This past weekend the New York Times ran a fascinating article about the use of racial epithets by Britons. The Times reports, “Britons generally agree — or say they do — that being racist is bad and that making racist remarks is wrong. But there is no national consensus on what that means, exactly. Take references to ‘golliwogs,’ which are Little Black Sambo-style dolls, or to ‘Pakis,’ a slur referring to people of Pakistani descent. Both terms have been used in Britain recently by famous people in infamous incidents. But though public condemnation followed each time, so did condemnation of the condemnation, the gist of which was that no offense had been meant, so no offense should have been taken.”

A sociologist weighs in…

Perhaps these mixed-up responses come in part because Britain, while deeply cherishing its tradition of free speech, also has laws against using language that incites racial hatred, said Robert Ford, a postdoctoral research fellow in sociology at the University of Manchester who studies racial attitudes in Britain.

“There’s a debate over whether these laws are acceptable in a free-speech society,” Mr. Ford said. “Some people say that freedom of speech is a fundamental birthright and that to condemn people for their language is ‘political correctness gone mad.

Read more.

Chicago-Tribune reporter Rick Morrissey presented a theory about Michael Phelps’ documented experimentation with marijuana – he did it because he actually wanted to get caught…

In order to see whether or not this theory had any validity, he consulted a sociologist, and writes,

I brought [my theory] to sociologist Jay Coakley, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs who has spent much of his career studying the sociology of sport. He agreed Phelps could be trying to escape something but wouldn’t go so far as to say the swimming star might have been making a conscious or subconscious effort to get caught partaking of the pot.

“I would say there was a desperate desire on his part to get out of this tunnel in which he has been living,” he said.

That tunnel is chlorinated. Phelps spends a good number of his waking hours underwater, and he has been doing it for a long, long time. Swimming is not generally a social sport. It’s hard to grow as a person when you’re basically in an isolation tank.

“After living in this training tunnel for eight to 10 years, he would have to at least fantasize about being outside of it,” Coakley said. “I don’t know whether this is a cry for help, ‘Please stop this train, get me out of this tunnel, I never want to go back,’ or whether it’s, ‘Hey, I’ve got to get out of this tunnel for my own sanity for at least awhile before I go back in.’ ”

But you can understand why Phelps might crave some modicum of normalcy. Most 23-year-olds don’t spend a large part of their free time in watery solitude. So as stunning as that photo of Phelps in a British tabloid was, maybe the idea of him partying hearty at the University of South Carolina isn’t.

“You really don’t have time to be normal with the kind of training he did,” Coakley said. “In terms of development, I’d say he’s probably developmentally delayed. He hasn’t had a chance to have the kinds of experiences that lead to normal adulthood.

“We just assume that, if you win a medal for some reason, it builds your character. That’s a crock. So he actually is facing this as a 23-year-old who is probably less mature than any average 23-year-old on the street.”

Read more.

The Hartford Courant reports this morning on the new trend of breaking up with a romantic partner via social networking sites such as Facebook. This article draws upon the demonstration of this breakup technique in a new movie opening today called He’s Just Not That Into You.

The Courant reports on the trend, with some sociological commentary:

Indeed, all that interwoven connectedness, which can help ease the way into a relationship, makes it all the harder to disengage at the end. Even if you do “unfriend” an ex, you’ll still most likely encounter him often on the Facebook sites of mutual friends where his photos and comments may likely turn up.

“If it’s over, it’s not quite over on Facebook,” said Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington and the author of 14 books on sex, love and relationships. Updates like “Barry is in a new relationship” or “Sarah went dancing all night last night” or photos of your ex with a new woman are sure to rankle.

“It’s a transparency that’s kind of sweet when nobody’s heart is breaking,” said Schwartz, who is also the chief relationship expert at Perfectmatch.com. “It’s not so sweet when you’d like to be on another planet.”

Another sociologist weighs in with a comment on notifying someone of a breakup via a change in ‘status’ on your profile page…

After such an experience [a facebook breakup], many Facebook users opt not to record any details about their romantic status, so that if it changes, at least they avoid having any notifications sent out. After the break-up, Simpson also weathered the Facebook updates containing tidbits about Andrew’s whereabouts, reminding her of what he was doing, which friends he was seeing.

Kathleen Bogle, a professor of sociology at La Salle University in Philadelphia and the author of “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus,” said having so much access to information about your ex “can really take jealousy to a new level.”

Read more.

