The Millenial Generation is coming of age in an era of low voter turnout, weak and waning labor union influence, and few civil protests compared to previous generations. Though this appears to paint a portrait of overall apathy, the young Millenials are not necessarily disengaged.

Last month, fast food workers, many of them young, in 60 cities and almost 1,000 restaurants across the country walked off their jobs in a demonstration for higher wages. In an article in the NYTimes, the workers involved in the walk-out received publicity for the “audacity of their demand,” a push to increase their hourly wages to $15. Currently, the majority of the 2.3 million fast food workers in America make no more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25, well below a living wage. The media depiction of the strikers as naïve and audacious in their demands calls to mind the Occupy Wall Street movement. Once again, corporations are claiming that raising workers’ wages would place a financial burden on consumers and hurt businesses.

But if we’ve learned anything from the backlash against these protests, it’s that the situation is not black and white. Tali Kristal’s recent research, “How the Decline of American Unions Has Boosted Corporate Profits and Reduced Worker Compensation,” argues that the consumer versus poverty-wage worker dichotomy is faulty. Not only has the federal minimum wage failed to rise with the cost of living, but the literal percentage of corporate profits going to the worker is declining—with more of the profits being pocketed by already-wealthy individuals. This is happening as labor unions, which have historically defended workers’ rights, decline in power and influence. Kristal advocates a need for increased collective action in the form of labor unions and a redirected attention to where profits are actually going.

Perhaps the fast food worker walk-out is an example of this much-needed change. University of Washington sociologist Jake Rosenfeld believes that the walk-outs mark a shift in the previous decline of labor unionism and collective action, arguing, “The strikes could elevate the union movement’s standing among younger workers who have grown up in an era when unions have steadily lost membership and power.” In a generation of waning civil engagement, declining labor unions, and an overall aura of apathy, such demonstrations mark a renewed form of collective action.

When thinking about the typical U.S. family, you might imagine a classic sitcom like The Brady Bunch: stay-at-home mom Carol, architect husband Mike, and six lovely children. At the time the show aired, a “blended” family of remarried adults was a bit of a novelty, sure, but it still stuck to the married mother and father, father is the breadwinner trope. And that’s still how many often picture U.S. families.

The Washington Post reports the findings of Ohio State University’s Department of Sociology on the living arrangements of U.S. children from birth to 17 years old. The researchers found that the children’s living arrangements varied distinctly by race. Asian children were most likely to live with a married mother and father, with only the father working, but that set-up only counted for 24% of living arrangements among Asian children. It turns out that dual-income households are the strong majority among both white and Asian children, and that both are more likely to live in dual-income households than either black or Hispanic children. Higher percentages of black and Hispanic children are living with their grandparents. Another notable statistic among black children is their greater likelihood of living with a single, never-married mother (this is true for nearly a quarter of all black kids).

No word yet on all white, three-boy, three-girl families with maids.

Election year or not, questions about voting behavior are rarely lacking among political pundits. Face it, they need stuff to talk about. Who will turn out in next year’s mid-term elections? How will the “Obama coalition” break in 2016? Social scientists are also posing questions. For example, why don’t people vote after the death of a spouse?

A study of 5.86 million Californians before and after the 2009-2010 statewide elections showed that “11 percent of people who would have voted if their spouse were alive failed to make it to the polls even a year and a half after the death.” The research found that immediately after the death of a spouse, people were less likely to vote, and while widows and widowers slowly return to the polls over time, they did not vote as often as they did before.

One possible explanation draws upon a central theme of sociology—the interplay of personal and public life. This study suggests that a personal tragedy leads to a withdrawal from public life. As Emma Green writes in The Atlantic, “If that’s at least somewhat true, that public life seems less important when private life collapses, then it’s also worth looking at the inverse: Do strong relationships and stable private lives make people better citizens?”

The important insights on social life that may come out of extensions of this research into wider elections, different geographic areas, socioeconomic effects, and longer-term studies, may well give the pundits and commentators something to talk about until 2016.

Best known for her seminal text The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander has examined the injustices and inequality perpetuated through mass incarceration, particularly its effects on black men in the United States. However, her recent article in The Nation, reflecting on the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, “breaks her silence” on interrelated topics, such as NSA spying, drone warfare, and the detention of immigrants.

