Newark Mayor Cory Booker recently announced that he will spend the week of December 4^th living on food stamps.  He will join the ranks of many others, such as celebrities and college students, who are undertaking a food stamp challenge.  As Professor Noliwe M. Rooks explained in an opinion piece in Time, however, there is a problem with such challenges.

These experiments are designed to make politicians and the general public more sensitive to the difficulties of living on $4.00 per day, the amount that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provides to the almost 46 million people who currently receive benefits…Proving that those who are wealthy, middle class or famous can live on $4.00 per day may increase empathy, but it will do little to actually help those who need the program most.

In the meantime, there is little public conversation about actually raising the dollar amount that the SNAP provides.  To explain this, Rooks cites survey research conducted by the Pew Research Center.  In the poll, 59% of respondents said the government should provide food and housing to all citizens.  Yet, 71% thought the poor were too dependent on this type of assistance, and 52% said support should not be increased if it will increase the deficit.  Americans are, in general, deeply ambivalent about the role of government assistance.

But, Rooks argues that this assistance is much needed.  One in five people surveyed in a recent Gallop poll said they could not always afford to feed their entire family, and more Americans struggled to afford food in 2011 than in any other year since the financial crisis. Between 1996 and 2011, SNAP reduced the number of extremely poor children in the United States by 50%.  To Rooks, an increase in the amount of support offered by the SNAP program would have an even larger impact.

Those who have taken up the SNAP challenge and chronicled their experiences all say that they were tired, couldn’t focus, and were distracted by hunger. Once their week was over, their lives got right back to normal. We can only hope that Cory Booker and others who take up such experiments will become advocates to help raise others out of poverty and not just spend a week walking in their shoes.

Why do we impose upon young, talented, and serious-minded high-school seniors the imperative of selecting an academic major that is, more often than not, completely irrelevant to, or at least inconsistent with, their heartfelt desires and true career objectives: to be professional athletes?

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, David Pargman, an emeritus professor of educational psychology at FSU, poses this question. The answer, he seems to believe is, “Who knows?” Suggesting an improvement to the current “deep dysfunction of college athletics,” Pargman goes on to say that, since it’s plain that “student athletes want to be professional entertainers,” we should let “family members, friends, and high-school coaches acknolwedge and support that goal… to study football, basketball, or baseball.”

But how? Well, “higher education, for better or worse, purports to be a pathway to a vocational future,” Pargman argues, so let’s create a “sports performance major.” The first two years would look much like any other liberal arts education, with the junior and senior years offering specialized training in everything from physiology to heavy resistance training labs, elements of contract law, kinesiology, and an introduction to motor learning. “Such prescribed coursework would be relevant to the athlete’s career objectives,” Pargman writes, and, since the students would also be playing for school teams, their experience would be analogous to that of a musical theater student: “They study their craft and display their acquired skill before campus audiences.”

Of course, a great portion of the student-athletes would still not go on to be professional athletes, but not only is this true for many collegiate programs, the major’s design would allow students a chance to gain knowledge of other associated fields. If nothing else, the author closes, “What I propose would be infinitely more honest than the charade that now prevails” as students dreaming of a pro career so often “completely lack interest in the mandatory and largely arbitrary and convenient choice of major.” Essentially, a sports performance major might let students stop acting.

Hoping to get an avalanche of Christmas cards and holiday letters this year? There’s just one rule: send out a pile of your own. That’s what a BYU sociology professor named Phillip Kunz did back in the ’70s, and his address stayed on others’ Christmas lists for nearly 15 years, reports NPR affiliate KERA news. The surprise? All those cards he sent, some 600, went to people he didn’t know.

Kunz’s little experiment involved sending about 300 personal holiday cards (hand-written!) and about 300 cards that just featured a family photo, but they all exerted a subtle peer pressure to reciprocate. He got long letters back from some of the strangers, and matching-sweater-photo-cards from others—some 200 responses in all. Robert Cialdini, a well-known emeritus social psychologist and marketing professor at Arizona State University, explains to journalist Alix Spiegel that the response reflects just how well the golden rule is drilled into us as kids: “We are obligated to give back to others, the form of behavior that they have first given to us,” he says. “Essentially thou shall not take without giving in return.”

Cialdini goes on to cite the implied social rules of give and take in common practices from tipping to using those pre-printed address labels charities send out. More nefariously, this is also what’s behind so much of the quid pro quo spotted in politics and when doctors prescribe medications because of the perks pharmaceutical companies have sent their way:

This doesn’t mean that the rule of reciprocation affects all of us all of the time…. But it is powerful. One of those invisible powerful things that can subtly shape how we behave even years after someone has given us something.

