For the first time ever, the National Archives and Records Administration is making the 1940 census public. Scholars planning to use the data for research, citizens hoping to track down their ancestors, and many others are excited about the release. In fact, after nearly 37 million hits in 8 hours, the website crashed. For more, including how the Minnesota Population Center is helping to make the information easier to access, click here!
Here in the Citings & Sightings section at The Society Pages we strive to go beyond simply turning your attention to the social scientists getting their work and names in the news. We also aim to commend journalists who, in the pursuit of bringing depth and context to their pieces, reach out to social scientists and take advantage of the unique perspective and data they provide. Without further ado, we are proud to announce the winner of our TSP Media Awards for Measured Social Science for the month of March 2012:
Stephanie Hegarty, “The myth of the eight-hour sleep.” BBC News, February 22, 2012.
As we discussed in our write up of the piece, this article uproots conceptions of “the way it has always been” by highlighting the implications of historical research. Something as common as our nightly sleep patterns and how we understand “normal sleep” are challenged by Hegarty’s treatment of historians and sleep scientists in a rich and though-provoking manner.
We admit the selection process for this award isn’t exactly scientific or exhaustive, but we did, as a board, work hard to winnow down to our favorite bunch of nominees, and then debate more from there. We also don’t have the deep pocketbooks to offer the winning journalists Stanley-Cup-sized trophies or cash prizes, but we hope our informal award offers both cheer and encouragement to continue the important work of bringing social scientistific knowledge to the broader public. Here’s to March’s best!
Cheers!
The Society Pages
It seems a no-brainer that the internet, social media, and cellphones have made homesickness for migrants a thing of the past. But as historian Susan J. Matt reveals in a recent New York Times op-ed, previous generations have found technology no substitute for home sweet home, and today’s immigrants are no different.
More than a century ago, the technology of the day was seen as the solution to the problem. In 1898, American commentators claimed that serious cases of homesickness had “grown less common in these days of quick communication, of rapid transmission of news and of a widespread knowledge of geography.”
But such pronouncements were overly optimistic, for homesickness continued to plague many who migrated.
Today’s technologies have also failed to defeat homesickness even though studies by the Carnegie Corporation of New York show that immigrants are in closer touch with their families than before. In 2002, only 28 percent of immigrants called home at least once a week; in 2009, 66 percent did. Yet this level of contact is not enough to conquer the melancholy that frequently accompanies migration. A 2011 study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that Mexican immigrants in the United States had rates of depression and anxiety 40 percent higher than nonmigrant relatives remaining in Mexico. A wealth of studies have documented that other newcomers to America also suffer from high rates of depression and “acculturative stress.”
Then why does the idea that technology can overcome homesickness persist? Matt cites a pervasive belief about mobility that many hold despite its disappointments.
The global desire to leave home arises from poverty and necessity, but it also grows out of a conviction that such mobility is possible. People who embrace this cosmopolitan outlook assume that individuals can and should be at home anywhere in the world, that they need not be tied to any particular place. This outlook was once a strange and threatening product of the Enlightenment but is now accepted as central to a globalized economy.
Technology plays a role in supporting this outlook.
The comforting illusion of connection offered by technology makes moving seem less consequential, since one is always just a mouse click or a phone call away.
Further, Matt argues that this illusion of connection may amplify homesickness rather than cure it.
The immediacy that phone calls and the Internet provide means that those away from home can know exactly what they are missing and when it is happening. They give the illusion that one can be in two places at once but also highlight the impossibility of that proposition.
The persistence of homesickness points to the limitations of the cosmopolitan philosophy that undergirds so much of our market and society. The idea that we can and should feel at home anyplace on the globe is based on a worldview that celebrates the solitary, mobile individual and envisions men and women as easily separated from family, from home and from the past. But this vision doesn’t square with our emotions, for our ties to home, although often underestimated, are strong and enduring.
Scientists often assert that climate change is a matter of empirical evidence, not belief. But, The Guardian’s Adam Corner notes that decades of social scientific research says that skepticism about climate change is primarily due to beliefs, not a misunderstanding of the science (though there’s certainly misunderstanding as well).
…..in studies that have asked who is sceptical about climate change and why, we find not a story about scientific ignorance, but a link between social attitudes, cultural beliefs and climate change scepticism. The evidence is starkest in the US , but similar patterns are found elsewhere too: older, white, conservative men tend to be more sceptical about climate change.
Corner is also a research associate at Cardiff University, and in a paper he recently published with several colleagues, he asked what would happen when two groups of people—one group comprised of people who were skeptical about climate change and the other group comprised of people who were not—read the exact same information about climate change in newspaper editorials. Overall, they found that the two groups of people evaluated the information differently, attributing different judgements about persuasiveness and reliability of the information.