Live Science reports on work by sociologist Sampson Blair suggesting that the recession may fuel more family murders and suicides. They write:

The dramatic murder-suicides last month involving a family in Ohio and another in California might be the tip of a deadly domestic-violence iceberg, a sociologist says. The topic, of course, is highly complex. In a nutshell, however, several studies have found that suicides as well as domestic violence spike for the unemployed. While family murder-suicides are relatively uncommon, such events can be tied to poor economic situations such as the current recession, said Sampson Blair, a sociologist at University of Buffalo.

“I expect an increase in such incidents over the next few years because economic strain on families provokes depression and desperation,” Blair said. Blair is not alone in anticipating a rise in suicide and deadly domestic violence.

But there does appear to be some disagreement between sociologists about the link between economic trouble and suicide…

While several studies have linked unemployment to suicides, it’s not clear that overall terrible economic times cause spikes in the suicide rate.

In fact one researcher, Loren Coleman, an expert on suicides and author of “The Copycat Effect” (Pocket, 2004), argues that suicides actually decrease during times of social and economic stress: “Historical studies conducted by sociologist Steven Stack and others have discovered a noticeable dip in suicides and related violent events when there is society-wide anguish, for example, in times of massive immediate grieving in periods of wars and economic depressions.”

Suicide is more common than most people think, though. Each day about 85 U.S. residents die by suicide, or roughly 30,000 a year. Hundreds of thousands more try it every year, according to researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia. Suicide is the ninth leading cause of death in the United States, higher on the list than homicide. Men are more prone to suicide than women. (Women are three times more likely to report attempting suicide than men, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Men apparently succeed more often, as they are four times more likely to actually die from suicide.)

The reasons are myriad and certainly go beyond mere economic misfortune.

A recent study led by Temple University sociology professor Matt Wray found Las Vegas residents are much more likely to commit suicide than people living elsewhere in the country. Among the reasons speculated by Wray and his colleagues in the November online version of the journal Social Science and Medicine: gambler’s despair, of course. But short-term economic woe is probably not the only mechanism at work in Sin City.

“Las Vegas is also one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the U.S., a pattern of growth that may amplify social isolation, fragmentation and low social cohesion, all of which have long been identified as correlates of suicide,” Wray said.

Read on…

The New York Times business section blog Economix, ran a story yesterday including commentary from sociologist Viviana Zelizer about the history of holiday bonuses – an especially interesting topic given the recent outrage surrounding bonuses for failing companies’ executives.

Over at The Huffington Post, the Princeton sociologist Viviana A. Zelizer recounts some interesting milestones in the history of the bonus, and traces its evolution from gift to entitlement:

At the turn of the 20th century, U.S. employers began substituting the traditional 19th century Christmas offerings to employees — turkeys, watches, candy or gold coins — with a cash bonus. As early as 1902, J. P. Morgan & Company had apparently broken the record by giving each of their employees a full-year’s salary as a Christmas present. Gifts of cash were increasingly standardized, calculated as a percentage of the wage. By 1911, 10 percent was considered “liberal.” Some banks went as far as substituting the Christmas present for a first of the year merit increase in salary.

Most employers, however, continued to want to treat the bonus as a discretionary gift; after all, this custom of “remembering the workers” served them well to oversee and regulate workers’ productivity as well as assuring their loyalty. Indeed, it is reported that Woolworth’s first Christmas cash bonus to employees in 1899 ($5 for each year of service, with a limit of $25) was meant to match competitors’ higher wages and avoid a salesgirls’ strike. It was probably also a cheaper way to pay overtime. Around 1910, a 25-year-old saleswoman working in a New York department store told a National Consumers’ League investigator that in the week before Christmas “she worked standing over fourteen hours every day… so painful to the feet becomes the act of standing for these long periods that some of the girls forgo eating at noon in order to give themselves ..a foot-bath.” For this overtime the store gave her $20 “presented to her, not as payment, but as a Christmas gift.”

Significantly, while some companies offered a bonus to every employee, others made the Christmas present contingent on length of service or a worker’s efficiency record. Or on a worker’s proper disposition of the bonus; in Christmas 1914, a large Minneapolis flour-milling company reportedly gave each of their employees a $25 check to be deposited at a savings bank, the gift-check being valueless otherwise.