And that, of course, is how we end up guiltily eying that stack of Christmas cards every year. We have to write back, don’t we?

With the holiday season upon us here in the United States, we often hear a bit more than usual about miracles. This seasonal trend isn’t the only trend of note, though. A few weeks ago, the Huffington Post’s David Briggs told us the number of Americans who believe in miracles at any time of year has increased over the last few decades.

Drawing on General Social Survey data, sociologist Robert Martin found that about 4 out of 5 Americans believe that miracles probably or definitely occur. The percent of people who “definitely” believe in miracles rose from 45 percent in 1991 to 55 percent in 2008.

Beliefs in heaven and hell have remained steady in recent decades, and the increased belief in miracles crosses all religious traditions, even to those with no religious affiliation. What might explain this change?

One potential explanation, according to Martin, is the cultural preoccupation with miracles promoted in non-dogmatic ways by a series of popular television programs such as “Touched by an Angel” and best-selling books such as the “Left Behind” and “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series. Martin and other researchers even point out that no one has likely done more for miracles than Oprah. (For a sociological study of Oprah, see here). Her television show made accounts of proclaimed miracles a regular part of the lives of millions of viewers.

Sociologist Kevin Dougherty also weighs in, noting that, in the United States, “There’s still this profound interest in spiritual things,” even as fewer Americans identify with a religious group.

We’re happy to announce the media award winners for September and October!

September: “Why Surveys Should Pay Attention to Prisoners,” Carl Bialik, Wall Street Journal.

In her write-up of the article, TSP’s Sarah Shannon reminds us that much of the young, African-American male population in the United States is incarcerated and thus unaccounted for in national surveys.  

October: “Tracing the Link Between Single Moms and Gun Violence,” Belinda Luscombe, Time Health & Family.

As the Citing explains, Luscombe uses social scientific research to weigh in on a current issue and show that the link between single moms and gun violence is tenuous, to say the least.

 As we’ve said before, the choice of each month’s TSP Media Award is neither scientific nor exhaustive, but we do work hard to winnow our favorite nominees.  And, while we don’t have the deep pocketbooks to offer enormous trophies or cash prizes, we hope our informal award offers cheer and encouragement for journalists and social scientists to keep up the important (if not always rewarding) work of bringing academic knowledge to the broader public.

Education News and the Minnesota Daily report that new research from a University of Minnesota team helmed by John Robert Warren reveals a whopping 450,000 students between grades 1 and 8 are held back every year, and there is wide variation across states. Previously, it had been thought that most of these “retentions” were evenly distributed and happened in the first grade, with students not quite ready to move into the second. Presumably, these earlier retentions would be less likely to derail an educational track or firmly established friendship ties, but those that come further into grade school would hold further-reaching effects.

As Warren tells the Daily:

“I think first grade is kind of a formative year, it’s where you begin to do the building blocks of reading and math and it’s always hard to tell when a kid is ready to move on,” Warren said. “I think there is a sentiment, right or wrong, that it might do some good to hold a kid back in first grade to help them build those foundational skills.”

Warren’s team is the first to get a look at state-by-state data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data, and they have published their full report in the journal Education Researcher.

China is an expanding country, trying to find where it fits in the social and economic framework of powerful nations. Conversely, its people are trying to find where they fit in the Chinese social structure. As they prepare for a change in political leadership, China is also faced with they rise of the individual. In an article for Voice of America, Shannon Van Sant interviewed UC Irvine sociologist Wang Feng about this phenomenon.

Much like in many areas in the Middle East, Europe, and North America, parts of China have recently seen a surge of protests and “mass incidents.”  Feng describes this as “directly linked to the growth of China’s middle class.”  While incomes in China increase, Feng explains, the expectations Chinese citizens have of individual rights and pursuits grow too. Everything from land ownership to corruption and taxation is now a subject of contestation.

These protests put the Chinese government in an awkward predicament.  Once infamous for its stifling of public activism, the state must react to these protests with the eyes of the world upon them. So far, it has tried to clamp down on the instigators but, in some cases, have also given in to the protestor’s demands. According to Dr. Feng, Chinese society has already changed—the government will “need to come in to really implement these bold reforms. Otherwise, well, time is running out.”

In 1976, a Greek veteran who had immigrated to the United States was diagnosed with lung cancer and given nine months to live.  Facing death, he decided to return to his native Greek island, Ikaria.  There, he prepared to die.  But, after a few months, he starting feeling better.  In fact, today, three-and-a-half decades later, he’s still alive.

