Reuters reports that the likelihood of a person entering a nursing home or another type of long-term care facility is elevated immediately following the death of a spouse according to recent research from Elina Nihtila, of the department of sociology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Nihtila suggested several reasons behind this pattern.

The Times Colonist reports on Nihtila’s interview with Reuters Health:

“It may be related to the loss of social and instrumental support, in the form of care and help with daily activities such as help in cooking, cleaning, and shopping formerly shared with the deceased spouse,” Nihtila told Reuters Health.

“Second, grief and spousal loss may cause various symptoms, such as depression and anxiety, loss of appetite, sleep disturbances, fatigue and loss of concentration that could increase the need for institutional care. Furthermore, grief may cause increased susceptibility to physical diseases.”

The latest issue of Esquire Magazine featured an article entitled “Why the F%$# Do People Talk on Cell Phones at the Movies?” and solicited commentary from sociologist Rich Ling.

“Response No. 1, by Rich Ling, sociologist and author of New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication is Reshaping Social Cohesion: There’s a mismatch between people’s understanding of what’s going on around them and their need to be in touch with other people. When someone calls you or texts you, it’s a random positive reinforcement, a little gift. ‘Somebody’s noticing me and that makes me feel important.’ Being noticed by other people is a real narcotic. You have to weigh the importance of your social life with your involvement in the collective film-watching experience. We need a balance between appropriate use and tolerant expectations.”

The Associated Press reports that Charles Moskos, sociologist and creator of the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy towards homosexuality in the military has passed away at the age of 74 after battling cancer.

The Chicago Tribune noted:

“Moskos helped design AmeriCorps, a public service organization, and studied Greek-Americans. But his most noted accomplishment was his advice to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that led to the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.

Under the policy, passed by Congress in 1993, gays are allowed to serve in the military, but they are prohibited from engaging in homosexual activity and to not talk about their sexual orientation.”

The Washington Post reports,

“The resonance of that long-ago predicament is still with us today, as a bitter Democratic presidential primary battle has caused many supporters of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton to feel that the campaign has pitted race against gender. Many Clinton supporters, men included, cite openly sexist criticism targeting their candidate — conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh asked, ‘Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?’ — and feel that a political defeat would be an unconscionable victory for sexism itself. Obama’s supporters, the majority of whom are white, cite the racism their candidate has faced — large numbers of voters have openly told pollsters they would never vote for a black man. Should Democratic superdelegates hand the race to Clinton, many of these voters would feel racism has won.”

The sociologist weighs in:

“Patricia Hill Collins, a University of Maryland sociologist who is to be the next president of the American Sociological Association, said the error being made by many Clinton and Obama supporters is to see race and gender in unidimensional terms: ‘Obama represents race and Clinton represents gender — this is a flawed model,’ Collins said. ‘Why does Obama not represent gender? He has a race and a gender. Hillary has a race and a gender.’

The reason for our selective focus, the scholars said, is that people are keenly aware of unfair disadvantages but spend no time dwelling on unfair advantages.”

Associated Press writer Jay Lindsay spoke with sociologist Peter Berger about a new study out of Boston University and the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs aimed at understanding more about evangelical Christians in the United States.

The project was born out of a concern that intellectuals look down on evangelicals and that the evangelical community’s influence has been largely absent from sociological study, a significant concern given that nearly 75 million Americans identify as evangelicals.

The Associated Press reports:

“Educated people have the notion that evangelicals are ‘barefoot people of Tobacco Road who, I don’t know, sleep with their sisters or something,’ Berger says. It’s time that attitude changed, [Berger remarks]. ‘That was probably never correct, but it’s totally false now, and I think the image should be corrected,’ Berger says in a recent interview… ‘It’s not good if a prejudiced view of this community prevails in the elite circles of society,’ says Berger, a self-described liberal Lutheran. ‘It’s bad for democracy and it’s wrong.'”

A recent story in the Boston Globe addresses the persistent absence of women in fields such as science and engineering. The significant gender gap in these careers is often blamed on science and math classes in schools, apparent differences in aptitude, as well as potentially sexist companies. Although women make up nearly half of those participating in the paid labor market, they hold only a small proportion of careers requiring high-qualifications and receiving high earnings. Women make up only 20% of our country’s engineers, less than 30% of chemists, and only about 25% of those specializing in computing and mathematics.

