According to a recent New York Times article, white children will soon be in the minority in the United States.  In fact, a new report based on Census 2010 data showed that the population of white children fell by 4.3 million (10%) in the last decade, while the population of  Hispanic and Asian children grew by 5.5 million (38%).

The Census Bureau had originally forecast that 2023 would be the tipping point for the minority population under the age of 18. But rapid growth among Latinos, Asians and people of more than one race has pushed it earlier, to 2019, according to William Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution who wrote the report about the shift, which has far-reaching political and policy implications.

The largest increase was among Hispanics, whose birth rates are much higher than non-Hispanic whites, in large part because the U.S. white population is aging.

As a result, America’s future will include a far more diverse young population, and a largely white older generation. The contrast raises important policy questions. Will the older generation pay for educating a younger generation that looks less like itself? And while the young population is a potential engine of growth for the economy, will it be a burden if it does not have access to adequate education?

As the Supreme Court considers a case regarding discrimination at Wal-Mart, a key issue is sociologist William Bielby’s research.

Plaintiffs in the class-action suit, who claim that Wal-Mart owes billions of dollars to as many as 1.5 million women who they say were unfairly treated on pay and promotions, enlisted the support of William T. Bielby, an academic specializing in “social framework analysis.”

Bielby concluded that two aspects of Wal-Mart’s culture might be behind pay and other disparities.

One was a centralized personnel policy. The other was allowing subjective decisions by managers in the field. Together, he said, those factors allowed stereotypes to infect personnel choices, making “decisions about compensation and promotion vulnerable to gender bias

Now, a main question in the case is whether Bielby should have been allowed to use general research to draw specific conclusions in the preliminary proceedings.

“Bielby made a conclusion that he had no basis to make,” said Laurens Walker, one of two University of Virginia professors who coined the term for the analysis almost 25 years ago. “He hasn’t done the research.”

But a brief supporting the plaintiffs from the American Sociological Association said that Professor Bielby’s work explaining how Wal-Mart’s policies may have led to discrimination “is well within our discipline’s accepted methods.”

Click here for the full story from the New York Times.

Last fall, 27-year-old Ohad Ben-Yaakov was injured in an accident at his part-time job, and he died after two weeks in a coma. Ben-Yaakov wasn’t married, nor was he in a relationship. No woman was pregnant with his child. Nevertheless, his devastated parents believe it’s not too late for them to become the grandparents of his offspring. And because they live in Israel, the world capital of in-vitro fertilization and a country that regularly pushes the envelope on reproductive technologies, they might get their wish.

No, this isn’t science fiction.  It’s reality in Israeli, and  Tablet recently explored an Israeli court’s consideration of whether parents have the right to use their dead son’s frozen sperm to create a grandchild.

It’s not surprising that Israel, a society that is at once rooted in ancient faith and deeply invested in cutting-edge technology, has pioneered futuristic forms of procreation. The biblical emphasis on fruitfulness, when compounded by the legacy of the Holocaust and the demographic issues shaping the Middle East, have made Israeli society and public policy exceptionally pro-natalist. The country is aggressive in pushing the boundaries of reproductive technology.

Some scholars worry about how these boundaries are being pushed, though.

“It used to be, God forbid you were infertile, it was sad and terrible and tragic, but you came to terms with it,” says Susan Martha Kahn, a Harvard anthropologist and author of Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel. “Now you can never come to terms with it. There’s no resolution. Some of these women go through round after round, 12, 15 rounds of IVF, and it doesn’t work. That is the eclipse of an entire young life spent trying to get pregnant.

Vardit Ravitsky, a professor in the Bioethics Programs at the Université de Montréal Faculty of Medicine, adds:

“Where we are with reproductive technologies is a result of the fact that we have refused to accept infertility as a fact . . . Today, the idea that I have a right to have a genetic child is much more accepted than in the past. To extend that one generation to genetic grandchildren maybe is not that farfetched.”

As the author of the article thoughtfully asks, when should a tragedy be accepted rather than combated with technology? Who gets to decide?  For more questions and discussion, see the full article.

Sociologist Charles A. Gallagher recently wrote an Op-Ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer that expressed concern about the belief that racial equality has been achieved in the U.S.