In social psychology, this phenomenon – “biased assimilation” – is well known, and no one is immune from it, so both sceptics and non-sceptics rated the editorials in line with their existing beliefs. The critical difference, of course, is that those who were not climate sceptics had the weight of empirical evidence on their side. What this experiment illustrates, though, is that “belief” in climate change is very much what matters. Without belief in climate change, scientific evidence simply bounces off. And it is social views and cultural beliefs that predict climate change denial, not people’s level of knowledge about climate science.
Does this mean that people fighting global warming should give up? Corner says “absolutely not,” though he asserts that we cannot look only to environmental science to provide an answer to a problem that is also social in nature.
While many turn up their noses at the thought, a recent article in the Star Tribune profiles a growing group of people who don headlamps and explore dumpsters for discarded edibles.
Some, calling themselves “freegans,” have a philosophy that shuns spending money and capitalism, and do it to protest waste.
Others just want to take advantage of free food.
The practice is rife with detractors, however, including food safety experts and most of the expiration date-abiding public. Taking food from dumpsters in public areas is not exactly against the law (at least no one has been prosecuted for it). Some cities, however, do have ordinances against dumpster diving, so most divers keep a low profile about their escapades.
Geographer Valentine Cadieux explains why such habits of food procurement might offend some:
“Food is such a huge part of our lives, wrapped up in our identities and cultures and habits, not to mention survival — so we experience tremendous resistance to questioning the way we get this food,” Cadieux wrote in an e-mail.
While some dumpster divers may do it for practical reasons, like survival or cutting down on food costs, others might be looking to make a bigger statement.
“Dumpster divers are demonstrating a way to call into question something that seems really legitimate and scientific [expiration dates or the convenience of throwing away food],” Cadieux said. “The general guilt that we feel about how many people are hungry is exactly the kind of thing that adds additional meaning to what may not be intended as a part of a social movement — but dumpster diving ends up being legible to people as a critique of throwing away too much food.”
Though perhaps not looking to start a broader social movement, dumpster divers certainly make an impression. And, apparently, their exploits can make for a well-stocked fridge.
“All the produce, just tons of green peppers and red peppers; they looked perfect,” Graham recalled with not a small bit of awe. “This was the first time I was diving, and I couldn’t believe it.”
The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment is well-known in social science circles and has provided evidence that relocating residents of poor neighborhoods to more advantaged neighborhoods can have positive outcomes, especially on physical and mental health for some groups. But new evidence cited in The Atlantic this month shows that such interventions may have and unintended dark side for political participation.
MTO’s designers in the mid-1990s hoped to improve conditions of employment, education, and health of low-income families in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 40 percent or higher. The experiment included about 4,200 families in five major U.S. cities.
The chance for residential mobility was determined by lottery. Some families remained in their current public housing development. A second group received standard Section 8 housing vouchers. A third set received vouchers that could only be used toward an apartment in a low-poverty neighborhood — areas with a poverty rate below 10 percent. (Families that received vouchers weren’t obligated to use them.)
Despite good intentions, not all of the results of this mobility have been positive. Some researchers have found that moving did not improve residents’ economic well-being and arrest rates for young men actually increased. It seems that Claudine Gay, political scientist at Harvard, has pinpointed another less-than-ideal outcome: decreased political participation.
Gay examined voter registration and turnout data in the 2002 primary and the 2004 presidential election. She compared the political participation of all three Moving to Opportunity groups: those who “lost” the lottery and stayed put, those who moved with Section 8 vouchers, and those who moved into low-poverty areas (as well as those who received vouchers but chose not to move).
Her analysis turned up no negative effects with regard to voter registration, and turnout for the 2002 primary was uniformly low. But Gay did observe a much lower voter turnout in the 2004 presidential election among families that received a voucher. The effects were especially pronounced for the so-called lottery “winners”: adults that moved into low-poverty neighborhoods had a lower voter turnout by 19 percent, compared with those who “lost” the lottery…
While hang-ups in the logistics of moving, like registering to vote in a new neighborhood or not knowing your new polling place, might seem like likely culprits in the decrease, Gay offers a different explanation:
Instead, Gay reasons, the primary source of decreased voter turnout is likely the “social disruption” that occurs when a poor urban family relocates to a higher-income area. Community connections are strongly linked with political participation, and while it takes time for a new resident of any community to connect socially, that difficulty may be greater for residents whose socioeconomic profile doesn’t match that of their new neighbors.
Given the high stake that poor citizens have in many public policy decisions, Gay argues that the effects of residential mobility on political participation must not be ignored.
The Summer Olympics in London could be a watershed event in sports, as every country is expected to send female athletes to participate. In the past, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Brunei have only sent male athletes, according to the New York Times.
Saudi Arabia, a monarchy whose legal system is based on Islamic law, is considered the most significant of the three, given its size, international oil influence and severe restrictions placed on women in daily life. While female athletes from Qatar and Brunei have participated in national and regional competitions, Saudi Arabia has essentially barred sports for women, according to Human Rights Watch.