This story, remarkable in its own right, isn’t the only one of its kind.  The island of Ikaria is being studied by several demographers who are investigating the places in the world where people live longer.  Dan Buettner, who travels the globe in an effort to better understand longevity, recently explained in the New York Times that he, Dr. Gianni Pes of the University of Sassari in Italy, and Dr. Michel Poulain, a Belgian demographer, work together to study these “blue zones.”

Starting in 2002, we identified three other populations around the world where people live measurably longer lives than everyone else. The world’s longest lived women are found on the island of Okinawa. On Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, we discovered a population of 100,000 mestizos with a lower than normal rate of middleage mortality. And in Loma Linda, Calif., we identified a population of Seventhday Adventists in which most of the adherents’ life expectancy exceeded the American average by about a decade.

These researchers had their work cut out for them.  Tracking down the ages of people, especially those who didn’t have birth certificates, proved difficult to say the least.  “One year they were 80; a few months later they were 82. Pretty soon they claimed to be 100.”  It’s easy to lose track.

Once they were assured that these blue zones were real, they turned to studying their ways of life.  Buettner spent time learning more about the Greek Island of Ikaria, which you can read here.  As he details, their diets are important, consisting of much olive oil and wild greens, low amounts of dairy (except goat’s milk) and meat products, and moderate amounts of alcohol.   But, communal lifestyle also seems to matter.  Ikaria is a communal place—an “us place,” not a “me place.”  As a resident told Buettner,

 “Do you know there’s no word in Greek for privacy?…When everyone knows everyone else’s business, you get a feeling of connection and security…If your kids misbehave, your neighbor has no problem disciplining them. There is less crime, not because of good policing, but because of the risk of shaming the family. You asked me about food, and yes, we do eat better here than in America. But it’s more about how we eat.Even if it’s your lunch break from work, you relax and enjoy your meal. You enjoy the company of whoever you are with. Food here is always enjoyed in combination with conversation.”

In fact, social structure might be one of the most important reasons behind their (and other Blue Zones’) secrets to longevity.  Beyond community, the centenarians in these locations often live engaging lives together, which gives them meaning.  As the Nicoyans in Costa Rica like to put it, they have a “plan de vida,” or a lifelong sense of purpose.

We’re excited to announce the July and August Media Award Winners (and promise to announce the September and October Award Winners next week):

July:  “Mainstream Media Tend to Ignore Blacks’ Mental Health Problems,” MCJ Staff, Milwaukee Community Journal

In his brief explanation of the piece, TSP Editor Doug Hartmann noted how this sociologically-minded article called attention to a timely and oft-ignored social issue. 

August: “Divorce Too Expensive for Poorest Americans, New Study Says,” Catherine New, Huffington Post

In her write-up of the piece, TSP’s Letta Page explained how New drew upon sociological research to highlight how divorce is, in a sense, a luxury item.

As we’ve said before, the choice of each month’s TSP Media Award is neither scientific nor exhaustive, but we do work hard to winnow our favorite nominees.  And, while we don’t have the deep pocketbooks to offer enormous trophies or cash prizes, we hope our informal award offers cheer and encouragement for journalists and social scientists to keep up the important (if not always rewarding) work of bringing academic knowledge to the broader public.

The global recession has caused a crisis of trust in both the political and financial systems. In his new book Aftermath, Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells turns his attention to the current financial crisis and life beyond the crisis. Speaking to the BBC’s Paul Mason recently, Castells talked about his particular interest in how the recession has forced people to reimagine their lives outside of their identity as a consumer. It has, he says, produced new, “non-capitalist” forms of economic behavior operating outside the financial system, rather than seeking to reform it.

A kind of protest counterculture, these growing alternative economies directly resist individualistic consumer culture through strategies such as no-interest lending, barter networks for goods and services, and co-operatives through which consumers can collectively access and raise resources. This financial system backlash also includes the rise of “ethical” banks, which forbid the kind of speculative investment and lending that created the financial crisis in the first place.

Another cooperative ethical model includes “crowdfunding,” in which individuals collectively raise money toward a specific goal. Made famous by websites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, crowdfunding has been used for software development, independent movie and music ventures, and political campaigns. It has also been used as grassroots activism. This summer, as documented in a Christian Science Monitor article, the Spanish government refused to investigate the collapse of one of its major banks, which taxpayer money had bailed out. Through crowdfunding, the Spanish version of the Occupy movement raised enough money to initiate a class action lawsuit against the bank—an incentive for the government to launch its own investigation into the bank’s collapse.

The significance of alternative economic movements for Castells, then, lies in the control that it gives to individuals and groups otherwise rendered powerless by political and economic structures.