With some minor caveats, what has moved to center stage in our national dialogue on race is the idea that the goals of the civil rights movement have been achieved, with Exhibit A being the election of the first black man as president of the United States. White Americans can point to President Obama as proof of this new racial egalitarianism, cementing the widespread belief that we are indeed a color-blind nation and that white privilege is a prerogative of the past.

And that’s not all.

Consider these figures from polls of white Americans: 71 percent were satisfied with the way society treats blacks (Gallup 2007); 43 percent said that racial discrimination toward blacks is not serious; 55 percent believe that racism is not widespread, but 42 percent believe racism against whites to be widespread (Gallup, 2007, 2008). A 2010 New York Times poll found that close to half, 48 percent of whites, agreed with the statement that “discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”

Gallagher counters the idea that America has become a color-blind nation by explaining that every quality of life indicator (on health, employment, incarceration, longevity, etc.) varies by race, “with racial minorities being on the short end of the stick.”

Yet, with many Americans viewing color-blindness as an accepted social fact, race-conscious policies and actions may be construed as reverse racism against whites.

I have witnessed such pushback, almost exclusively from my white students, when discussing racial inequality in the university classroom. Students challenge any talk about institutional racism with the “What about Obama?” retort, which implies we are beyond race because there is a black man in the White House. This is a fair question from 18-year-old college students, many of whom were raised in almost exclusively white, middle-class suburbs. But we must realize that for many whites of all ages, “What about Obama?” is now the default answer to questions about racial equality in the United States.

Check out the full Op-Ed here.

Many people view aggressive behavior as the behavior of social outcasts.  But, a new study covered by LiveScience (and many other news sources) found that popular adolescents, except for those at the very top of the social ladder, are the ones who are more likely to bully their peers.

It isn’t aggression that makes kids more popular. But becoming more popular makes kids more aggressive, said study author Bob Faris, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis — suggesting that those kids see tormenting others as a way to gain and cement status.

Robert Faris and his co-author Diane Felmlee used data on 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th graders from 19 public schools in North Carolina.  Rather than just looking at the individual traits of bullies, they looked at the social networks in which bullying takes place.

“For the most part, we find that status increases aggression,” Faris told LiveScience….The gradual increase of aggression with popularity continues until you reach the top 2 percent of popular students, Faris said. At that point, aggression suddenly drops off. The top 2 percent are even less aggressive than the kids at the very bottom of the heap, Faris said.

The sociologists also complicated this story by examining gender.

On the whole, kids with many friends of the other gender are 16 percent less aggressive toward their same-gender peers, Faris said. Schools where boys and girls mix and mingle are also less aggressive on the whole. But in schools where mixed-gender friendships are rare, the few kids who do have them tend to be more aggressive, Faris said.

These cross-gender ambassadors (Faris calls them “gender bridges”) are rare, Faris cautioned, so it’s harder to be certain of the results. What may be happening, he said, is that gender bridge kids are proportionately more popular, thanks to their ability to connect the guys to the girls and vice versa.

See LiveScience for the complete story.

In November, Arizona joined California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nebraska, Texas, and Washington by banning affirmative action in higher education.  Miller-McCune recently reflected on how these bans are failing to “keep pace with the changing demographics” of the United States.

Take the case of California, as reported in Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, a new book on the state’s voter-approved ban on affirmative action known as Proposition 209. In 1994, four years before the measure went into effect, when colleges were giving a boost to applicants based on race, 38 percent of high school graduates and 18 percent of University of California students were African American, Latino or Native American. In 2008, after a decade with the ban, these minorities represented nearly half of high school graduates but only 20 percent of UC students.

“By stepping back from its commitment to affirmative action, we believe California and other states and colleges have contributed to an increase in racial and ethnic stratification,” wrote co-editors Eric Grodsky, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, and, Michal Kurlaender, a professor of education at the University of California, Davis. Within college types, [underrepresented minority] students tended to shift from higher- to lower-quality colleges and universities. … African American and Latino undergraduates in the state of California may be worse off now than they were 10 years ago.”

Peter Hinrichs, an economist at Georgetown, also weighs in on the effects of these bans.

Taking a broad look at college enrollment and racial composition across the country between 1995 and 2003, economist Peter Hinrichs found that affirmative action bans have no effect on the typical four-year college or the typical student. But at public universities in the top 50 of the U.S. News & World Report rankings, he found, the numbers of blacks and Latinos typically drop 30 percent and 27 percent, respectively, after affirmative action bans are imposed, compared to pre-ban enrollments, while the numbers of whites and Asian Americans increase 5 percent to 6 percent.

