Business Week reports:

Same-sex couples are as good at raising well-adjusted, healthy children as heterosexual couples are, a review of 20 years of social science research finds.

“There’s a deeply held and widespread view out there that children need both a mother and a father to do well,” said study author Judith Stacey, a professor of sociology and of social and cultural analysis at New York University in New York City. “And it seems to be a bipartisan conviction — with a lot of public policy based on that premise — since literally both President Bush and President Obama have said exactly that.”

“But the point is that this orthodoxy is supposedly supported not just by a belief, but by actual research,” Stacey noted. “Yet we found that, in fact, there is no research that shows that children need both a mother and a father. And we looked everywhere.”

Stacey and study co-author Timothy J. Biblarz, chairman of the sociology department at the University of Southern California, published their findings in the February issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family.

The review examined studies looking at a range of child outcomes and found that parenting quality trumps the gender of the parents.

In terms of parental skills, the reviewed studies typically measured familial dynamics such as parental consistency, nurturance, communication, structure, scheduling, stability, conflict and abuse. In terms of child well-being, the studies assessed psychosocial development measurements such as self-esteem, school achievement, peer relations, mental health status and depression, social problems and substance abuse.

The authors concluded that men and women of the same social class and educational background are more similar in the way they parent than women are with other women or men with all other men; that the offspring of lesbian and heterosexual parents are actually more alike than they are different; and that to date there is no research to suggest that parental gender has any significant impact on the well-being of a child.

“The bottom line is that it is the quality of parenting, not the gender of the parents, that matters for child outcomes,” said Stacey.

Does a rise in women’s earning power have benefits to marriage beyond economic stability?  In an attempt to address this question, a recent New York Times article summarized some of the recent social scientific evidence on the rise of working women:

Last week, a report from the Pew Research Center about what it called “the rise of wives” revived the debate. Based on a study of Census data, Pew found that in nearly a third of marriages, the wife is better educated than her husband. And though men, over all, still earn more than women, wives are now the primary breadwinner in 22 percent of couples, up from 7 percent in 1970.

While the changing economic roles of husbands and wives may take some getting used to, the shift has had a surprising effect on marital stability. Over all, the evidence shows that the shifts within marriages — men taking on more housework and women earning more outside the home — have had a positive effect, contributing to lower divorce rates and happier unions.

The article points to demographic and sociological evidence that suggests greater marital stability and egalitarianism when a woman is more economically independent:

While it’s widely believed that a woman’s financial independence increases her risk for divorce, divorce rates in the United States tell a different story: they have fallen as women have made economic gains. The rate peaked at 23 divorces per 1,000 couples in the late 1970s, but has since dropped to fewer than 17 divorces per 1,000 couples. Today, the statistics show that typically, the more economic independence and education a woman gains, the more likely she is to stay married. And in states where fewer wives have paid jobs, divorce rates tend to be higher, according to a 2009 report from the Center for American Progress.

Sociologists and economists say that financially independent women can be more selective in marrying, and they also have more negotiating power within the marriage. But it’s not just women who win. The net result tends to be a marriage that is more fair and equitable to husbands and wives.

The changes are not without their challenges. “With women taking on more earning and men taking on more caring, there’s a lot of shifting and juggling,” said Andrea Doucet, a sociology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. Her study, the Bread and Roses Project, tracks couples in the United States and Canada in which women are the primary breadwinners. But the dynamic is “not as easy as you’d think it would be,” she said. “You can’t just reverse the genders.”

Men, for instance, sometimes have a hard time adjusting to a woman’s equal or greater earning power. Women, meanwhile, struggle with giving up their power at home and controlling tasks like how to dress the children or load the dishwasher.

Highlighting additional sociological evidence:

Kristen W. Springer, a sociologist at Rutgers, has found that among men in their 50s, having a wife who earns more money is associated with poorer health. Among the highest earning couples in her study, a husband who earns less than his wife is 60 percent less likely to be in good health compared with men who earn more than their wives.

And despite the sweeping economic changes in marriage over the last 40 years, all is not equal. Even among dual-earning couples, women still do about two-thirds of the housework, on average, according to the University of Wisconsin National Survey of Families and Households. But men do contribute far more than they used to. Studies show that since the 1960s, men’s contributions to housework have doubled, while the amount of time spent caring for children has tripled.

And the blurring of traditional gender roles appears to have a positive effect. Lynn Prince Cooke, a sociology professor at the University of Kent in England, has found that American couples who share employment and housework responsibilities are less likely to divorce compared with couples where the man is the sole breadwinner.

