In my readings for the Crawler I often come across articles that use the term ‘sociological’ to express an ambiguous set of influences or circumstances related to a given news item. This week I was struck by an especially poignant example as the pundits and journalists swarmed around the Bristol Palin controversy, a teen pregnancy in the political spotlight. 

New York Times columnist Adam Nagourney writes: 

In many ways, how the country will react to the pregnancy of Ms. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is more a sociological question than a political one. Yes, many officials in both parties — including Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, Mr. McCain’s Democratic opponent — were quick on Monday to say that the private lives of candidates should be strictly off limits.

But this clearly stands as a challenge to the traditional image of a potential first family, and could well provide fodder for provocative conversations around kitchen tables or sly references in the late-night television comic-sphere. It will test again what voters deem private, at a time when the Web has pulled down so many curtains, and what in these times is considered a normal family life.

Full story.

What should we as sociologists make of these vague references to the forces at play in our social world? Does the use of the term sociological become diluted when it remains unexplained?

What do you think?

This week Newsweek magazine reported on a new book from sociologist Michael Kimmel entitled, ‘Guyland,’ which has been receiving significant media attention since its release. Our fascination with a hard partying lifestyle has at last been systematically studied. 

 Tony Dokoupil of Newsweek writes: 

Once the preserve of whacked-out teens and college slackers, this testosterone-filled landscape is the new normal for American males until what used to be considered creeping middle age, according to the sociologist Michael Kimmel. In his new book, “Guyland,” the State University of New York at Stony Brook professor notes that the traditional markers of manhood—leaving home, getting an education, finding a partner, starting work and becoming a father—have moved downfield as the passage from adolescence to adulthood has evolved from “a transitional moment to a whole new stage of life.” In 1960, almost 70 percent of men had reached these milestones by the age of 30. Today, less than a third of males that age can say the same.

“What used to be regressive weekends are now whole years in the lives of some guys,” Kimmel tells NEWSWEEK. In almost 400 interviews with mainly white, college-educated twentysomethings, he found that the lockstep march to manhood is often interrupted by a debauched and decadelong odyssey, in which youths buddy together in search of new ways to feel like men. Actually, it’s more like all the old ways—drinking, smoking, kidding, carousing—turned up a notch in a world where adolescent demonstrations of manhood have replaced the real thing: responsibility. Kimmel’s testosterone tract adds to a forest of recent research into protracted adolescents (or “thresholders” and “kidults,” as they’ve also been dubbed) and the reluctance of today’s guys to don their fathers’ robes—and commitments. They “see grown-up life as such a loss,” says Kimmel, explaining why so many guys are content to sit out their 20s in duct-taped beanbag chairs. The trouble is that the very thing they’re running from may be the thing they need.

Read the full story. 

USA Today recently ran a story about the high profile success stories of adult men who grew up in single parent households, supported solely by their mothers. 

USA Today’s Sharon Jayson writes:

Conventional wisdom is that boys who grow up without fathers are at greater risk of problems, from doing poorly in school to substance abuse. So how does that account for the high-profile successes of standouts such as presidential candidate Barack Obama, Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and others who were reared by single mothers?

The psychologist consulted for the piece suggested that young men raised by single mothers are not predestined to fail simply because they are raised in a non-traditional household. While not all sons will succeed in the same ways as Phelps and Obama, the risk of growing up with a single mom has more to do with financial strain.

The sociologist on hand delves further into the issue…

Another expert on fatherhood, sociologist Tim Biblarz of the University of Southern California-Los Angeles, says the evidence shows economics plays a significant role in the risk for negative outcomes, such as poorer grades and lower educational attainment, substance abuse or poor social adjustment.

“Those who grow up with single mothers with adequate socioeconomic resources tend to do well. The children of poor single mothers are more at risk,” Biblarz says. “Many of the results that say that kids are at increased risk for negative outcomes have to do with economics.”

