Science Daily highlighted a longitudinal study of aging and managing illness in a Florida retirement community:

Eva Kahana, Robson Professor of Sociology and director of the Elderly Care Research Center at Case Western Reserve, reported the findings from interviews with 100 cancer survivors. These survivors are part of a longitudinal study of 1,107 elderly adults living in a retirement community.

This study calls attention to generally accepting, timid behaviors that elderly patients report about their interactions with the healthcare system while battling cancer. Nevertheless the very same older adults offer advice to other older cancer patients to take a more activist stand and become advocates in their care.

This finding of the study overturns the notion that elderly patients are disinterested and disempowered health consumers, Kahana said.

In-depth interviews about their cancer experiences revealed elderly survivors became advocates for others battling cancer, though they had taken a more passive stance – “relying on physicians and family members” – during their own struggle. So…

The researchers said the findings suggest “a transition maybe occurring from passive to a more-active or even activist orientation due to the illness experience.”

The New York Times recently spoke to sociologist John Robert Warren about the effects of high school exit exams, now adopted in 26 states:

People who have studied the exams, which affect two-thirds of the nation’s public school students, say they often fall short of officials’ ambitious goals.

“The real pattern in states has been that the standards are lowered so much that the exams end up not benefiting students who pass them while still hurting the students who fail them,” said John Robert Warren, an expert on exit exams and a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

“The exams are just challenging enough to reduce the graduation rate,” Professor Warren added, “but not challenging enough to have measurable consequences for how much students learn or for how prepared they are for life after high school.”

Read the rest of the article.

The Santa Barbara Independent reports:

In 2004, demonstrations and protests in favor of marriage equality were observed by civil rights activists and same-sex couples across the United States. These acts were largely spurred by the mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, and his act of defiance in ordering the County Clerk to issue marriage licenses, against California’s Defense of Marriage Act. This was seen as a sign of things to come by many optimistic activists until 2008 when Proposition 8 banned gay marriage in California.

The story draws on Verta Taylor and colleagues’ study in the American Sociological Review:

In the article, Taylor alludes to the pivotal role of the 2004 protests and shows the likely historical significance by saying: “The San Francisco weddings served as a public and dramatic tactic to claim basic civil rights for gay and lesbian people … Our research shows that the month-long wedding protest sparked other forms of political actions, including legal challenges and the formation of social movement organizations that ignited a statewide campaign for marriage equality in California.”

Check out abstracts from the December 2009 issue of the American Sociological Review.

The San Francisco Chronicle explains Yahoo Inc.’s new effort to integrate social science into computer science:

In the last year, Yahoo Labs has bolstered its ranks of social scientists, adding highly credentialed cognitive psychologists, economists and ethnographers from top universities around the world. At approximately 25 people, it’s still the smallest group within the research division, but one of the fastest growing.

The recruitment effort reflects a growing realization at Yahoo, the second most popular U.S. online site and search engine, that computer science alone can’t answer all the questions of the modern Web business. As the novelty of the Internet gives way, Yahoo and other 21st century media businesses are discovering they must understand what motivates humans to click and stick on certain features, ads and applications – and dismiss others out of hand.

Yahoo Labs is taking a scientific approach to these questions, leveraging its massive window onto user behavior to set up a series of controlled experiments (identifying information is always masked) and employing classic ethnography techniques like participant observation and interviews.

Some, such as computer scientist John Seely Brown, praise Yahoo’s innovation:

He complimented Yahoo Labs’ efforts, both because increasingly few companies pursue basic research in Silicon Valley – and fewer still are applying a sociologist’s eye to a medium that is increasingly becoming a social phenomenon.

“Today, you really have to take much more seriously what captures attention,” he said. “Yahoo’s next competitive advantage may be taking a different attitude toward this … than Google, which tends to look at what they do as engineering efforts.”

But not all of Silicon Valley is convinced:

However, there are risks when a for-profit company adopts an academic approach, which calls for publishing research regardless of the outcome.

