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.’”

The National Post recently published the third of a four-part series on Daniel McGinn’s book House Lust, titled “The Sociology of the Mega-Home.” McGinn’s book examines the obsession we have with our homes, and draws upon scholarly research related to shared living space of all sizes. This article suggests that personal problems and isolation from other family members is a function of the activities and interactions in the home rather than the square footage of the house.

“When sociologists have examined house size and family life, they’ve usually focused on the other extreme: the extent to which living in cramped or overcrowded circumstances leads to problems. In fact, research suggests that it does. New York University sociologist Dalton Conley cites studies showing that people who live in homes where the number of rooms is fewer than the number of inhabitants suffer from increased irritability, withdrawal, weariness and poor physical and mental health. Conley’s own research goes even further, suggesting that children who grow up in an overcrowded home tend to suffer in educational attainment, perhaps because they don’t have sufficient space to study or because the crowded conditions affect their sleep.”

…but…

“Kathryn Anthony is an architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana. Anthony believes that while people may worry about a family in a 9,000-square-foot home losing touch with one another, it may be just as easy to lose touch in a 1,500-squarefoot home in which each family member plugs into his own iPod while tapping on a wire-less-equipped laptop. ‘These kind of electronic devices allow people to get into their own worlds and really divorce themselves, at least temporarily, from what’s going on,’ Anthony says. It’s no wonder that pediatricians advise parents to keep TVs and computers out of children’s bedrooms.”

Read more. 

Mike Nizza, author of the New York Times blog The Lede, recently reported on a new study from physicist Cesar Hidalgo of the University of Notre Dame and Calros Rodriguez-Sickert from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile on the persistence of relationships within the cell phone network.

Hidalgo and Rodriguez-Sickert used data from almost two million people and eight million phone calls over the course of the year. They found that the leading cause of a persistent relationship was reciprocity – one friend returning another’s call.

PhysOrg.com interviewed Hidalgo:

“‘One result that I thought was somehow not so intuitive was the trade-off between the degree (number of links) of a person and the persistence of its ties,’ Hidalgo told PhysOrg.com. ‘It has been known for a long time that some people are much more connected than others, yet it was not known whether these highly connected individuals also had a larger number of strong connections. While time constraints may force people with more ties to be less persistent on average, the data also showed that, in absolute terms, people with more ties also have a greater number of persistent ties than those less connected. Highly connected individuals are not trading quality for quantity; rather, they appear to be more socially expressed in both the numbers of links and the persistence or strength of them.'”

This recent broadcast from National Public Radio attempts to answer the question of why children curse. Drawing upon the expertise of psychologists from premier research institutions, Morning Edition reporter Allison Aubrey provides some interesting answers and comical anecdotes.

Listen here.

Talking about marriage? Call in the sociologists!

In a recent article from TheStreet.com, Lyneka Little reports on the conclusion that marriage can be a ‘double-edged sword,’ providing positive and negative benefits to each member of the couple. The effects have proven to be disproportionately favorable for married men, who make more than their single counterparts. Read more…

“‘Marriage works as a two-edge sword,’ says Stephen Sweet, an assistant professor of sociology at Ithaca College in New York. On the plus side, there is often much stability to gain from tying the knot.”

“‘Married people are better off than single people based on economic status, social status and happiness,’ Sweet says. ‘The economic gains of marriage can come from aligning yourself with another individual and increasing social capital.'”

 “…Other jobs where a ring could raise your profile? Judge, clergyman and police officer. A police officer may want to show a stable life and marriage can help that, says S. Alexander Takeuchi, a professor of sociology at the University of North Alabama.”

“And how about your productivity? ‘Once you get married, you’re going to spend more time with your spouse and family,’ and it may affect your job productivity, according to Takeuchi. For those in a creative career, Takeuchi says, ‘the amount of time that you can spend to think and visualize things, and use your imagination decreases.'”

Science Daily reports on a new publication from Professor Yang Yang at the University of Chicago that concludes that Americans grow happier with age. The findings from this study, published in the latest issue of the American Sociological Review, also concludes that Baby Boomers are not as happy as other generations, that on average, African Americans are not as happy as whites, and men are less happy than women. The study uses data from the General Social Survey from 1972 to 2004. The paper also highlights the rise and fall of happiness between historical time periods in the United States

Professor Yang Yang comments:

“‘Understanding happiness is important to understanding quality of life. The happiness measure is a guide to how well society is meeting people’s needs,’ said Yang Yang, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago.”