Read the full story.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a new study about children and housework out of the University of Maryland, and the surprising trend that they are doing very little of it. 

WSJ quips: 

Quiz for the day: How much time each day, on average, does a 6- to 12-year-old child spend on household chores?

If you guessed more than a half-hour, you’re wrong. Children are spending a mere 24 minutes a day doing cleaning, laundry and other housework — a 12% decline since 1997 and a 25% drop from 1981 levels, says Sandra Hofferth, director of the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland, based on a forthcoming study of 1,343 children. In the glacial realm of sociological change, that amounts to a free fall.

And another sociologist’s findings are considered…

Pitching in at home has become a crucial marriage-preservation skill for young men. Studies show parents still assign more housework to girls than boys. Yet these same young women hope as adults to find men who will help out; 90% of 60 women ages 18 to 32 studied by Kathleen Gerson, a New York University sociology professor, said they hoped to share housework and child care with spouses “in a committed, mutually supportive and egalitarian way.” After controlling for other factors, U.S. marriages tend to be more stable when men participate more in domestic tasks, says a study of 506 U.S. couples published in 2006 in the American Journal of Sociology.

And another’s…

Housework has unique value in instilling a habit of serving others. Analyzing data on more than 3,000 adults, Alice Rossi, a proessor emerita of sociology at University of Massachusetts Amherst, found doing household chores as a child was a major, independent predictor of whether a person chose to do volunteer or other community work as an adult. Thus for parents who value service, housework is an important teaching tool.

Read the full story.

The New York Times health blog, ‘Well,’ reports on a new study out of the University of Toronto which suggests that promotions and increased power at work can lead to an increase in conflict between workers, especially when the new boss is a younger man. The study looks at job authority and personal conflicts at work by using a national survey of more than 1,700 adults in the U.S. 

Tara Parker-Hope reports: 

Lead author Scott Schieman, professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, said younger men may be more competitive, which leads to more friction with others at work. Conflict may also stem from the fact that other workers view younger supervisors as less deserving of their authority because of their young age, which leads to additional workplace tension. Mr. Schieman speculated that younger women also must deal with concerns about their credibility and authority in the workplace. It may be that women respond with more empathy and concern, however, thus avoiding conflict.

“Overall, the conflict associated with authority is worse for younger workers, but there is something about younger women that attenuates that association,” said Mr. Schieman. “As others have shown, they tend to enact these more cooperative orientations when they attain authority.’’

Read the full story.

NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday featured a report on the results of a new collaborative study from some of our country’s premier immigration scholars — John Mollenkopf, Mary C. Waters, and Philip Kasinitz.

Margot Adler of NPR reports:

In much of the debate over immigration, there is an underlying question: Are today’s immigrants assimilating into the mainstream as easily as past generations? The answer, at least in New York City, is an unqualified “yes,” according to the results of a 10-year study involving more than 3,000 young men and women, most of them in their 20s.

John Mollenkopf, a professor at City University of New York and an author of the study, says that if you look at the children of immigrants, “the kids are doing well compared to their parents and also doing well compared to the native-born comparison groups.”

Link to the story.

This past Sunday’s New York Times book review examined ‘Credit and Blame,’ a new book from the late Charles Tilly. Alexander Star of the Times writes:

Two years ago, the sociologist Charles Tilly, who died this spring at the age of 78, published “Why?,” a slim volume examining our compulsive drive to give reasons for what we do. Explaining, he stressed, is a social art; what counts as a good reason always depends on the relationship between who’s giving the reason and who’s taking it. If you spill a glass of wine on a stranger, you might shrug it off with a conventional remark like “I’m a klutz.” If you spill a glass of wine on your wife, you are more apt to tell a story: “I was feeling nervous because of the bills.” It’s one thing to give someone a bad explanation. It’s even worse to give the wrong kind of explanation. If you expect your doctor to give you a technical account of your illness and you receive a cliché instead, you feel you are not being taken seriously.