Immigration researcher, Marta Tienda, was recently profiled on NJ.com:

She is one of the world’s foremost sociologists, an achievement she insists has little to do with genius and everything to do with “trying harder than everybody else.”

“What I bring to the table is proof that anybody can make it if they do the work,” says Tienda, 59. “I want what I am and where I came from to resonate with people, particularly young Hispanic women.” …

Tienda’s road to excellence began as a child migrant worker in the farm fields of the Midwest, where she picked vegetables alongside her three sisters, brother and her father, an illegal immigrant from Mexico.

It is a journey that involved loss, sacrifice and decades of 18-hour workdays.

At college, she developed a passion for social change:

Tienda studied Spanish literature on a full scholarship at the University of Michigan. Her plan to become a teacher was derailed by a summer job working with immigrants. Tienda discovered she could mediate change, for instance, when she convinced growers it was in their best interest to provide day care for workers. She vowed to become “a problem solver.”

She recognized that sociological research could be a tool to help improve the lives of Hispanic people in the U.S.:

For more than 20 years, Tienda has done just that, although her research has expanded to cover other minorities.

Her seminal work, “The Hispanic Population of the United States,” was published in 1987 and is still used in college classrooms. Analyzing demographic patterns over a 20-year period, it was the first authoritative description of this country’s diverse Hispanic population. It led to a professorship for Tienda at the University of Chicago.

There, she helped rebuild the population studies office into a world-renowned research center and eventually became chairwoman of the sociology department. She collaborated with Israeli sociologist Haya Stier on another benchmark study — “The Color of Opportunity: Pathways to Family, Welfare and Work,” published in 2001. Based on a survey of Chicago’s racially diverse, inner city poor, it documented ways in which race limited economic opportunity.

Her strengths, colleagues say, lie in the breadth of her knowledge, her grasp of the mathematics that drive quantitative demographic research and, of course, that prodigious energy.

The Bakersfield Californian welcomes 2010 by reflecting on the past decade:

Naming this decade — and we must, because we are Americans, and we name things — isn’t going be so easy. Some decades, at least in retrospect, are easy calls. The Gay Nineties. The Roaring Twenties. The Psychedelic Sixties. But naming the ’00s is a challenge best postponed, because nothing we’ve considered rings with authenticity.

So,

All we can do is look at the evidence that historians and sociologists not yet born will consider. And one thing, beyond the bookend disasters of 9/11 and the Great Recession, stands out: Technology reshaped who we are and how we interact. Social media took hold of America in the last few years of the ’00s, with 350 million users on Facebook, 100 million on MySpace, and 18 million using Twitter.

Sociologist Rhonda Dugan weighs in:

“I’d call it the Decade of Self-Importance,” she said. “Everyone is networking online, but they’re not doing it just to find jobs. They’re doing it to talk about themselves. The ‘Me Decade’ was all about me. Now it’s about me and telling everyone about it. I use Facebook myself. And now I’m asking myself, ‘Why am I posting that I ran a half-marathon?’ We’ve become more narcissistic, and social media has helped push it along.”

Retired sociologist Russell Travis also comments:

“I’d call it the PTSD — the Post-Traumatic Stress Decade,” he said. That name “reflects the cumulative stress from the aftermath of two ongoing wars and the many coming home afflicted with (real) PTSD; the aftermath of a seriously tanked economy; … and the aftermath of the 2001 bombing of the Twin Towers.”

Maybe this is how we’ve come to deal with events just too big and too profound to process — by blocking out the wider world and turning inward, going to our own, personal safe place where the mundane trumps the abstract, the ordinary blocks out the incomprehensible, and 140 characters (or less) just about covers it.

