Recent data released by the Census Bureau have sociologists and demographers abuzz about mobility in the U.S. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

Americans are moving again, following a recession-induced plunge in mobility. But the mobility rate is still at historic lows as housing costs and few job opportunities keep many Americans hunkered down.

Some 37.1 million Americans, or 12.5 percent of the population, moved in 2009, according to the Census Bureau. That’s up – barely – from 11.9 percent the previous year, the lowest the US mobility rate has been since the Bureau began tracking it in 1948.

A normal rate during good economic times, such as in the 1990s, is between 15 and 17 percent.

A sociologist comments:

“What the [recession] has done is frozen people in place,” says Kenneth Johnson, a senior demographer at the Carsey Institute and a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. “I’ve never seen changes of this magnitude in so short a period: It’s stunning for demographers.”

Another expert weighs in on the economic effects of lower mobility:

But the fact that the mobility rate is still very low is bad news for the economy, says Richard Florida, professor of US urban theory at the University of Toronto.

“Mobility is the cornerstone of the American economic backbone,” says Professor Florida, author of the new book “The Great Reset.” “Our economy has been premised on flexibility and mobility. Our workforce has always better able to move to where jobs and opportunities are.”

One demographer explains why local vs. long-distance moves might be problematic:

“It’s not good news,” says William Frey, chief demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It only ticked up for local moves, not long-distance moves. I think the latter is a more significant story than the former – more college-educated people, more young people trying to move up in their careers. They are the lifeblood of migration and growth.”

Another concerning although consistent trend: People with incomes below the poverty line were more likely to move locally – and less likely to make long-distance moves – than others.

But experts see at least some positives of lower mobility:

Moving tends to take a toll on people. Staying put, by contrast, reaps social benefits like stronger family and community connections. Communities with lower levels of mobility tend to enjoy higher levels of trust and well-being, Mr. Frey says.

“People have their kids around them longer. There’s a stronger sense of community, but you’d like to think that would happen more for voluntary reasons,” he says.

Two recent failed terrorism attempts have some wondering if terrorists are losing their touch. Christian Science Monitor reports:

Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-born US citizen arrested and charged with the attempted attack, appears to have had little real training in explosives technique, according to US officials. And the Times Square bungle was preceded by the Christmas Day incident in which a Muslim Nigerian man on a Northwest Airlines flight tried, and failed, to ignite plastic explosives sewn into his underwear.

Are these twin flops evidence of systemic ineptitude? Perhaps. But it is at least as likely that they show Al Qaeda and its allies have moved towards a new, more decentralized, method of targeting the US and other Western nations.

Although the attacks on 9/11 were spectacular and highly destructive, experts note that typical terrorist attacks are generally less coordinated and more amateurish.

In a way, what the US is seeing now may be judged a return to more usual terrorist tactics.

After all, terrorism, by definition, is an attention-getting strategy employed by those without the ability to mount conventional military attacks.

Criminologist Gary LaFree explains:

“Terrorism is a tool of the less-powerful, and they use what they have at hand,” says Gary LaFree, a professor of criminology and director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland in College Park.

The deadly successes of the 9/11 attacks perhaps have made Islamist terrorists appear more competent than they are, in general. Mr. LaFree counts some 50 or 60 thwarted attacks linked to Al Qaeda or its allies since 2001.

“Terrorists use readily available, low-tech weapons, and they often screw up,” says LaFree.

The Globe and Mail has published an interview with two University of Toronto sociologists who have written a new book on “foodies.” According to the article:

As the authors explain in their new book Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape, for which they interviewed 30 people and analyzed hundreds of articles, today’s foodies might find classic French haute cuisine stuffy. They may be willing to try goat testicles and sheep brains. And they’ll happily visit the city’s best hole-in-the-wall eateries, no matter how dumpy the decor. But one thing foodies flat-out refuse to eat is dinner at a mundane, generic chain restaurant.

Sociologists Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann argue that being a foodie isn’t just about consuming good food, it’s also about garnering cultural capital. Says Johnston:

A lot of elements of foodie culture are still relatively exclusive, and part of what foodie culture is about is dabbling in all sorts of different ethnic cuisines and food traditions. What makes that a kind of privilege is to have the kind of knowledge to go to all of these kinds of places [whether it’s a fancy restaurant or hole-in-the-wall eatery], so you’re not just familiar with one type of ethnic cuisine, you’re familiar with the whole range of them. And that can end up constituting a kind of cultural capital people use to display their sophistication.