In “Credit and Blame,” Tilly looks just as closely at our most ethically freighted explanations. When something happens that alters our environment for the better or for the worse, we are rarely content simply to say, “Oh well, those are the breaks,” or “I suppose I got lucky this time.” Instead, we leap at the chance to deem someone — anyone — responsible. We blame our parents when we are unhappy, and credit them for their sacrifices when they die. Thanking friends and family at the Academy Awards ceremony may be, as another sociologist has written, “the ultimate American fantasy” of giving credit, while winning a lawsuit against a local polluter may be the ultimate fantasy of affixing blame.

WARNING: Spoiler Alert

As a sociologist, Tilly was more interested in how we assign credit and blame than when it’s right to do so. Should we care that when a chief executive attributes his company’s success to his own intelligence or decisiveness, he’s probably wrong? Why do we put more blame on someone who drives through a stop sign at night and kills a child than on the countless others who drive through stop signs and kill no one? Tilly does not answer such questions, but his analysis suggests that for all the bad judgments we may make about the supposed malfeasance of terrorism-neglecting bureaucrats or the homeless, our habits are not easily reformed. Blaming, he argues, is not a vice or an aberration but an essential habit that allows us to maintain and repair our relationships with others. Our justice detectors are not fundamentally defective. They are suited to the task of setting things right — approximately.

The full review. 

This past Sunday’s Pioneer Press featured an opinion piece from our very own Monte Bute, author of ‘A Backstage Sociologist,’ a blog housed by Contexts magazine.

The piece, titled ‘Obama lawn sign policy slows down bandwagon,’ begins…

A few days ago I received a letter from Barack Obama, pleading that I “rush a generous contribution” to him. I placed the return envelope in my checkbook.

The same evening I got a call from his campaign asking me to door-knock on the weekend. I already had plans but I agreed to future weekends.

Then I requested a lawn sign. The volunteer informed me that I could buy one at campaign headquarters.

Buy one? Purchased in bulk, a two-color lawn sign might cost the Obama campaign $1. I checked the Obama ’08 Web site. They offer the budget-conscious supporter a generic 26-by-16-inch sign for $8. For those Obamites into conspicuous consumption, the site advertises a variety of 22-by-15-inch designer signs for $19.99. If this were an oil company, the Democrats would be accusing it of price gouging. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, “So it goes.”

Read the whole thing right here.

EurWeb.com reported on a study presented at the American Sociological Association meetings earlier this month about how the dramatic increase in the prison population since the early 1970s may be having significant demographic consequences that “disproportionately affect black males.” 

The study from Becky Pettit and Bryan Sykes of the Univeristy of Washington found that “the jump in incarceration rates represents ‘a massive intervention’ in Black families and may be responsible for lowered rates of fertility, increased and involuntary migration to rural areas as well as greater exposure to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and AIDS.”

EurWeb.com adds:

According to Pettit, the justice system “has become more punitive” and one result is that 1 of every 100 Americans is currently behind bars and nearly 60 percent of those are young, most low-income Black males. This fact, she suggest, has led to an increased number of men not producing children and the resulting drop in the Black fertility rate.

Full story.

Reuters UK reports on new research out of the University of Chicago, which concluded that getting old does not mean an end to sex. Survey data from elderly Americans indicates that more than 60% of the men and nearly 50% of the women have been sexually active in the past year.

Reuters reports:

More than three-quarters of American men aged 75 to 85 and half of women that age are still interested in sex, a survey of the elderly by University of Chicago researchers found.

“It’s not age per se; that when you get to 80 it’s all over with,” said sociologist Edward Laumann, who led the study of 3,000 American men and women aged 57 to 85 who lived at home, not in nursing homes.

“It’s driven by more proximate factors such as if you become obese, or you’re smoking too much, or you contract diabetes. Medications can depress sexual interest. The aging process itself is not a major factor driving these results,” he said in a telephone interview.

Read more.