Over a broader range — the top 115 public and private colleges in the U.S. News rankings — the numbers of black and Latino students drop 17 percent and 16 percent, respectively, at schools with affirmative action bans, Hinrichs found.

Some supporters of the bans claim that many students who are ethnic and racial minorities attend mediocre high schools and are thus not equipped for the academic rigors of college.  But, social scientists have found otherwise.

A 2010 study co-authored by Marta Tienda, a Princeton University sociologist, showed that black and Latino students who were admitted to the University of Texas at Austin on the basis of their high school rankings consistently got as good or better grades in college than the affluent whites with higher SAT scores whom they replaced. The minority students also were equally or more likely to graduate in four years.

Read more about these  studies and attempts to replace affirmative action laws in the full article.

Arab News recently covered the two books that sociologist Asef Bayat published this year.  In them, he uses social movement theory to explain how everyday actions create change in the Middle East.

While many believe radical Islam expresses the interests of the poor, Bayat has observed that the urban poor are generally reluctant to support any kind of political movement. The poor cannot afford to be ideological, but they are interested in organizations and associations that can help them and answer their needs. Their political opinion is not linked to political Islam, but in a poor people’s “nonmovement,” which is the main form of activism in the Muslim Middle East.

Instead of organized politics, everyday life turns into “street politics.”

The concept of “street politics” is closely tied to the economic situation prevalent in the Middle East. Bayat rightly points out that the streets of Cairo, Tehran or Jakarta are jam-packed with people “compelled by the poverty or dispossession” to work, socialize and spend their day in the public spaces. Streets allow people to come into contact with each other and share their problems and this can turn a small manifestation into a massive demonstration. Revolutions and protest movements originate on the streets. Therefore, authorities are often weary of the potential danger of street politics, which often reflect the feelings and opinions of a nation.

The organizations and associations that work to meet the needs of the poor people’s “nonmovement” are also covered by Bayat.

Bayat rightfully highlights the positive role played by Muslim movements who provided health care, education and financial aid. This is the case of the Rifah Party in Turkey, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria and how Hezbollah filled the vacuum triggered by the total absence of the state in Lebanon. The growing number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) confirms the vital role they play especially in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Sudan. Social Islam and NGOization “despite their flaws, appear to have become the dominant forms of activism that now contribute to improving some aspects of people’s lives in Middle Eastern countries,” writes Bayat.

Americans love marriage.  The wedding industry is worth over 40 billion dollars, and TV shows and magazines continually cover stories of romantic proposals, show us how women chose their wedding dresses, and highlight when and where celebrities tied the knot.  But, TIME recently confirmed a sociological story: marriage is changing.

In 1978, 28% of people surveyed thought that marriage was becoming obsolete.  Today, a new study conducted by the Pew Research Center and TIME revealed that 40% of people think it’s obsolete.

Even more surprising: overwhelmingly, Americans still venerate marriage enough to want to try it. About 70% of us have been married at least once, according to the 2010 Census. The Pew poll found that although 44% of Americans under 30 believe marriage is heading for extinction, only 5% of those in that age group do not want to get married. Sociologists note that Americans have a rate of marriage — and of remarriage — among the highest in the Western world. (In between is a divorce rate higher than that of most countries in the European Union.) We spill copious amounts of ink and spend copious amounts of money being anxious about marriage, both collectively and individually. We view the state of our families as a symbol of the state of our nation, and we treat marriage as a personal project, something we work at and try to perfect. “Getting married is a way to show family and friends that you have a successful personal life,” says Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. “It’s like the ultimate merit badge.”

This badge of merit has changed over the past few decades.  In 1960, 70% of American adults were married.  Now, about half are.  Also, wealthy, highly educated people are now more likely to get married/be married than those with lower levels of education and socioeconomic statuses.

The change is mostly a numbers game. Since more women than men have graduated from college for several decades, it’s more likely than it used to be that a male college graduate will meet, fall in love with, wed and share the salary of a woman with a degree. Women’s advances in education have roughly paralleled the growth of the knowledge economy, so the slice of the family bacon she brings home will be substantial.

