A new study from the American Sociological Association (ASA) finds that women in sociology are achieving substantial success as professional sociologists and enjoying high productivity in their research. But the study finds that nearly a decade after earning their Ph.D.’s, there are significant differences between men’s and women’s career trajectories.

Inside Higher Ed reports some of the key findings from this research…

• Male sociologists in the cohort [received their Ph.D. in 1996-1997] were more likely than female sociologists to be married or living with a partner (83 percent vs. 68 percent), or to have children living with them (62 percent to 50 percent).
• Among sociologists who are parents, women are much more likely to be divorced (21 percent vs. 1.4 percent).
• Many sociologists who do have children do so before their tenure reviews, with the largest group having a first child 3-4 years after earning a doctorate.
• Parenthood does not appear to limit research productivity, at least as measured by the number of articles published in refereed journals — a key measure for the discipline. Mothers and fathers reported an average of 10.0 refereed journal articles since they earned their doctorates, while childless men and women reported an average of 9.5.
• Mothers appeared, on average, to earn less than others in the cohort. The income question was asked with categories, not exact amounts. The median income for sociologists who are fathers, and for sociologists who don’t have children, was between $70,000 and $99,000. The median income for sociologists who are mothers was between $50,000 and $59,000.
• On many issues, mothers and fathers both reported high levels of stress related to advancing their careers while also caring for their families. Child care, the tenure process, and teaching loads were key issues for parents.

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The latest issue of Newsweek featured an article entitled, ‘The Future of Freedom: The Fate Of Liberty In The Next Century Is Fragile, In Part, Because The Very Notion Is Now So Ill-Defined.’

Newsweek reporter Robert J. Samuelson writes,

In a century scarred by the gulags, concentration camps and secret-police terror, freedom is now spreading to an expanding swath of humanity. It is not only growing but also changing–becoming more ambitious and ambiguous–in ways that might, perversely, spawn disappointment and disorder in the new century.

Undoubtedly, it was time for some sociologists to weigh in…

In 1900, this was unimaginable. “Freedom in the modern sense [then] existed only for the upper crust,” says political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset of George Mason University. There were exceptions–America certainly, but even its freedom was conspicuously curtailed, particularly for women and blacks.

…

Traditional freedom historically meant liberation from oppression. But now freedom increasingly involves “self-realization.” People need, it’s argued, to be freed from whatever prevents them becoming whoever they want to be. There’s a drift toward “positive liberty” that emphasizes “the things that government ought to do for us,” says sociologist Alan Wolfe of Boston College. This newer freedom blends into individual “rights” (for women, minorities, the disabled) and “entitlements” (for health care, education and income support) deemed essential for self-realization.

Read more.

Contexts contributor Robin Simon graced the pages of Newsweek recently to offer some comments on the debate as to whether or not having children contributes to or detracts from overall happiness. While Simon’s perspective has garnered some negative attention, her numerous publications on the subject of parenting have brought her significant media attention.

Newsweek’s Lorraine Ali writes,

The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term “bundle of joy” may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. “Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers,” says Florida State University’s Robin Simon, a sociology professor who’s conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. “In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.”

Simon’s findings have not always been well-received…

Simon received plenty of hate mail in response to her research (“Obviously Professor Simon hates her kids,” read one), which isn’t surprising. Her findings shake the very foundation of what we’ve been raised to believe is true. In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, 50 percent of Americans said that adding new children to the family tends to increase happiness levels. Only one in six (16 percent) said that adding new children had a negative effect on the parents’ happiness. But which parent is willing to admit that the greatest gift life has to offer has in fact made his or her life less enjoyable?

Read more.

UK paper, the Telegraph reports on a recent study from sociologist Alfred Biderman, titled ‘Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War.’ This studied garnered media attention today as it was revealed that US interrogators’ training was based on Chinese methods of interrogation proven to be ineffective.

Telegraph reporter Tim Shipman writes:

American military trainers gave a class to camp interrogators in 2002 on how to use “sleep deprivation”, “exposure” and other “torture” methods to reduce captives to “animals” and obtain information.

But it has emerged that the techniques presented in the class were copied word-for-word from a 1957 US Air Force study which focused on Chinese techniques – that did not work.