The Globe reports:

“Over the past decade and more, scores of conferences, studies, and government hearings have been directed at understanding the gap. It has stayed in the media spotlight thanks in part to the high-profile misstep of then-Harvard president Larry Summers, whose loose comment at a Harvard conference on the topic in 2005 ultimately cost him his job.”

“Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women – highly qualified for the work – stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.”

“One study of information-technology workers found that women’s own preferences are the single most important factor in that field’s dramatic gender imbalance. Another study followed 5,000 mathematically gifted students and found that qualified women are significantly more likely to avoid physics and the other ‘hard’ sciences in favor of work in medicine and biosciences.”

Read more.

Well-known Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson recently wrote an op-ed piece for for the New York Times about Hillary Clinton’s ‘3 am’ phone advertisement.

Patterson writes:

“On first watching Hillary Clinton’s recent ‘It’s 3 a.m.’ advertisement, I was left with an uneasy feeling that something was not quite right — something that went beyond my disappointment that she had decided to go negative. Repeated watching of the ad on YouTube increased my unease. I realized that I had only too often in my study of America’s racial history seen images much like these, and the sentiments to which they allude.”

…

“I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s ‘Birth of a Nation,’ the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.”

Full story.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports on the findings from a study by Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Christakis’ findings…

“A smoker is more likely to kick the habit if a spouse, friend, co-worker or sibling did as well.”

The study concluded that smokers tend to quit in groups, and that those individuals who don’t stop smoking inevitably find themselves excluded from their social circles. Dr. Christakis commented that smoking behavior depends not only on the people you know, but the people who they know as well. Read on…

The Wall Street Journal reports on a new series of studies about the trend towards young adults moving back home to live with their parents.

WSJ discusses findings highlighted by sociologist Katherine Newman…

“More upper- and middle-income parents, including many who felt pressed for time when their children were growing up, aren’t ready to be ‘finished with them’ by their 20s, says Katherine Newman, a Princeton University sociology professor and one of the project’s 20 researchers. Also, as more students attend college at older ages, parents are coming to regard the 20s as a time of self-discovery.”

And co-investigators…

“Researchers on the project set out to document economic factors driving the trend, but found it’s bigger than the financial causes usually blamed for it. To be sure, rising housing and commuting costs play a role, Dr. Yelowitz found. But neither those factors nor job-market changes fully explain the 25-year trend. The biggest increase in young adults living with parents came in the 1980s, when the labor market generally improved, he found. And rising real housing costs explain only about 15% of the drop in independent living among young adults, which started years before the sharpest run-up in housing.”

Full story.

The New York Times reports on a new collaborative study by sociologist Philip Kasinitz of CUNY, political scientist John H. Mollenkopf, and Harvard sociologist Mary C. Waters. The findings from this $2 million 10-year project will soon be published in a book titled “Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age” from Harvard University Press.

The study focused on a number of different groups to examine the experiences of adult children of immigrants in the New York region including: Dominicans, Chinese, Russian Jews, South Americans (encompassing Colombians, Ecuadoreans and Peruvians) and West Indians. For the purposes of comparison, the investigators also studied U.S.-born whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans born on the mainland who live in the New York area.

The study pointed to signs of positive progress as many of these adult children achieve more than their parents in education as well as earnings, in some cases surpassing native-born Americans. But on a more cautionary note, the study highlighted how persistent poverty and low academic achievement among Dominicans and the prevalence of racial discrimination again Caribbean immigrants impede universal progress for all groups.

How did they do it?

“The study was based on 3,415 telephone interviews conducted between 1998 and 2000; 333 face-to-face follow-up interviews in 2000 and 2001; and a final round of 172 follow-up interviews in 2002 and 2003. The subjects of the study were 18 to 32 at the time of the initial interviews and were either born in the United States to at least one immigrant parent, or arrived in the United States by age 12. The study covered 10 counties: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Westchester and Nassau in New York and Essex, Hudson, Passaic and Union in New Jersey.”