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.”

Well-know sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh of Columbia University has written for Slate Magazine on Grand Theft Auto 4. Venkatesh’s article “Unjustifiable Carnage, Easy Alliances, and Lots of Self-Doubt: What Grand Theft Auto IV Gets Right About Gangland and Illegal Economies” draws connections between ‘Liberty City,’ the setting of the game, and Chicago’s South Side.

Venkatesh writes,

“If you are a fan of the new Grand Theft Auto video game, I have just the neighborhood for you. The setting of GTA IV, Liberty City, is an amped-up version of the New York metro area. If you want a slice of the real thing, however, I’d recommend Chicago’s South Side. The last time I visited Chicago, I stopped by 59^th Street, near Washington Park (and only a few short blocks from the picturesque University of Chicago). Two of the local gangs were fighting each other in full view for control of a prime sales spot, a hotel. For a monthly fee, the proprietor had promised to allow one gang to turn the place into a bordello—drugs, prostitution, stolen merchandise. For the gangs, winning meant more than simply getting rid of their enemy. Neither controlled the area surrounding the hotel. Anyone bringing drugs (or women, or guns, etc.) to the hotel would have to run the gantlet formed by other enemy gangs, who would be at the ready to shoot down the transporter.”

Check out this fascinating blog post from Jeff Weintraub about MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews’ comments about contrasting sociologists with Americans.

Weintraub writes,

“Tonight, Matthews suddenly decided that even mentioning class and race in connection with elections is for ‘sociologists,’ not ‘Americans.’ Using phrases like ‘blue-collar’ is ‘elitist talk.’ And simply by talking about ‘white working-class voters,’ Hillary Clinton is almost ‘like the Al Sharpton of white people.'”

Check out the full story with video link.

MercuryNews.com reports on a new study out of Stanford University which suggests that the older a man is when he marries, especially after age 40, the more likely it is that his bride will be significantly younger, regardless of whether or not the man is wealthy.

Co-investigators Paula England and Elizabeth McClintock have found that “men in their 40s tend to marry women who average seven years younger, men in their 50s are marrying brides who average 11 years younger, and men in their 60s are marrying women who are 13 years younger. ” 

England and McClintock suggest that this may be due to changes in family structure after the 1960s, but attribute this trend largely to what they call “a double-standard of aging” — where “the male idea of beauty is found in women in their early twenties and remains fixed as men age.”

Science Daily reports on a new study from Christine Whelan at the University of Iowa which suggests that men whose mothers earned a college degree and worked outside the home seem to have an effect on how they choose their wives.

Whelan’s study, which focuses on high-achieving men (defined as those who are in the top 10% of earnings for their age as well as those with a graduate degrees), are likely to marry a woman whose education mimics their mothers’. Of these high achieving men in the study, almost 80% of them whose mothers had college degrees married women with college degrees.

In addition, of those men whose mothers had graduate degrees, 62% of high-achieving men married other graduate degree holders, and 27% got hitched to women with college degrees.

Science Daily reports:

“‘Successful men in their 20s and 30s today are the sons of a pioneering generation of high-achieving career women. Their mothers serve as role models for how a woman can be nurturing and successful at the same time,’ said Whelan, a visiting assistant professor of sociology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. ‘One man I interviewed put it like this: “If your mother is a success, you don’t have any ideas of success and family that exclude a woman from working.” This Mother’s Day, I think we should thank those moms for leading the way toward gender equality for a younger generation.'”

The New York Sun recently reported on the release of a new study from sociologist Harry Levin of Queens College titled, “Marijuana Arrest Crusade.” The report claims that police have singled-out minorities during the drug crackdown in New York beginning in 1997. The study makes use of data from the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services which shows that between 1997 and 2007, of those arrested on drugs charges, 52% of the suspects were black, 31% Hispanic, and only 15% white.

Some blame laws…

“Laws were revised in the late 1970s to largely decriminalize carrying small, concealed stashes of marijuana, Mr. Levin said. But he claimed police routinely ‘manufacture’ arrests for possession in public view — still a misdemeanor — by stopping young black men on the street and goading them into emptying their pockets.”

Others blame the administration…

“According to the study, arrests for marijuana possession began skyrocketing in the late 1990s during the Giuliani administration — a trend that continued under Mayor Bloomberg at an estimated cost of between $50 and $90 million a year. There were 39,700 arrests last year alone, according to the study. The 2007 total makes the city ‘the marijuana arrest capital of the world,’ Ms. Lieberman [the Executive Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union] said.”

Charles Tilly, legendary sociologist and Columbia University professor has passed away at age 78. The New York Times obituary cited Tilly’s unique combination of historical and quantitative methods in his work. A prolific scholar, Tilly published 51 books and more than 600 scholarly articles.

Excerpts from the Times obituary:

“In an interview on Thursday, Adam Ashforth, a professor of anthropology, political science and sociology at Northwestern University, called Dr. Tilly ‘the founding father of 21st-century sociology.’ He particularly praised Dr. Tilly’s seamless synthesizing of his own work on witchcraft and politics in South Africa. Dr. Ashforth also mentioned Dr. Tilly’s dizzying output of books, which had been running at more than a book a year for more than two decades.”

“’It was exhausting keeping up with him,’ Dr. Ashforth said. ‘We’ll now have a chance to catch up with our reading.'”

“On April Fool’s Day in 1969, The New York Times asked leading intellectuals what they considered foolish. Dr. Tilly answered, ‘One way I’d like to improve social life is to get a guy to stop for five minutes or one minute or 10 seconds and listen to what the other guy says.’”

New researcher out from Florida State University shows that teenagers who are living with one biological and one step-parent have lower grades and significantly greater behavioral problems than adolescents from intact families. Further, the study suggests that these problems increase over time. Kathryn Tillman and co-investigators studied data on 11,000 adolescents for this new study, published in the journal Social Science Research.

The authors found heightened negative effects for boys living with half-siblings or step-siblings on behavioral measures and concluded that teens who live with both half-siblings and step-siblings than those who live with one or the other.

Reuters reports:
“‘These findings imply that family formation patterns that bring together children who have different sets of biological parents may not be in the best interests of the children involved,’ said Kathryn Harker Tillman, a professor of sociology at the university.”

“‘…One half of all American step-families include children from previous relationships of both partners, and the majority of parents in step-families go on to have additional children together,’ she added in a statement.”

 A recent article from Alex Williams for the New York Times investigated the ways in which young employees in their 20s and 30s discuss their salaries. Williams claims that there is an “etiquette to sharing the information” when young professionals brag about their salaries.

The Times reports:

“For instance, most young people don’t tell their cubicle mates, according to a 2007 study for Money magazine by the sociologist Jeanne Fleming and the writer Leonard Schwarz. Still, young workers seem somewhat less likely to adhere to this convention than older ones. The study found that 90 percent of those over 35 who were surveyed agreed with the statement ‘you should never let your co-workers know how much you make,’ while 84 percent of subjects under 35 agreed.”

“But between friends almost anything is fair game. Beth Kobliner, the author of the best-selling ‘Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties,’ said she had noticed that many young people now ‘have no idea what their boomer parents earn, but know every intimate detail about their close friends’ salaries, 401(k)s and debt loads.’”