However, this may entail ignoring inequalities. Says Baumann:

…if you’re going to be a foodie and value authentic and exotic cuisine, it’s going to lead you to places of poverty, to contexts of impoverished food production and consumption. Through romanticizing those conditions of poverty, you can get the good food without having to dwell on the uncomfortable fact of poverty.

The authors also noticed gender differences among foodies:

Johnston: One thing that was surprising to me was the different ways that men and women embody their foodie culture. Men often emphasize their expertise more, and they’re often much more interested in the exoticism, especially eating things that are wildly unconventional, like goat testicles. And women didn’t do that as much. They talked more about how their interest in food was also about protecting the health of their family.

Women who have kids tend to earn less than women who don’t, a phenomenon known as the “motherhood penalty.” But USA Today reports that  that when a woman has children makes a difference.

Researchers at the University of Maryland in College Park and the University of California at Los Angeles reviewed 35 years of data from some 2,200 women born between 1944 and 1954, and found that women who had kids in the early- to mid-20s or even younger didn’t fare as well economically as those who delayed.

Sociologist Joan Kahn, one of the study’s authors, comments:

“Women who delay childbearing end up as successful economically as women who didn’t have children, and we look at it basically throughout their adult years — well into their 50s,” she says.

The point, she says, is that women who are younger when they have kids and attempt to get back into the workforce later may not have that up-front investment in education and training, which those who have kids later benefit from. They earned equivalent wages and had higher status occupations just like women who were childless.

USA Today reports on a new study examining whether people who are overweight receive less care from their doctors.

Previous research has shown that some physicians find it awkward to work with obese patients and have low expectations for success. And heavy patients have reported feeling that doctors are biased and disrespectful because of their extra weight. To examine whether such attitudes translate into differences in actual practice, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center evaluated the medical care of nearly 70,000 patients. They were Medicare beneficiaries or received care from Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals.

The scientists compared how likely heavy and normal-weight people were to meet standard guidelines for preventive care, including diabetes care (eye exams, sugar and cholesterol testing), flu vaccines, pneumonia vaccines and screenings for breast, colorectal and cervical cancers.

Results showed that people in the study who were overweight or obese were just as, if not more, likely to receive preventative care from their doctors as people of normal weight.

The study’s lead investigator, who holds an MD and a PhD in sociology, comments:

“Physicians appear to be doing a good job at preventive care, despite surveys suggesting that physicians have negative attitudes toward obesity and patients’ perceptions that their doctors are biased,” says lead author Virginia Chang, an assistant professor of medicine and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania…

“It’s important to ensure that obese patients are getting equitable preventive care, as these services can save lives and reduce costs down the road,” Chang says.

Still, questions remain. “Our findings do not address patients’ satisfaction with their care,” she says. “And these findings may not be true of younger populations where the stigma of obesity may be greater.”

With political representation and federal funding at stake, Midwestern states are showing the highest Census response rates so far. According to the New York Times:

With Thursday dubbed Census Day — the day the questionnaires are meant to capture as a snapshot — South Dakota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, North Dakota and Iowa are ranked the top five states by federal officials, because they have the highest participation rates in the census so far. People can send in the forms until mid-April, but the Midwest’s cooperativeness might rightly worry other regions.

After all, the census guides the federal government on decisions with lasting impact — like how many representatives states will have in Congress and how much federal money they win for their roads.

But the high rates of participation in these rural states may have less to do with vying for power and resources and more to do with social norms and sensibilities.

Census officials said lots of social factors seemed to correlate to a community’s responsiveness (or silence) to the census mailings. Places where people stay put, for instance, often answer. In this town, most people said they had grown up here.

But some North Dakotans, where the state capital, Bismarck, had the nation’s fourth-highest response rate among larger cities as of Wednesday night, suggested a simpler answer. Perhaps it was the way of thinking around here — some combination, they said, of being practical, orderly, undistracted and mostly accepting of the rules, whatever they are. “We have a high degree of trust in our elected officials,” said Curt Stofferahn, a rural sociologist at the University of North Dakota, “and that carries over to times like these.”

The towns and cities the census described this week as having 100 percent participation rates are mostly tiny. How hard, some wondered, is it to get 50 responses from 50 people? And in Wolford, which officially has a 100 percent rate, plenty of people — perhaps more than 20 — are not included in that statistic because they hold post office boxes and have yet to receive forms.

By all appearances, these norms are being passed along to the next generation of rural residents.

At Wolford Public School, where 46 children from around the area attend kindergarten through 12th grade (the ninth grade is empty and only one child is in fourth grade), census leaflets, posters and stickers have been handed out in Wanda Follman’s class of 11 children.