According to a recent Human Rights Watch report, women in Saudi Arabia are systematically discriminated against when it comes to sports. There is no physical education for girls in state schools, and gyms were closed for women in 2009 and 2010. So, while senior Human Rights Watch researcher Christoph Wilcke welcomes the participation, he notes that the International Olympic Committee should work toward more systemic change.
However, even this change might have effects beyond Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia’s sending of female athletes could put pressure on other countries with similar restrictions to do the same, said Martha F. Davis, a professor at Northeastern University School of Law.
“I think it’s a savvy move,” she said. “It’s trying to make sure there isn’t a groundswell of Arab Spring-like activities and being responsive to those yearnings to participate. It’s being proactive.”
Professor Erika George (S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah) noted that there may be some negative reactions as well.
“There are people who may think it’s inappropriate,” George said. “But there’s precedent for this. It’s going to be hard to argue that a woman can be an Olympic champion but not be behind the wheel.”
The ever-expanding world of Google has opened the door for all kinds of large-scale statistical analyses, and in a paper published in Science, physicists Alexander Petersen, Joel Tenenbaum, and their co-authors demonstrate the utility of all that data. They mined through Google’s massive collection of scanned books to discover patterns behind the life and death of words.
The Wall Street Journal picked up on the physicists’ study and recently ran an article on their language evolution findings. For starters, the study makes the most accurate estimation yet of words in the English language—a whopping 1 million, much higher than previous dictionaries have ever recorded (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has 348,000). And, even though it seems like slang outpaces even dedicated text-decryptors, it appears the English language is growing more slowly than in past decades, partly because the language has already grown so rich there isn’t much use for new words. The words that are born, though, get relatively high frequency of use since they are usually created to describe something new (think “Facebook”).
According to the authors, the world of words is “an inherently competitive, evolutionary environment. All these different words are battling it out against synonyms, variant spellings, and related words.” According to Tenenbaum, the WSJ reports, synonyms seem to be stuck in “Darwinian battles.”
In examples related by the WSJ, the authors document how “Roentgenogram” was the most popular term for “X-ray” (or “radiogram,” another contender) in the 20th century, but is now effectively dead (that is, it’s extremely rare). Similarly, the article cites that “loanmoneys” died circa 1950, killed off by “loans,” and “persistency” is breathing its last, out-competed, appropriately enough, by “persistence.”
Homogenization, the WSJ relates, may be another reason for faster word death rates in the modern era. For instance, William Clark (of Lewis & Clark fame) “spelled ‘Sioux’ 27 different ways in his journals (‘Sieoux,’ ‘Seaux,’ ‘Souixx,’ etc.), and several of those variants would have made it into 19th-century books.” Now, between auto-correct and copy editors, such “chaotic variety” is weeded out much more quickly, essentially speeding up natural selection in the warring world of words.
Furthermore, the study suggests a “tipping point” for words. At around 30 to 50 years old, new words either become long-standing staples of the language of fall out of style like so many Zubaz. The authors suggest this may be because that stretch of decades marks the point when dictionary makers approve or disapprove new candidates for inclusion. Or perhaps it’s generational turnover: ever-innovative children accept or reject their parents’ coinages and the words they leave behind don’t make it to the next generation of speakers.
Marriage may be good for the heart, in more ways than one, claims a new study from the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. The study, which was covered by USA Today, found that married adults who underwent heart surgery were over three times more likely to survive the first three months after the operation. And, the likelihood of dying within the first five years was nearly double for single individuals.
The lead author of the study is Ellen Idler, a sociologist at Emory University. Idler and her colleagues interviewed over 500 patients who underwent emergency or elective coronary bypass surgery prior to their surgeries. Then, they analyzed the patients’ responses with survival data from the National Death Index. Overall, marriage boosted survival for both men and women.
“The findings underscore the important role of spouses as caregivers during health crises,” Idler says. The higher long-term death rate for singles was linked to higher smoking rates — but spouses may also play a role in discouraging smoking, the researchers say.
Men who work in majority-female professions—say, as nurses or as kindergarten teachers—don’t also take on more traditionally “womanly” tasks at home, according to new research in the American Journal of Sociology.
Husbands working in “gender deviant” fields actually put in more hours on “manly” chores when they’re off the clock, study author and Princeton University doctoral student Daniel Schneider found, when compared with men who work in more gender-balanced fields. “They putter around with the cars, take care of the yard, fix things around the house—you know, guy stuff,” wrote Bonnie Rochman, covering the study in Time.
Schneider found that the wives of these men also put in more time on typical women’s housework such as cooking and cleaning.
“It’s counterintuitive in a sense,” Schneider told Time. “Maybe what we’re seeing here is that men who are gender-deviant in the market are doing compensatory action at home by doing more typically male chores.”
Schneider’s AJS study looked at heterosexual couples in the U.S., using census data to calculate which occupations were predominantly female and information on individuals’ occupations and time spent on housework from the National Survey of Families and Households and the American Time Use Survey.