A report released this week from the Council on Contemporary Families addresses recent childbearing trends among American women with commentary from University of Maryland sociologist Steven Martin.

Steven Martin explains:

• “Although fertility rose in 2006, we are NOT witnessing the start of another baby boom. But we have reached the level at which the population is reproducing itself without added immigration.
• Love, baby carriage, and no marriage? Almost all the increase in births was accounted for by non-marital births, although educated women and very rich women, who are more likely to be married, also increased their birth rates.
• There has been a significant rise in the proportion of 3 and 4 child families among the super-rich, but this is confined to such a small sliver of the population that it does not affect national fertility rates.
• Women are increasingly delaying childbearing, and the fertility rates of educated and uneducated women seem to be undergoing a slow convergence.
• Higher birth rates of immigrants account for only a small part of the recent fertility rise.
• American women are more successful than women in most other industrial countries in being able to pursue higher education and develop careers without foregoing childbearing.” — (full report)

A New York Times article on the recent steroid scandals among professional baseball players seeks explanations from sociologists as to the nature of male friendships and the implications for those bonds when trainers testifying against players. Evoking Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, this depiction of male friendship benefits from a sociological perspective.

“‘These are moments when there’s a clash between two conflicting values connected to masculinity,’ said Michael S. Kimmel, a sociologist at State University of New York at Stony Brook and author of ‘The Gendered Society.’ ‘No. 1, you always do the right thing. And the second is, you never betray your friends.’”

“’There’s a tendency to protect a teammate or the organization, even at the expense of higher moral principles,’ said Faye L. Wachs, a professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona who specializes in sports sociology.”

Miller-McCune reports on University of Texas sociologist, Arthur Sakamoto’s new report on paying top dollar for the best service providers. Sakamoto cites the example of a top-rated prostate surgeon in the country having a potentially negligible difference from his colleague ranked 50th, while the difference in cost could be staggering. This, Sakamoto argues, is an example of how individuals seeking services will pay top dollar for a formally or informally ranked provider because of a lack of expertise on the part of the consumer.

“‘The top people in their fields are getting much higher salaries than they used to get,’ he said. ‘That’s most obvious among lawyers and doctors. But it also applies to the person who gave John Edwards his $200 haircut.’
Sakamoto believes that star-power phenomenon is one important reason economic inequality is growing within occupations — the subject of the just-published paper he co-wrote with ChangHwan Kim of the University of Minnesota. Usually, the term “wage inequality” brings to mind headlines about chief executive officers — unions like the AFL-CIO ruefully note that the average S&P 500 CEO averaged $15 million in total compensation in 2006. Sakamoto agrees the disparity between white-collar and blue-collar salaries is very much a reality, citing a 2002 study that reports the wage gap between high school graduates and college graduates increased 15 percent from 1979 to 1999.”

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education reports on the results of a new survey from the Pew Foundation which reveals Black perceptions of a deepening social split between poor and middle-class Blacks.

Sociologists Earl Wright and Darnell Hunt were asked to weight in on the results.

“We’ve seen over the past 20 years now a rolling back of many of the advances and gains of the civil rights movement, plain and simple. Attacks on affirmative action, attacks on welfare programs and not only welfare programs, but programs designed to benefit individuals who are among the working poor. And, add to this, the deteriorating economic structure in America,” says Dr. Earl Wright, the chair of the sociology department at Texas Southern University in Houston.

“My reading of that is that they probably are worse off. The economy has tanked. Look at the news right now; the housing market, the financial markets, the Iraq war has siphoned off resources away from the infrastructure and the domestic economy. I think that’s a reflection of what people are really feeling,” says Dr. Darnell Hunt, a professor of sociology and director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African-American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Miami Herald reports the recent recommendation from sociologist Michele Dillon to use lent as a time of financial sacrifice.

“Lent is traditionally a period of self-denial, so this might a good time to also focus on economic austerity, said Michele Dillon, a University of New Hampshire sociology professor who studies religion, particularly Roman Catholicism.

‘What’s different this year is many people who feel under economic pressure to give up things can at least use the season of Lent as an opportunity,’ Dillon said.

‘They can think, “I’m also doing this for religious purposes as well as lifestyle and economic purposes.””’

Playbill recently announced that sociologist Eric Klinenberg‘s 2002 book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago will hit the stage on February 21st in at the Live Bait Theater featuring actors from the Pegasus Players.

Playbill writes: According to Pegasus, “this moving new play looks at the heat wave of 1995 which took the lives of 739 Chicagoans. Chicago playwright and published author, Steve Simoncic recreates the hot air that swirled between medical examiners, health officials, reporters, mayoral staff, and sweaty Chicagoans.” It “examines one of the country’s worst weather-related disasters from all perspectives, creating a vivid portrait of a city in crisis, but with its resources and humanity firmly intact.”

On February 1st, Newsweek covered the release of Sudhir Venkatesh‘s latest book, Gang Leader for a Day. The book details Venkatesh’s experiences studying the lives of crack dealers in some of the most notorious housing projects in Chicago.

Newsweek writer Jessica Bennett remarks:
“For the most part, Venkatesh atones for his clichéd reflections with raw detail of what life inside these projects—at the height of the crack epidemic—is really like. And he’s not oblivious to his own naiveté; he notes frequently that life in the projects is vastly different from his own upbringing in the suburbs of Southern California. “

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, David Grusky, sociology professor and founding director of Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, announces the inaugural publication of Pathways, a new quarterly magazine dedicated to contemporary public policy. This issue features essays from candidates Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama on how each would approach a new ‘war on poverty.’

What the candidates say:
“The candidates’ policy recommendations include: tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit (Obama), creating at least 5 million “green collar” jobs (Clinton) and repealing the Bush tax cut for families earning more than $200,000 per year (Edwards).”

Inside Higher Ed recently published an interview with Kathleen A. Bogle, assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at LaSalle University, on her new book Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus which explores the ‘hookup culture’ of college life through the study of two East Coast universities. Her in-depth interviews reveal varying effects for men and women and the relationship of this pattern of behavior to issues of alcohol use and sexual assault. Risky sex? No as much as you might think…