But the similarity to other forms of compensation invited recipients to treat the bonus as an entitlement, pressing for a definition of the additional income as a right. The personalization of a business gift from employer to employee was hard to sustain when the bestowal was standardized and expected. By the 1950s, the Christmas bonus officially lost its status as a gift: when a firm announced a reduction in its annual Christmas bonus as a way to make up for the expense of introducing a costly new retirement plan, the union tried to negotiate the employees’ holiday bonus. After the company refused any bargaining, the union appealed to the National Labor Relations Board. The Board ruled that the Christmas bonus could no longer be considered an employer’s discretionary gift but an expected and negotiable component of a worker’s wage. While a dissenting board member protested that a “genuine Christmas gift has no place at the bargaining table” (Niles-Bement-Pond Company and Amalgamated Local No. 405, International Union, United Automobile, Aircract & Agricultural Implement Workers of America, C.I.O., 1952), it was generally agreed that the bonus was no longer a present but a separate category of payment from the regular paycheck. The benefactor-beneficiary component of the employer-employee relationship, it follows, was vanishing…

Read more.

The New York Times recently ran a piece entitled “Why the Sting of Layoffs Can Be Sharper for Men,” in which they look into how job loss may affect men differently – with a greater negative impact – than women.

Psychiatrists and family therapists establish the claim that men are more adversely affected by job loss…

Dr. Louann Brizendine, author of “The Female Brain” and a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, says that women who lose their jobs “aren’t going to take as much of a self-esteem hit” as men. That is because the most potent form of positive social feedback for many men comes from within the hierarchy of the workplace. By contrast, she said, women may have “many sources of self-esteem — such as their relationships with other people — that are not exclusively embedded within their jobs.”

She said that over the past six months, her clinic has had an increase in the number of men seeking help for difficulties related to job loss.

Terrence Real, a family therapist and the founder of Real Relational Solutions in Arlington, Mass., said the difference in reactions could be explained by the idea of performance esteem.

“Everyone who has written about male psychology has acknowledged that men base their sense of self on the maxim that ‘I have worth because of what I do,’ ” Mr. Real said. The feeling is that “you are only as good as your last game or your last job,” he said.

But research by two sociologists suggests an interesting nuance in this observed trend…

YET while men may appear to reel more socially and psychologically from job loss, they fare far better when it comes to re-employment.

In a 2002 study, two sociology professors at Wichita State University, Charles S. Koeber and David W. Wright, found that women who were laid off and went on to look for another job were re-employed less often than men in the same position. This was especially the case if the women were married, had previously held a part-time job or had worked in something other than a highly skilled, white-collar job.

The implication, Professor Koeber says, is that women have more of a burden than men to show their commitment to a job after a layoff.

“It looks like employers systematically apply some criteria to women that they don’t to men who are looking for jobs after being laid off,” Professor Koeber said.

Read more.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported today on new research from sociologist Daniel Lichter of Cornell University about the impact of living together before marriage. The Chronicle reports: 

Spurred by the sexual revolution and buoyed by recent economic concerns and marital trends, cohabitation – as a temporary situation, a lengthy arrangement or something in between – has become a unique, multifaceted institution in its own right, and a hot field of study among sociologists.

It’s not without controversy. Conventional wisdom – backed up by studies in the 1980s and ’90s – has held that so-called serial cohabitants have higher divorce rates than those who wait until marriage to live together. However, new data suggest that when someone cohabits only with a future spouse, divorce rates are the same or lower than if they didn’t live together before marriage.

But new research from a number of sociologists suggests its time to revise our views on the effects of living together:

A study published in November by sociologist Daniel Lichter of Cornell University found that the odds of divorce among women who married their sole cohabiting partner were 28 percent lower than those of women who never cohabited. (See “Behind the numbers” story on D3.)

“They used to say that cohabitation was a risk factor for divorce. Now that we have broader samples, that’s not true,” says Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and author of “Marriage, a History.”

The majority of Americans now live together before getting married. Of couples married after 1995, 65 percent of men and women in first-time marriages lived together beforehand, according to the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth.

“For most people, cohabitation is still a transition point,” says University of Michigan sociologist Pamela Smock. “This is not the case for everyone, as there is an increase in the percentage of cohabiters who live together for a long period of time – a subgroup for whom it’s not just a train stop. But by and large, cohabiting relationships tend to be short, as the couple either breaks up or marries within a number of years.”

She expects that in coming years, as much as 80 percent of the population will live together unmarried at some point in their lives, up from the current 70 percent.

One can’t talk about cohabitation without also talking about marriage. As the average age of a first marriage in the United States has risen to 27 years for men and 25 for women, young adults are filling in before that with “marriage lite,” in Coontz’s words.

Read more.