In a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., Alexander seeks to “connect the dots” between mass incarceration and broader systems of poverty, racism, militarism, and materialism. Motivated by King’s wider critiques of the Vietnam War abroad and labor exploitation at home, Alexander refuses to keep a narrow view of the inequality of mass incarceration or “stay in her lane,” as she describes it. In the spirit of the March on Washington, she links her own research with the national and international phenomena of the war on terror and the war on drugs, saying,

When we declare war on “things” like terrorism and drugs, it becomes easy to forget that real people—mothers, fathers and children—will be targeted, caged and killed without due process, without consideration of their basic humanity, and without asking the hard questions required of complicated social and global problems that cannot be solved by a simple declaration of war.

Social networks allow instant access to friends and family, and let you show the world what’s going on in your life. Maybe a bit narcissistic, but harmless. Studies, however, have been all over the place on the question of whether SNS (social networking systems) are “good” or “bad” for individuals and society. Are we more connected than ever or more disconnected than ever? A recent study by the Public Library of Science went with the bad news: it found that the more you use Facebook, the more miserable you’ll be.

A recent article in The Economist describes the work of Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan, and Philippe Verduyn of Leuven University in Belgium. In response to generally short-term, “cross-sectional” studies of SNS, their study was done over an extended period of time.  Subjects would answer surveys reporting their mental and emotional states multiple times a day. The more they were on Facebook, the more they reported being dissatisfied with life.

Others studies have associated the use of social networks like Facebook with depression, social tension, and envy. The article states:

Endlessly comparing themselves with peers who have doctored their photographs, amplified their achievements and plagiarised their bons mots can leave Facebook’s users more than a little green-eyed.

On a positive note, the same study found that the more in-person contact the subject had, the more satisfied they were. Digital dualism aside, a well-rounded life of on- and off-line interaction—that good old “moderation”—seemed to do the trick.

UC Berkeley grad students and Scholars Strategy Network members Charlie Eaton and Jacob Habinek are in an ideal spot—geographically, educationally, even generationally—to look at college debt. Young people seeking first degrees, let alone post-secondary education, are increasingly floundering in student debt, and Congress is dragging its heels when it comes to finding ways to mitigate that debt’s effects. But the state of California’s higher education system is also notoriously in the red, and that’s where their research comes in.

“Public research universities,” like those the authors attend, “have passed along their own debt to students by raising tuition and fees by an average of 56 percent from 2002 to 2010,” writes Don Troop in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Bottom Line blog. So, yes, the students face rising loan debt, but it’s at least partially due to the borrowing needs of the colleges getting passed along to the “consumer,” a model not usually associated with public institutions. Troop goes on to cite the authors’ work examining data “from 155 public research universities,” “among which debt-service payments had risen 86 percent from 2002 to 2010.”

The idea that inflation raises the cost of goods and providers then raise the cost of the goods for the end consumer isn’t new. When that commodity is education, however, we see students (even those who never graduate) holding what may soon amount to adjustable rate credit card bills: federal and private education loans. To read the full SSN report, click here.

For many, the “American Dream” means owning a comfortable home in a nice neighborhood, and that idea brings a certain Mellencamp tune to mind.

The song nods to a deeper point: the history of American housing policy from the New Deal and the G.I. Bill onwards was often defined by who couldn’t get a little pink house. In fact, racial biases among policymakers and bureaucrats made it difficult or impossible for minorities to get support for housing in white neighborhoods (For a great account of this history, see Ira Katznelson’s book When Affirmative Action Was White, or his recent blog post over at The Scholars Strategy Network).

Today’s housing policies may be flipping the script on this story, but not necessarily in a good way.

The Atlantic Cities reports new research from NYU Sociologist Jacob Faber on the 2006 housing bubble that preceded the massive economic crash and kickoff to the U.S. “Great Recession” in 2008. It turns out that during this bubble, in addition to denying home loans to racial minority groups, banks were also targeting minority groups for lower quality loans. The article reports:

Black and Hispanic families making more than $200,000 a year were more likely on average to be given a subprime loan than a white family making less than $30,000 a year… blacks were 2.8 times more likely to be denied for a loan, and Latinos were two times more likely. When they were approved, blacks and Latinos were 2.4 times more likely to receive a subprime loan than white applicants.

