Right? It’s poetic, but police, economists and criminologists say it’s neither that simple nor that dramatic.

“Everybody thinks it’s just a law of nature, but that’s just not true. There are a lot of things more powerful than the economy, operating all the time,” said David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention at the John Jay College of Criminal Studies in New York.

The buzz on the street is that car break-ins and petty thefts are on the rise, prompting some residents to beef up their block-watch programs. But crime actually has been going down or staying stable in many central Ohio communities.

But sociologist Richard Rosenfeld presents a more nuanced argument as to why this trend might occur…

Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said a subtle increase in crime will deepen with the economy. It’s not that desperate people turn to a life of crime, he said; it’s that existing criminals can make more money in a down economy as demand for cheap stolen goods rises.

“It’s anecdotal so far,” he said. “But when the numbers come out, I do expect an increase in crime over the next few years.”

The Columbus Dispatch emphasizes that among academics, the verdict is still out on this link…

Read more.

Yesterday USA Today reported on new research out of Michigan State University suggesting that many students who apply for and receive early admission to the college of their choice regret the decision. The newspaper presents this study as further evidence that high school students should avoid the early-admission rush so they will not regret the decision later in life.

Bad timing is the culprit. “Many young people are being pressured to making college choices before they are developmentally ready,” says Michigan State University sociologist Barbara Schneider, author of a report released today that examines the psychological and social implications of admission policies. Though she says that case “has yet to be made empirically,” she cites her forthcoming research suggesting “students who make these choices very early, without having opportunities to explore other options, (in their 20s) report some dissatisfaction with their college choices and lives.”

Although it looks as though this needs to be fleshed-out more before any definitive claims can be made, USA Today found additional anecdotal support for the idea…

David Hawkins of the non-profit National Association for College Admission Counseling says the findings support some members’ concerns that students are being rushed. The group’s 2005 survey found that 25% of responding colleges accept some applicants before they start their senior year. Some recruiters have waived application fees or offered priority housing to students who apply as juniors. The group now bars colleges from admitting a student until after they get a junior year transcript. Harvard, Stanford and other selective schools have softened binding early-admission policies so that admitted students could apply elsewhere, too.

Read more.

ScienceDaily.com ran a press release yesterday on new research in the journal Sociology of Health and Illness which looks at reproductive responses of parents of children with genetic conditions or impairments. The study suggests that these parents “may avoid the need to choose whether to undergo pre-natal testing or to abort future pregnancies by simply avoiding subsequent pregnancy altogether.”

Parents are ‘choosing not to choose’, researcher Dr Susan Kelly, who is based at the Egenis research centre at the University of Exeter, suggests, in a ‘reflection of deep-seated ambivalence’ about the options and the limitations of new reproductive technologies.

According to ‘Choosing not to choose: reproductive responses of parents of children with genetic conditions or impairments’ published in the journal Sociology of Health and Illness, more than two-thirds of parents in the USA-based study chose not to have any more children rather than accepting tests to identify or avoid the birth of an affected child. Of the parents who did have further children, a majority chose not to make use of prenatal screening or testing.

The researchers note:

“The choices associated with prenatal screening and genetic testing practices … were for most parents shaped by a heightened sense of the risks inherent in reproduction and of the limits of medicine’s ability to predict and control them,” says Dr Kelly.

“Faced with this set of choices, many parents chose to avoid future reproduction. Many parents did not perceive the information they understood to be available from prenatal testing to be useful or relevant to their sense of responsibility and control. Experiencing the birth of an affected child for some parents exposed the limitations of medical knowledge and practice, and placed medicine alongside other forms of interpretation and evidence. Interventions such as genetic testing for many were associated with uncertainty and a loss of control for parents as responsible caretakers and decision makers.”

Read more.

Famous Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman made headlines recently for his academic pursuits. A sociology degree of all things! And according to the Dallas Morning News, one of his remaining courses at UCLA was on race and ethnicity…

The Associated Press reports:

The Hall of Fame quarterback says he’s passed his two final college courses and will graduate in June from UCLA — 20 years after he left for the NFL. The Dallas Morning News reported Tuesday that Aikman is getting a bachelor’s degree in sociology and will participate in UCLA’s graduation ceremonies. The 42-year-old Fox Sports broadcaster says he’s “finally taking care of unfinished business.”

The Dalls Morning News noted:

Aikman had planned to make the walk two decades earlier. But the matter of the April 1989 NFL draft came along. The Cowboys insisted that the first player selected get to Dallas as soon as possible to help rejuvenate their floundering franchise. The two sociology classes he was going to take that spring quarter would have to wait. Aikman never dreamt graduation would be delayed 20 years.

“Finally taking care of unfinished business,” Aikman said Monday, explaining why he took the necessary courses to secure his degree. “It was important to me.”

For this famous sociology major, I can’t help but wonder… why sociology?