For the first time in about a century, new Census data reveal that population growth in big U.S. cities is exceeding that of the suburbs. According to the Associated Press (via Huffington Post):

Primary cities in large metropolitan areas with populations of more than 1 million grew by 1.1 percent last year, compared with 0.9 percent in surrounding suburbs. While the definitions of city and suburb have changed over the decades, it’s the first time that growth of large core cities outpaced that of suburbs since the early 1900s.

In all, city growth in 2011 surpassed or equaled that of suburbs in roughly 33 of the nation’s 51 large metro areas, compared to just five in the last decade.

Young adults forgoing homeownership and embracing the conveniences of urban life appear to be a driving force behind this trend.

Burdened with college debt or toiling in temporary, lower-wage positions, they are spurning homeownership in the suburbs for shorter-term, no-strings-attached apartment living, public transit and proximity to potential jobs in larger cities…They make up roughly 1 in 6 Americans, and some sociologists are calling them “generation rent.”

A related report from NPR further cites tougher mortgage rules since the housing bubble burst as an important factor.

Even with big drops in housing prices and interest rates, getting a mortgage has become a lot harder since the heady days of “no income, no assets” loans that fueled the housing boom of the early 2000s. Most lenders now require a rock-steady source of income and a substantial down payment before they will even look at potential borrowers. And many millennials won’t be able to reach that steep threshold.

The combination of stricter mortgage requirements, college loan debt, and a tough economy leaves sociologist Katherine Newman skeptical of young adults’ prospects for home ownership for the foreseeable future. From Huffington Post:

“Young adults simply can’t amass the down payments needed and don’t have the earnings,” she said. “They will be renting for a very long time.”

Admittedly, I know little about Pinterest. But judging by the site’s membership, now topping 10 million worldwide, many of you are familiar with the social media site. Members have been “pinning” their favorite items—images, videos, messages, etc.—to themed, virtual pin boards since 2010. Nor am I representative of most sociologists: just check out the contributions from Gwen Sharp and Lisa Wade over at Sociological Images or the teaching-centric boards compiled by self-professed public sociologists at The Sociological Cinema to see what I mean.

Beyond how it’s already being used, Deborah Lupton, a sociologist at the University of Sydney, suggests in The Australian that Pinterest also offers a creative way to organize research materials. Lupton has created a board for each of her areas of intellectual inquiry. As Lupton explains, “Because of its emphasis on the visual; [Pinterest is] perfect for curating and displaying images that are related to the subject matter one is researching or teaching.”

So whether you’re planning your summer travel itinerary, next semester’s syllabus, or your next research grant—tap in to the inspiration!

Earlier this month, Slate published an article by Sociologist Mark Regenerus about the effects of same sex parenting on children.  As part of the New Family Structures Study, Regenerus and his colleagues screened over 15,000 Americans (ages 18-39) and asked them if their biological mother or father ever had a romantic relationship with a member of the same sex.   When comparing children who answered “yes” to children from heterosexual married families, they found children from heterosexual married families fared better in economic, educational, social, and psychological outcomes.

This study has prompted many comments and several other articles.  For example, in another article in Slate, William Saletan says that the findings shouldn’t be surprising, as Regenerus’s study is not a study of gay parents who decided to have kids.  Rather, it’s a study of people who engaged in same sex relationships (and often broke up their families) several decades ago.

 What the study shows, then, is that kids from broken homes headed by gay people develop the same problems as kids from broken homes headed by straight people. But that finding isn’t meaningless. It tells us something important: We need fewer broken homes among gays, just as we do among straights.

Sociologist Debra Umberson also shared reactions, published yesterday in the Huffington Post, to Regenerus’s study.  Specifically, she focused on methodological concerns.

His definition of children raised by lesbian mothers and gay fathers is incredibly broad — anyone whose biological or adopted mother or father had a same-sex relationship that the respondent knew about by age 18. Most of these respondents did not even live with their parent’s same-sex partner; in fact, many did not even live with their gay or lesbian parent at all! Of the 175 adult children Regnerus claims were raised by “lesbian mothers,” only 40 actually lived with their mother and her same-sex partner for at least three years.

Umberson also notes that in order to be considered a child of a heterosexual married family, respondents had to have parents who were continually married from the time of their birth to the time of the survey.  With the wide net cast for same sex relationships, the study likely captured families that had far more stress than average families of that generation, contrasted with very stable heterosexual married families.

What does this tell us?  According to both Saletan and Umberson, it’s a reminder that stress and instability harm children in any family context.