A USA Today Op-Ed by Thomas Sander and Robert Putnam reveals a long-term consequence of unemployment:

Recent studies confirm the results of research during the Great Depression — unemployment badly frays a person’s ties with his community, sometimes permanently. After careful analysis of 20 years of monthly surveys tracking Americans’ social and political habits, our colleague Chaeyoon Lim of the University of Wisconsin has found that unemployed Americans are significantly less involved in their communities than their employed demographic twins. The jobless are less likely to vote, petition, march, write letters to editors, or even volunteer. They attend fewer meetings and serve less frequently as leaders in local organizations. Moreover, sociologist Cristobal Young’s research finds that the unemployed spend most of their increased free time alone.

These negative social consequences outlast the unemployment itself. Tracking Wisconsin 1957 high school graduates, sociologists Jennie Brand and Sarah Burgard found that in contrast to comparable classmates who were never unemployed, graduates who lost jobs, even briefly and early in their careers, joined community groups less and volunteered considerably less over their entire lives. And economist Andrew Clark, psychologist Richard Lucas and others found that, unlike almost any other traumatic life event, joblessness results in permanently lower levels of life satisfaction, even if the jobless later find jobs.

Equally disturbing, high unemployment rates reduce the social and civic involvement even of those still employed. Lim has found that Americans with jobs who live in states with high unemployment are less civically engaged than workers elsewhere. In fact, most of the civic decay in hard-hit communities is likely due not to the jobless dropping out, but to their still-employed neighbors dropping out.

Some possible explanations for this disturbing trend:

What might explain the civic withdrawal during recessions? The jobless shun socializing, shamed that their work was deemed expendable. Economic depression breeds psychological depression. The unemployed may feel that their employer has broken an implicit social contract, deflating any impulse to help others. Where unemployment is high, those still hanging onto their jobs might work harder for fear of further layoffs, thus crowding out time for civic engagement. Above all, in afflicted communities, the contagion of psychic depression and social isolation spreads more rapidly than joblessness itself.

The Sydney Morning Herald discusses the Copenhagen climate talks:

Polls have suggested that more than 80 per cent of Australians accept the fact of man-made climate change, and more than 70 per cent of people around the world want governments to give it greater priority.

With such a consensus, you would think we would all be on red alert, citizens and elected officials mobilised to do whatever necessary.

Yet global support for action has been described as “a mile wide but an inch deep” (a phrase first used to describe support for foreign development assistance). The majority may be concerned, but that’s where it stops.

Here comes the sociology:

Sociologists wouldn’t be surprised about what, in many ways, is classic “tragedy of the commons” inaction. The late American sociologist, Garrett Hardin, described the ecological damage done when herdsmen sharing pasture act in their own self-interest by putting too many cattle on the land, thereby destroying it for everyone, including themselves. In the case of climate change, shared ownership of the planet has to metamorphose into a sense of shared responsibility or we all stand to lose.

In Hardin’s pasture, it would be understandable if more were expected from the herdsman with the greatest number of cattle — in our case, the countries responsible for most emissions.

But there are sociological factors working against a sharing of responsibility. Countries fear they may end up taking too many risks; that the cost to them may be disproportionate; that “free-riders” will avoid doing anything. Such fears have dampened the political will to act on a threat viewed as global rather than national.

Moving ahead…

Hardin’s solution to the commons problem was ‘mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected”. But macro-level measures such as emissions targets, carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes may ultimately depend on changing personal attitudes and behaviour.

It’s all about hearts and minds. Leaders with foresight can legislate, but the biggest change will come if they can bring the people along with them; a shift in the public mindset inevitably reinforcing change in government and business.

The article also discusses the pyschology of climate change, so read more.

The New York Times reports on “soul-searching” in Turkey after the murder of a gay man last year:

For Ahmet Yildiz, a stocky and affable 26-year-old, the choice to live openly as a gay man proved deadly. Prosecutors say his own father hunted him down, traveling more than 600 miles from his hometown to shoot his son in an old neighborhood of Istanbul.

Mr. Yildiz was killed 16 months ago, the victim of what sociologists say is the first gay honor killing in Turkey to surface publicly. He was shot five times as he left his apartment to buy ice cream. A witness said dozens of neighbors watched the killing from their windows, but refused to come forward. His body remained unclaimed by his family, a grievous fate under Muslim custom.