Asked on Wednesday if their families had returned census forms yet, nearly all 11 shot their hands in the air. The children excitedly recited some of the questions from memory.

“I filled it out with my mom’s help,” said Kyle Yoder, the 8-year-old, who wore glasses and a serious face. “It was kind of easy.”

More stay-at-home moms in the U.S. are going into business for themselves, Reuters reports:

The Small Business Administration says the number of self-employed women around the country jumped by 10 percent from 2000 to 2006, to 5.3 million.

For Lewis, an online marketplace called Etsy provided a place to sell her estate-style and faux vintage pieces. The website, www.etsy.com, lets craft makers set up their own virtual shops. It currently has more than 4.2 million users.

“It’s wonderful to be able to call my own shots,” Lewis said. “I can work at night, so if I want to do something with my family, I can.”

Launched in 2005, the Brooklyn, New York-based Etsy now has more than 400,000 sellers, most of whom are women, and posted more than $180 million in sales last year. Nearly 70 percent of sellers are college-educated.

Moms cite balance and flexibility as reasons to start their own online craft shops. A sociologist comments on the trend:

“Women are looking to both work and take care of families, but the traditional workplace doesn’t provide that opportunity, so they are looking for their own ingenious ways (to do that),” said Pamela Stone, a sociology professor at New York City’s Hunter College.

“What women are seeking is flexibility and these companies are providing them with this option,” said Stone, who wrote “Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home.”

The Daily Mail reports that the face of the U.S. is changing rapidly in the delivery room.

America is reaching a ‘tipping point’ when the babies born to minority parents outnumber whites for the first time.

More white women than ever before are postponing having children until they are older, while minority mothers are still having babies at younger ages, according to a US study published yesterday.

Experts claim the immigration boom has accelerated the historic trend that is likely to leave whites in the minority in America by the middle of the century.

The percentage of children born to minority parents has grown significantly  in recent decades, but this study projects that more than half will be to minority parents this year.

One of the study’s authors, a sociologist, weighs in:

‘For America’s children, the future is now,’ said Kenneth Johnson, a sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire who researched many of the racial trends in the report.

‘Census projections suggest America may become a minority-majority country by the middle of the century,’ he added.

He explained that there are now more Hispanic women of prime childbearing age in the US, who tend to have more children than women of other races.

More white women are waiting until they are older to have babies, although it is not yet clear how much effect that will have on the current trend of increasing minority newborns.

The number of white women of prime childbearing age is on the decline, dropping 19 per cent from 1990.

Broken down by race, about 52 per cent of babies born in 2008 were white.

That’s compared to about 25 per cent Hispanic, 15 per cent black and 4 per cent Asian. Another 4 per cent were identified by their parents as multiracial.

What will the significance of this trend be? The Daily Mail speculates…

The numbers highlight the nation’s growing racial and age divide, seen in pockets of communities across the US, which could heighten tensions in current policy debates from immigration reform and education to health care and Social Security.

There are also strong implications for the 2010 population count, which begins in earnest next week, when more than 120 million US households receive their census forms in the post.

The Census Bureau is running public service announcements this week to improve its tally of young children, particularly minorities, who are most often missed in the once-a-decade head count.

Whites currently make up two-thirds of the total US population, and recent census estimates suggest the total number of minorities may not overtake the number of whites until 2050.

Right now, roughly one in ten of the nation’s 3,142 counties already have minority populations greater than 50 per cent.

But one in four communities have more minority children than white children or are nearing that point, according to the study, which Mr Johnson co-published.

According to USA Today, the 2010 Census will

remind Americans that racial classifications remain an integral part of the country’s social and legal fabric while, at the same time, recognizing that racial lines are blurring for a growing number of people…The government will give the nation’s more than 308 million people the opportunity to define their racial makeup as one race or more.

Some suggest that Obama’s presidency may affect how individuals report their race this time around. But how Obama himself will record his race remains a mystery.

Obama, born to a black father and a white mother, is not only the first black president but the first biracial president.

During his successful campaign in 2008, Obama referred to himself as black but also referred to his roots in Hawaii, where he was raised by his white mother. When the Obamas’ Census form arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., will he identify himself as black or as black and white? The White House declines to say.

A sociologist weighs in:

“The issue of perception is central,” says Ann Morning, a sociology professor at New York University. In an article titled “Who is Multiracial?” she estimated that about one-third of the U.S. population has some mixed-racial ancestry going back several generations. She predicts young generations will be more embracing of their multiracial heritage.