Faber adds that the trend doesn’t just deny support to these minority groups, it actually ignores their financial successes.

…this data offers another illustration that middle-class blacks have often not been able to leverage their income status for the same benefits as middle-class whites.

Ain’t that America?

On both the left and the right, discussions about the environment can often turn to religion to remind us of our responsibility to take care of the planet. Both Presidents Bush and Obama have reminded us to be “good stewards of the earth,” despite the disagreement on what that really means, and the activism of a range of religious groups on the issue has led pundits and scholars to conclude that Americans’ Christianity has been getting greener over the past few years.

A new report from Michigan State University, however, may challenge this verdant vision. Lansing’s Fox News affiliate station reports that a new study by John Clements, Aaron McCright, and Chenyang Xiao suggests a real divide between between what Christian leaders are saying and congregants are doing. Their work with an environmental attitudes section in the 2010 General Social Survey found that rank-and-file Christians have not shown “a significant increase in pro-environmental attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.” In fact, nonreligious respondents in the survey were more likely to show concern about the environment and more willing to sacrifice to protect it.

The good news from the authors’ article in Organization & Environment is that, among Christians alone, those who were more religious were more likely to engage in “private environmental behaviors” like driving less and recycling. The real question, then, is not which religion gets to claim it cares more about the environment, but rather how to make these beliefs and behaviors more common for everyone.

When things start to get crazy, the “bystander effect” can kick in. As seen in many public incidents (notably when bystanders took photos of a man about to be killed on NYC train tracks), the bystander effect is generally considered a powerful force in determining whether someone intervenes in a dramatic indecent. Basically, people are less likely to intervene if others are around—they assume someone else will deal with the problem. That said, a recent study by graduate student Michael Parks of Penn State shows that the bystander effect may not be as strong as was once thought.  In an interview for MedicalXpress, Parks explains what he saw in observing bar fights:

These bystanders used nonaggressive interventions to break up about 65 percent of the fights between two aggressive males. Most bystander interventions were classified as nonviolent interventions, which included verbally stopping the fight, or separating the fighters.

Parks worked with Wayne Osgood and Richard Felson, both professors of Penn State; Samantha Wells of the University of Ontario; and Kathryn Graham of the University of Toronto. The team’s study found that bystanders were most likely to intervene when they felt the violence was getting “too severe.” Bystanders were most likely to step in when it was male-to-male aggression, since most assume the violence escalates most quickly. Surprisingly, bystanders generally avoided breaking up male-to-female aggression (though, anecdotally, police officers do say intervening in partner violence is risky, since both partners may turn their aggression on the interloper).

“It seems a little upsetting that people didn’t intervene in incidents that involved a man harassing a woman, but the results showed that this was indeed the case,” said Parks. “Our data showed that this type of violence had the lowest level of severity, so one explanation for the lack of intervention in these incidents is that third parties perceived that the events won’t escalate into higher levels of violence, something that does not have the potential to be dangerous or an emergency.”

Today marks the first day that gay couples can legally marry in the states of Rhode Island and Minnesota, the eleventh and thirteenth states respectively to legalize gay marriage. In the wake of  the recent Supreme Court decision on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California’s Prop 8, many gay and lesbian individuals and allies around the country are celebrating advances in the rights and recognition extended to gay couples on a federal level.

However, in the midst of these celebrations, Rick Settersten points out in a recent LA Times article that same-sex couples, who do not reside in the thirteen states and the District of Columbia where gay marriage is legal, continue to be left out by the law. He states,

For those of us trapped elsewhere in the country—even in places we love—the verdict reinforces the fact that the security of our families and our futures rises or falls depending on where we live.

Highlighting the variation and inconsistency by state in legal rights extended to gay and lesbian partnerships, Settersten describes the reality of gay couples that migrate to states with more legal recognition. Settersten, his partner Dan, and their two children moved from Ohio in 2004 when the state banned recognition of any form of same-sex coupling (marriage, civil unions, or domestic partnerships). At the time, their new home state of Oregon enabled them to co-adopt children and register as a domestic partnership. Although they have been together for almost thirty years, their domestic partnership in Oregon will not be federally recognized under the DOMA decision, forcing them to move yet again if they want to benefit from federal recognition of their union.