These changes would suggest that the drive to finish college would explain why fewer people are married.  But, in the last two decades, people with a high school education began to get married later than college graduates.

What has brought about the switch? It’s not any disparity in desire. According to the Pew survey, 46% of college graduates want to get married, and 44% of the less educated do. “Fifty years ago, if you were a high school dropout [or] if you were a college graduate or a doctor, marriage probably meant more or less the same thing,” says Conley [a sociologist at New York University]. “Now it’s very different depending where you are in society.” Getting married is an important part of college graduates’ plans for their future. For the less well educated, he says, it’s often the only plan.

Promising publicly to be someone’s partner for life used to be something people did to lay the foundation of their independent life. It was the demarcation of adulthood. Now it’s more of a finishing touch, the last brick in the edifice, sociologists believe. “Marriage is the capstone for both the college-educated and the less well educated,” says Johns Hopkins’ Cherlin. “The college-educated wait until they’re finished with their education and their careers are launched. The less educated wait until they feel comfortable financially.

And as they wait, they are increasingly likely to pass the time under the same roof.

Cohabitation is on the rise not just because of the economy. It’s so commonplace these days that less than half the country thinks living together is a bad idea. Couples who move in together before marrying don’t divorce any less often, say studies, although that might change as the practice becomes more widespread. In any case, academic analysis doesn’t seem to be as compelling to most people as the example set by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Or as splitting the rent.

But,

“Marriage is still the way Americans tend to do long-term, stable partnerships,” says Cherlin. “We have the shortest cohabiting relationships of any wealthy country in the world. In some European countries, we see couples who live together for decades.” To this day, only 6% of American children have parents who live together without being married.

This story is further nuanced by differences in class and views about what is best for children.  Check out the full article!

The website that many of you will visit after this one (or may have already visited!) is providing sociologists with new research opportunities.

Andreas Wimmer and Kevin Lewis used facebook to study friendships among college freshman and found that race’s impact on friendships may be overstated.

“Sociologists have long maintained that race is the strongest predictor of whether two Americans will socialize,” says lead author Andreas Wimmer, professor of sociology at UCLA. “But we’ve found that birds of a feather don’t always flock together. Whom you get to know in your everyday life, where you live, and your country of origin or social class can provide stronger grounds for forging friendships than a shared racial background.”

To reach these conclusions, Wimmer and Lewis studied the social networks of college freshmen by examining tagged photos on facebook.

True to past research, the sociologists initially saw same-race friendships develop rapidly: White students befriended each other one-and-a-half times more frequently than would be expected by chance, Latino students befriended each other four-and-a-half times more frequently, and African American students befriended each other eight times more frequently. But when the researchers dug deeper, race appeared to be less important than a number of other factors in forging friendships.

“Much of what at first appeared to be same-race preference, for instance, ultimately proved to be preference for students of the same ethnic background,” Lewis says. “Once we started controlling for the attraction of shared ethnic backgrounds or countries of origin, the magnitude of racial preference was cut almost in half.”

While Wimmer and Lewis stress that racial discrimination is still a problem, they believe past research may have exaggerated the role of race in social relationships.  Instead, social and physical constraints play a bigger role.

To read the entire article, click here.

Many of our posts focus on colleagues’ research, but teaching is also newsworthy.  The student newspaper at the University of South Carolina recently ran an article about an upcoming sociology course at USC—Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame.

The professor, Mathieu Deflem, explained the idea behind the course:

“We’re going to look at Lady Gaga as a social event,” Deflem said. “So it’s not the person, and it’s not the music. It’s more this thing out there in society that has 10 million followers on Facebook and six million on Twitter. I mean, that’s a social phenomenon. It’s a global social phenomenon. So the central question of the course is, this fame, which is ironically also the theme of her first records, how can it be accounted for? What are some of the mechanisms and some of the conditions of Lady Gaga’s rise to popularity?”

Deflem added that another key question of the course is, “What does it mean, and how does a person become famous?”

Deflem usually teaches criminology, the sociology of law, and policing, but he is excited to examine the popular social phenomenon in a sociological light.

In the beginning, the course will deal with the sociology of popularity in general. The first couple weeks probably won’t be about Lady Gaga at all. But then the Gaga scenario will be used as a real-life example detailing sociological traits. More specific information about the course content can be found at gagacourse.net – a site Deflem has already created for the class.