The study by sociologist Alfred Biderman, Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War commented on methods that led to false confessions and “brainwashing.”

…

Mr Biderman’s article described “one form of torture” used by the Chinese as forcing prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods” in conditions of “extreme cold”

It also detailed how “semi-starvation”, the “exploitation of wounds” and “filthy, infested surroundings” could reduce a prisoner to “animal level concerns.”

The Guantanamo Bay interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker during the September 11 attacks, is known to have included sleep deprivation and exposure to cold.

Read more.

The TimesOnline (UK) reports on the backlash that has begun against a culture in which all children are given prizes and young people are only used to getting their way. Reporter Margarette Driscoll writes about the overwhelming child-centeredness of life in Britain with personal anecdotes and scholarly opinions.

A UK sociologist weighs in…

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University, believes our child-centredness is really adult-centredness. “It’s a way of reassuring ourselves that our children are going to be insulated from pain and adversity,” he said. “We tell children they are wonderful now for tying their shoelaces or getting 50% in an exam. But really it’s our way of flattering ourselves that we’re far more sensitive to children than people were in the past.”

The trouble is, Furedi says, that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. “You’re subtly giving kids the message that they can’t cope with life,” he said. “I have a son of 12 and when he and his friends were just nineI remember being shocked at them using therapeutic language, talking about being stressed out and depressed.”

While researching The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, its co-author Dennis Hayes, visiting professor of education at Oxford Brookes University, discovered a leaflet telling students that if they studied sociology they might come across poor people and get depressed and if they studied nursing they might come across sick people and get distressed – so the university offered counselling.

Read more.

A new study from Northwestern University scholars Eszter Hargittai and Gina Walejko suggests that “men are more likely to share their creative work online than women despite the fact that women and men engage in creative activities at essentially equal rates.”

This new research found that nearly two-thirds of men reported posting their work online, while only about half of the women in the study reported doing so.

“Because sharing information on the Internet today is a form of participating in public culture and contributing to public discourse, that tells us men’s voices are being disproportionately heard,” says Eszter Hargittai, assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University.

When co-authors Hargittai and Walejko controlled for ‘self-reported digital literacy’ and ‘Web know-how,’ they found that men and women were posting their material at equal rates.

“This suggests that the Internet is not an equal playing field for men and women since those with more online abilities — whether perceived or actual — are more likely to contribute online content,” says Hargittai.

Read more.

The Washington Post reports, “the question of whether the country is happier today than it was in, say, 1970 turns out to have a surprisingly good empirical answer. For nearly four decades, researchers have regularly asked a large sample of Americans a simple question: ‘Taken all together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?'”

This new article includes the addition of commentary from sociologist Ruut Veenhoven who disputes a widely accepted theory from USC economist Richard Easterlin, known as the ‘Easterlin Paradox,’ which highlights the paradoxical disconnect between a nation’s economic growth and the growth of its happiness. This theory has traditionally been confined to rich, Western countries.

Easterlin attributes the phenomenon of happiness levels not keeping pace with economic gains to the fact that people’s desires and expectations change along with their material fortunes. Where an American in 1970 may have once dreamed about owning a house, he or she might now dream of owning two. Where people once dreamed of buying a new car, they now dream of buying a luxury model.

“People are wedded to the idea that more money will bring them more happiness,” Easterlin said. “When they think of the effects of more money, they are failing to factor in the fact that when they get more money they are going to want even more money. When they get more money, they are going to want a bigger house. They never have enough money, but what they do is sacrifice their family life and health to get more money.”

Sociologist Ruut Veenhoven counters:

Not everyone agrees with Easterlin and his economic-growth-is-not-the-way-to-happiness theory. Ruut Veenhoven, a sociologist in the Netherlands and the director of the World Database of Happiness, argues that wealth is actually a very reliable predictor of happiness. If you take a snapshot of people in different countries, he argues, the data shows that people in Denmark, Switzerland and Austria report being happier than people in the Philippines, India and Iran, and the people in those nations report being happier than those in Armenia, Ukraine and Zimbabwe.