Morning is African American. But she also has English, Chinese and American Indian ancestry. Since 2000, she has checked off black, white, Asian and American Indian.

“The bigger thing is how I will mark my daughters,” Morning says. Their dad is Italian and she believes most people will look at her daughters as white. For now, she’ll check all the boxes for them, too.

Some question whether counting race is a good idea at all.

Roderick Harrison, a demographer at Howard University and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. “But for a lot of others, it’s like, ‘OK, are you going to turn your back on the rest of us?’ … A lot of the racial and ethnic politics of the Census are that we want the biggest numbers possible for our groups.”

The Census has a long-lasting effect on politics and money. Population counts every 10 years decide the number of seats every state gets in the U.S. House of Representatives and determine how more than $400 billion a year in federal aid is allocated.

“I know it’s valuable information if you’re doing economic development or dispense certain amount of money to areas that need it,” says Stewart Cockburn, 39, who lost his job in textile sales in September. “My point about race in general in this country is that we’re just never going to get past it if we keep asking about it.”

Cockburn, of Greensboro, N.C., says he’s Scottish and Irish and has a great-grandmother who was Cherokee.

“I don’t understand why everyone makes such a big deal about race,” he says. “Maybe one day we will no longer care about race, ethnicity or the color of another person’s skin.”

Donna Edwards, of Santa Monica, Calif., says it’s important that the federal government allows people to identify more than one race. “It’s about time, isn’t it?” says Edwards, who is half Japanese and half German/Scottish/Welsh and spent years frustrated by forms that boxed her into one or the other.

A recent survey of retired police commanders in New York City has been causing a stir in the news media and the blogsphere this week, including this article in the New York Times:

More than a hundred retired New York Police Department captains and higher-ranking officers said in a survey that the intense pressure to produce annual crime reductions led some supervisors and precinct commanders to manipulate crime statistics, according to two criminologists studying the department.

The retired members of the force reported that they were aware over the years of instances of “ethically inappropriate” changes to complaints of crimes in the seven categories measured by the department’s signature CompStat program, according to a summary of the results of the survey and interviews with the researchers who conducted it.

Further…

In interviews with the criminologists, other retired senior officers cited examples of what the researchers believe was a periodic practice among some precinct commanders and supervisors: checking eBay, other Web sites, catalogs or other sources to find prices for items that had been reported stolen that were lower than the value provided by the crime victim. They would then use the lower values to reduce reported grand larcenies — felony thefts valued at more than $1,000, which are recorded as index crimes under CompStat — to misdemeanors, which are not, the researchers said.

Others also said that precinct commanders or aides they dispatched sometimes went to crime scenes to persuade victims not to file complaints or to urge them to change their accounts in ways that could result in the downgrading of offenses to lesser crimes, the researchers said.

“Those people in the CompStat era felt enormous pressure to downgrade index crime, which determines the crime rate, and at the same time they felt less pressure to maintain the integrity of the crime statistics,” said John A. Eterno, one of the researchers and a retired New York City police captain.

His colleague, Eli B. Silverman, added, “As one person said, the system provides an incentive for pushing the envelope.”

The research has been criticized roundly by some, including former police commissioner William Bratton in an op-ed response yesterday:

The notion that there has been widespread downgrading of felony crime under CompStat is way off base. First, categories of crime that are nearly impossible to downgrade, notably homicide and auto theft, have declined much more than the categories that might be more readily manipulated. Auto thefts, which must be reported accurately because victims need crime reports to make insurance claims, are down 90 percent since 1993, the year before CompStat was inaugurated. In contrast, grand larceny, the category that can be most readily downgraded (by reducing the value of the property stolen), has declined only about 55 percent. Homicides, which generally report themselves when the body is discovered, are down about 76 percent, from 1,951 in 1993 to 471 in 2009.

Sociologist Jay Livingston also provides an alternative look at victimization data for burglary over the same time period in NYC that would appear to back Bratton up.

So, who to believe? Again, from the New York Times article:

The seven-page summary of the survey certainly indicates that many of the retired officers believe the system has gone significantly wrong.

Indeed, the researchers said the responses supported longstanding concerns voiced by some critics about the potential problems inherent in CompStat. The former officers indicate that it was the intense pressure brought to bear on the commanders of the city’s 76 precincts in twice-weekly CompStat meetings — where they are grilled, and sometimes humiliated, before their peers and subordinates, and where careers and promotions can be made or lost — that drove some to make “unethical” and “highly unethical” alterations to crime reports.

Given that concern over crime and crime numbers are not unique to New York, this is undoubtedly not the last we’ll hear on this topic for a long time to come.