The Ottawa Citizen recently explored the portrayal of fathers on the small screen, unpacking the common perception that TV dads are increasingly shown as inept, lazy, or immature. Think Ward Cleaver as compared to Tim Taylor, Ray Barone, or Homer Simpson. Diana Miller, a sociology graduate student at the University of Toronto, designed a study to compare fatherhood in 1950’s sitcoms to more recent shows like Two and a Half Men and Everybody Loves Raymond. She found, actually, more similarities than differences:

There is almost no difference in how often men express anger or emotional attachment. And men in the 1950s were almost as likely to say they were being victimized by someone else, such as their boss, as they do in the recent sitcoms.

Men in both sets of sitcoms also show almost equal amounts of self-deprecating behaviour. In Make Room for Daddy, Danny Thomas made affable comments about his mechanical ineptitude. Fast-forward 35 years and Chandler Bing of Friends was often revealed as deeply insecure. It’s a different kind of self-deprecation, but there’s not much difference in the number of these incidents on television, says Miller.

Probably the greatest difference Miller noted is that men in the recent sitcoms make fewer imperative statements, are less likely to be respectful to others, and less likely to be respected by others. It might signal a decline in male authority, but it’s also a sign of all-around lower standards of decorum and politeness, she says.

Men in the recent sitcoms are also more likely to be immature. In Miller’s recent sample, there were about five times as many incidents of immaturity as in the 1950s series. But sitcom women have also become increasingly immature.

Bank customers in Germany recently voted among potential images to be printed on their bank cards, and a bronze bust of Karl Marx emerged as the clear favorite. As Marx glares at the MasterCard logo, we as sociologists wonder what he might have to say about this curious turn of events.

Reuters reports on the potential significance of Marx as a symbol for the residents who voted for the image in the German city of Chemnitz:

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, citizens of Chemnitz – then known as Karl-Marx-Stadt – and the rest of East Germany would have seen Marx’s face on their 100-Mark banknotes.

Flattened during World War Two, Chemnitz was rebuilt as a model socialist city and still boasts a seven meter-tall bust of Marx in its center. The city has been economically depressed since the end of communism and its population has shrunk by 20 percent.

The east has witnessed a wave of nostalgia in recent years for aspects of the old East Germany, or DDR, where citizens had few freedoms but were guaranteed jobs and social welfare.

Visit NPR for an image of the card and to contribute to a forum of potential Marx-inspired taglines.

This week, some soccer players competing in the Euro 2012 (hosted in Poland and Ukraine) have also spent time visiting the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camps.  According to the BBC’s Clare Spencer, this genocide tourism is not a new phenomenon.   In fact, 1.4 million people visited Auschwitz last year.

Other sites of genocides and similar atrocities, such as Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia, are also becoming popular destinations for tourists.  The Aegis Trust notes that over 40,000 foreigners visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in 2011.  And, tourists visit the hotel featured in Hotel Rwanda every day to take their pictures by its entrance.

So why do tourists increasingly visit mass graves and memorials? Psychologist Sheila Keegan says that what we want to get out of a vacation has expanded.  In other words, we want to relax, but we also want to broader our horizons.

“People want to be challenged. It may be voyeuristic and macabre but people want to feel those big emotions which they don’t often come across. They want to ask that very basic question about being human – ‘how could we do this?’,” she says.

Keegan also explains that vacations are good talking points. “It’s about creating your own history, reminding yourself how lucky you are.”

(This doesn’t come without controversy, though. For more on that, check out the article.)

In a June 2012 TIME Ideas column online, author Judith Warner reflects on the recent work of sociologist Andrea Doucet (of Ontario’s Brock University). Warner writes that Doucet’s focus on shifting family paradigms, as well as women’s increasing numbers in the ranks of “family breadwinners” (that is, primary earners in heterosexual relationships), has led the researcher to look for a change from “50-50” thinking to a focus on egalitarianism across the board. This leads to “something more like fairness—or like ‘symmetry’.”

Doucet tells Warner:

My overall aim is for gender equality… but it always bothers me when the measures we use are not quick in synch with how people live their lives… Maybe what we need to change then is that larger set of conditions that allow people to make choices that work.

The problem, the author explains, is that, even though many attempts have been made to create greater equality by assuming the gold standard would be “lives of sameness.” Through a series of rhetorical questions, Warner reasons that Doucet’s concept could open up space for families to define egalitarianism based on their own measures of earning power, love of career, and the rewarding (and annoying) aspects of various tasks that keep a family humming along:

It’s something of a “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” formulation, one that might, for once, just possibly work. Sharing, as opposed to equality.”