Veenhoven has even come up with a measure similar to one used by public health officials to measure the burden of disease — how many years of happiness a person might enjoy in different countries. The Swiss apparently have the highest number of “happy life years” — 63.9 — while Zimbabweans have the least — 11.5. People in the United States have an average happiness of 57 happy life years.

Read more.

Time Magazine reports:

Americans of every religious stripe are considerably more tolerant of the beliefs of others than most of us might have assumed, according to a new poll released Monday. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life last year surveyed 35,000 Americans, and found that 70% of respondents agreed with the statement “Many religions can lead to eternal life.” Even more remarkable was the fact that 57% of Evangelical Christians were willing to accept that theirs might not be the only path to salvation, since most Christians historically have embraced the words of Jesus, in the Gospel of John, that “no one comes to the Father except through me.” Even as mainline churches had become more tolerant, the exclusivity of Christianity’s path to heaven has long been one of the Evangelicals’ fundamental tenets. The new poll suggests a major shift, at least in the pews.

The Religious Landscape Survey’s findings appear to signal that religion may actually be a less divisive factor in American political life than had been suggested by the national conversation over the last few decades. Peter Berger, University Professor of Sociology and Theology at Boston University, said that the poll confirms that “the so-called culture war, in its more aggressive form, is mainly waged between rather small groups of people.” The combination of such tolerance with high levels of religious participation and intensity in the U.S., says Berger, “is distinctively American — and rather cheering.”

Less so, perhaps, to Christian conservatives, for whom Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay suggests the survey results have a “devastating effect on theological purity.” An acceptance of the notion of other paths to salvation dilutes the impact of the doctrine that Christ died to remove sin and thus opened the pathway to eternal life for those who accept him as their personal savior. It could also reduce the impulse to evangelize, which is based on the premise that those who are not Christian are denied salvation. The problem, says Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is that “the cultural context and the reality of pluralism has pulled many away from historic Christianity.

Read more.

The Boston Globe reports on how the increasing potency of marijuana fuels the fires of partisan marijuana debates.

“…The polarized debate about [marijuana’s] safety has been rekindled by two reports released separately this month by the federal government and a leading drug prohibition group. Both studies conclude that marijuana’s potency has increased, which they link to reports of more addiction, mental health problems, and emergency room admissions related to marijuana use among teenagers.”

And the sociologist weighs in…

In a field with limited research, partisans tend to create paper thin arguments, as easily made as they are countered, said Roger Roffman, professor of sociology at the University of Washington.

“I think [both sides] do a disservice to the general public,” said Roffman, who has written papers and edited books on marijuana use and dependence. On websites of drug policy reform advocates, “you’ll find lots of information about the very adverse consequences of criminalizing marijuana and very little mention of the very real harm associated with marijuana among some people in some circumstances,” he said.

Meanwhile, on government and prohibitionist websites, he said, “you’ll find plenty of information on the harmful consequences of marijuana abuse and very little information, perhaps, on the harmful consequences of criminalizing marijuana.”

Read on.

Inside Higher Ed reports on a recent publication from the American Sociological Association about the job market for new Ph.D.s.

“New Ph.D.’s in sociology appear to have a healthy job market in which to land positions, based purely on the numbers. But an analysis released by the American Sociological Association also points to a potential mismatch in specialties, as hiring committees appear to be much more enamored of criminology than are sociology graduate students.”

The up-side…

“The overall picture is quite positive. The association had listings in 2006 for 1,086 unique positions, 610 of them for assistant professors. During that same year, 562 Ph.D.’s were awarded in sociology. The report notes that not all of the posted positions in any year are filled by new Ph.D.’s or at all, but given that there are also postdoctoral positions, positions for which no rank is specified, and positions not included in the ASA job listings, the outlook is encouraging for new Ph.D. recipients.”

The down-side…

“Where things are slightly less certain is in the area of specialties. More than one third of the assistant professor positions did not specify a subfield. But the top subfield specified (nearly three times more than the runner up) was criminology/delinquency, and the sixth most popular subfield was a related one, law and society. The concern of those who prepared the report is that evidence suggests grad students are focused elsewhere.”

Read more.