A sociologist comments on this “honor killing”:

Until recently, so-called honor killings have been largely confined to women, who face being killed by male relatives for perceived grievances ranging from consensual sex outside of marriage to stealing a glance at a boy. A recent government survey estimated that one person dies every week in Istanbul as a result of honor killings, while the United Nations estimates the practice globally claims as many as 5,000 lives a year. In Turkey, relatives convicted in such killings are subject to life sentences.

A sociologist who studies honor killings, Mazhar Bagli, at Dicle University in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast, noted that tribal Kurdish families that kill daughters perceived to have dishonored them publicize the murders to help cleanse their shame.

But he said gay honor killings remained underground because a homosexual not only brought shame to his family, but also tainted the concept of male identity upon which the community’s social structure depended.

“Until now, gay honor killings have been invisible because homosexuality is taboo,” he said.

Gay rights groups argue that there is an increasingly open homophobia in Turkey.

Read more.

The New York Times reports:

In recent years, a growing number of teenagers have been dressing to articulate — or confound — gender identity and sexual orientation. Certainly they have been confounding school officials, whose responses have ranged from indifference to applause to bans.

Further:

Dress code conflicts often reflect a generational divide, with students coming of age in a culture that is more accepting of ambiguity and difference than that of the adults who make the rules.

“This generation is really challenging the gender norms we grew up with,” said Diane Ehrensaft, an Oakland psychologist who writes about gender. “A lot of youths say they won’t be bound by boys having to wear this or girls wearing that. For them, gender is a creative playing field.” Adults, she added, “become the gender police through dress codes.”

Recently, a Mississippi 17-year-old wasn’t allowed to wear a tux for her yearbook photo:

At Wesson Attendance Center, a Mississippi public school, just that sort of fight erupted over senior portraits. Last summer, during her photo session, Ceara Sturgis, 17, dutifully tried on the traditional black drape, the open-necked robe that reveals the collarbone, a hint of bare shoulder.

“It was terrible!” said Ms. Sturgis, an honors student, band president and soccer goalie, who has been openly gay since 10th grade. “If you put a boy in a drape, that’s me! I have big shoulders and ooh, it didn’t look like me! I said, ‘I can’t do this!’ So my mom said, ‘Try on the tux.’ And that looked normal.”

Shortly thereafter, students were informed that girls had to wear drapes for yearbook portraits; boys, tuxedos.

The Mississippi chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote to the school. Rickey Clopton, superintendent of Copiah County schools, did not return phone calls. Last month he released a statement affirming that the school’s decision was “based upon sound educational policy and legal precedent.”

Last month, Veronica Rodriguez, Ms. Sturgis’s mother, paid for a full-page ad in the yearbook that is to include a photograph of her daughter in a tuxedo.

Schools have some freedom in how they will respond:

But generally, courts give local administrators great latitude. In Marion County, Fla., students must dress “in keeping with their gender.” Last spring, when a boy came to school wearing high-heeled boots, a stuffed bra, and a V-neck T-shirt, he was sent home to change.

“He was cross-dressing, and it caused a disruption in the normal instructional day,” said Kevin Christian, a district spokesman. “That’s the whole point behind the dress code.”

Sociologists weigh in on how non-conformity can lead to harassment:

“There are other places where there are real safety issues,” said Barbara Risman, a sociologist at the University of Illinois who studies adolescent gender identity. “Most boys still very much feel the need to repress whole parts of themselves to avoid peer harassment.”

Last fall, Stephen Russell, a professor at the University of Arizona who studies gay, lesbian and transgender youths, conducted a survey of about 1,200 California high school students. When asked why those perceived as not as “masculine” or “feminine” as others were harassed, a leading reason students gave was “manner of dress.”

So…

When a principal asks a boy to leave his handbag at home, is the request an attempt to protect a student from harassment or harassment itself?