The real key here might lie in changing public discussions to reflect the actual lives of families, who are already negotiating, balancing, and flourishing in egalitarian homes. These mothers and fathers, wives and husbands might just need the vocabulary to explain their (gasp!) Marxist micro-communities.

According to a recent article on treehugger.com, you can spot income inequality from space. Yes, you read that correctly. If you look at the pictures below, you should be able to spot a clear difference between the two neighborhoods.

Pictures can say a thousand words, but these can be summed up pretty quickly.  Put simply, more affluent communities can afford more space for trees. They also place more value on growing and maintaining them.

In fact, according to Tim DeChant, Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and creator of Per Square Mile,

for every 1 percent increase in per capita income, demand for forest cover increased by 1.76 percent. But when income dropped by the same amount, demand decreased by 1.26 percent… The researchers reason that wealthier cities can afford more trees, both on private and public property. The well-to-do can afford larger lots, which in turn can support more trees. On the public side, cities with larger tax bases can afford to plant and maintain more trees.

These trees also reinforce inequalities by providing shade, improving the air quality, and even improving the mental health of those around. As the article notes, “[I]t all makes a pretty powerful argument in favor of tree-planting initiatives in lower income neighborhoods.”

The Occupy movement’s strength is its theatrics, argues Todd Gitlin, author of Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street, on the Possible Futures blog of the Social Science Research Council.

The “anarchist post-punk core” of Occupy has been more about expression than mission from its start, writes Gitlin, a professor of sociology and journalism at Columbia University. Thus, the play that took place on May Day was a natural expression of Occupy’s spirit:

Occupy, in other words, is primarily an identity movement, and identity movements face inward. They aspire to be cultures, self-sufficient and gorgeous. People don’t join Occupy, they do it. It’s a way of life, a transvaluation of values. Joining in such a life is, to a few tens of thousands of people nationwide, an intense form of disaffiliating from the main currents of American society and culture. It means not only disaffection from plutocratic control but making oneself at home with the movement’s own solidarity.

TSP and other social scientific sources are swimming in great information about the Occupy Wall Street movement, so be sure to check out some of these additional sources and add your own favorites in the comments!

• “On ‘Camping’ and the Framing of Occupy Movement Strategies, Sociological Images
• “Occupy Wall Street Demographics,” Graphic Sociology
• “Occupy What?,” Sociology Lens
• “Understanding ‘Occupy,'” Contexts

Though I am more than happy to trade in my blue jeans and boots for shorts and flip-flops, not everything warm weather brings is welcome.  As the Bemidji Pioneer reminds us, warm weather also brings tornado season.

For years, weather experts have been working on cutting-edge technology to detect tornados.  But, when city sirens wail and weather warnings flash across the bottom of t.v. screens, people are generally slow to take cover.   In fact, many studies have shown that people often spend time looking for more information about the potential tornado rather than hitting their basements.  According to Dennis Mileti, a sociologist and retired director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder,

“People turn into information vampires when they hear their town and village might be struck by a violent tornado…And if you don’t provide them with the information they need, what you’re actually doing is guaranteeing the time people spend searching is longer rather than shorter.”

In addition, many people get into the mindset that the warning is “just another warning.”  Tornado survivors are an exception, though, as they almost always respond more quickly to severe weather warnings.  But, as Mississippi State University Sociologist Laura Myers explains, the rest of us don’t learn from their experience.

Myers found that about 10 percent of the population are anxious about bad weather and take shelter at the first sign of danger. But, most respond to dangerous situations like a tornado warning with what she calls denial. “They’re sitting there saying, ‘OK, I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want to have to worry about it. I want to assume everything is going to be OK.’ That’s why the person will wait for that secondary confirmation. They’ll say, ‘I’ve really gotta know it’s going to hit me.’”

Related, many don’t respond due to the prevalence of false alarms.  According to the National Weather Service, three out of four tornado warnings are false alarms.  Social scientists believe that just explaining that these were false alarms (for example, that a tornado formed but didn’t touch down) would help; otherwise, people often think they are just mistakes.

Because of this, the weather service is making an effort to utilize the knowledge of social scientists in order to understand the impact of warning systems.  This blending of physical and social science, combined with new technology and social media outlets, will change how tornado warnings reach us and, hopefully, save lives.