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story about how kids these days aren’t into planning in advance – attributing this ‘new’ phenomenon to the rise of mobile communications via text messaging and web-based chat. The Inquirer reports:

The ubiquity of cell phones and text messaging, especially among young people, has changed the whole idea of the word plans – most significantly, it allows people not to make any.

“One of the consequences of the mobile phone is that you can postpone any decision until the last minute,” said James E. Katz, chair of the Rutgers University communications department, where he directs the Center for Mobile Communications Studies. “Since you have up to that last minute to obtain information for the decision, cell phones can give you the opportunity to delay it. What do you want for dinner? Hmmm, I’ll tell you when I am really hungry.”

But a sociologist isn’t so sure that this is a new trend…

Ted Goertzel, a professor of sociology at Rutgers-Camden, is not nearly as worried, saying that the late-planning habit, especially for young people, started at least a generation ago, or even before, with the countercultural 1960s and ’70s.

“There was a value of being spontaneous and free of entanglements,” said Goertzel, 66, whose own children, now 43 and 39, weren’t big on making long-term plans when they were younger. In comparison, when he and his wife were younger, she had to know Tuesday what they were doing Saturday.

“Even with wired telephones, there was a lot of last-minute communication,” he said. “It might also be cyclical, a matter of generational culture, an ‘uptight’ generation followed by a ‘laid-back’ one.”

Read more.

An article on technology and sociological research recently came across the Crawler’s radar, originally published in the New York Times. The story describes how nearly 100 students living in Random Hall (an on-campus dormitory) at MIT have traded in their personal privacy for free smartphones used to study their movements. The smartphones generate information beamed to a central computer, including individual actions, to map the dorm’s social network. The Times writes: “The students’ data is but a bubble in a vast sea of digital information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence.”

About the researcher…

Alex Pentland, a professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is leading the dormitory research project, was a co-founder of Sense Networks. He is part of a new generation of researchers who have relatively effortless access to data that in the past was either painstakingly assembled by hand or acquired from questionnaires or interviews that relied on the memories and honesty of the subjects…

Dr. Pentland calls his research “reality mining” to differentiate it from an earlier generation of data mining conducted through more traditional methods.

Dr. Pentland “is the emperor of networked sensor research,” said Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell who studies communications networks and their role as social networks. People and organizations, he said, are increasingly choosing to interact with one another through digital means that record traces of those interactions. “This allows scientists to study those interactions in ways that five years ago we never would have thought we could do,” he said.

Once based on networked personal computers, collective intelligence systems are increasingly being created to leverage wireless networks of digital sensors and smartphones. In one application, groups of scientists and political and environmental activists are developing “participatory sensing” networks.

Read more.

This morning the New York Times ran a story about new research indicating that teen pregnancies are on the rise once again. The Times’ Tara Parker-Pope reports, “Parents have worried for generations about changing moral values and risky behavior among young people, and the latest news seems particularly worrisome. It came from the National Center for Health Statistics, which reported this month that births to 15- to 19-year-olds had risen for the first time in more than a decade.”

Building the case that this is a myth:

The news is troubling, but it’s also misleading. While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that in many ways, today’s teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations.

Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.

A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.

The rates also went down among younger teenagers. In 1995, about 20 percent said they had had sex before age 15, but by 2002 those numbers had dropped to 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys.

Call in the sociologist!

“There’s no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and are much wilder than they ever were,” said Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. “But when you look at the data, that’s not the case.”

One reason people misconstrue teenage sexual behavior is that the system of dating and relationships has changed significantly. In the first half of the 20th century, dating was planned and structured — and a date might or might not lead to a physical relationship. In recent decades, that pattern has largely been replaced by casual gatherings of teenagers.

In that setting, teenagers often say they “fool around,” and in a reversal of the old pattern, such an encounter may or may not lead to regular dating. The shift began around the late 1960s, said Dr. Bogle, who explored the trend in her book “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus” (N.Y.U. Press, 2008).

And another…

“There is a group of kids who engage in sexual behavior, but it’s not really significantly different than previous generations,” said Maria Kefalas, an associate professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and co-author of “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage” (University of California Press, 2005). “This creeping up of teen pregnancy is not because so many more kids are having sex, but most likely because more kids aren’t using contraception.”

“For teens, sex requires time and lack of supervision,” Dr. Kefalas said. “What’s really important for us to pay attention to, as researchers and as parents, are the characteristics of the kids who become pregnant and those who get sexually transmitted diseases.

“This whole moral panic thing misses the point, because research suggests kids who don’t use contraception tend to be kids who are feeling lost and disconnected and not doing well.”

Read the full story.