The New York Times recently spoke to sociologist John Robert Warren about the effects of high school exit exams, now adopted in 26 states:

People who have studied the exams, which affect two-thirds of the nation’s public school students, say they often fall short of officials’ ambitious goals.

“The real pattern in states has been that the standards are lowered so much that the exams end up not benefiting students who pass them while still hurting the students who fail them,” said John Robert Warren, an expert on exit exams and a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

“The exams are just challenging enough to reduce the graduation rate,” Professor Warren added, “but not challenging enough to have measurable consequences for how much students learn or for how prepared they are for life after high school.”

Read the rest of the article.

While drawing comparisons between Hurricane Katrina and the recent earthquake in Haiti may be tempting, sociologist Kathleen Tierney tells CNN why doing so is not such a good idea.

Like Katrina, the earthquake has produced effects of catastrophic proportions. Both events rank among the largest catastrophes ever experienced in the Western Hemisphere.

They both have resulted in large loss of life and immense human suffering and make the coordination of emergency resources extremely difficult. Ordinary citizens are left to fend for themselves in the wreckage. And as we saw in Katrina and see now in Haiti, residents of disaster-stricken areas are the true first responders.

The aftermath of such catastrophes brings more prolonged suffering and massive recovery challenges. People pay attention as the media cover them, but they turn their attention elsewhere when the cameras leave, even though many of the real challenges that victims and affected regions face emerge later. Like the Gulf region, Haiti will struggle for years and perhaps decades to rebuild and recover.

But there, the comparisons end.

The contrasts have much to do with the events’ impacts on a national versus regional scale.

Katrina did not flatten our nation’s capital or prevent national leaders from communicating with one another. Impacts were catastrophic in areas where Katrina struck, creating significant logistics problems, but the infrastructure of the rest of the nation was untouched. Also important, it was possible to issue warnings for Katrina, which enabled the vast majority of those who were at risk to evacuate to safety. The victims of the earthquake had no such warning.

In contrast, the earthquake in Haiti destroyed much of its capital, Port-au-Prince, and affected approximately one-third of the population of the entire country. The proportion of the nation’s population that has been killed, injured or left homeless is enormous. The facilities that could have assisted victims, such as hospitals, clinics and the UN headquarters for the nation, were destroyed or are not operational. Aftershocks, which will continue for weeks, months and perhaps even years, will do additional damage and further compound both rescue and relief efforts.

In addition, both disasters affected the poor and vulnerable, but again scale comes into play:

On almost all indicators of well-being — health, education, literacy, income — Haiti ranks very low. The nation has a long history of rule by dictators, political coups and savage violence. The capacity of Haiti’s series of governments to provide services to its people has been abysmal for most of its history.

In many ways, residents of Haiti faced a daily disaster even before the earthquake. These differences matter, and they should be kept in mind by those seeking to see parallels between the two catastrophes.

The Santa Barbara Independent reports:

In 2004, demonstrations and protests in favor of marriage equality were observed by civil rights activists and same-sex couples across the United States. These acts were largely spurred by the mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, and his act of defiance in ordering the County Clerk to issue marriage licenses, against California’s Defense of Marriage Act. This was seen as a sign of things to come by many optimistic activists until 2008 when Proposition 8 banned gay marriage in California.

The story draws on Verta Taylor and colleagues’ study in the American Sociological Review:

In the article, Taylor alludes to the pivotal role of the 2004 protests and shows the likely historical significance by saying: “The San Francisco weddings served as a public and dramatic tactic to claim basic civil rights for gay and lesbian people … Our research shows that the month-long wedding protest sparked other forms of political actions, including legal challenges and the formation of social movement organizations that ignited a statewide campaign for marriage equality in California.”

Check out abstracts from the December 2009 issue of the American Sociological Review.

The New York Times recently highlighted recent research by sociologists Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse on the tendency for professors to be liberal:

New research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they should ask why so many liberals — and so few conservatives — want to be professors.

In their findings, Gross and Fosse chalk this one up to typecasting:

Conjure up the classic image of a humanities or social sciences professor, the fields where the imbalance is greatest: tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular — and liberal. Even though that may be an outdated stereotype, it influences younger people’s ideas about what they want to be when they grow up.

Jobs can be typecast in different ways, said Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse, who undertook the study. For instance, less than 6 percent of nurses today are men. Discrimination against male candidates may be a factor, but the primary reason for the disparity is that most people consider nursing to be a woman’s career, Mr. Gross said. That means not many men aspire to become nurses in the first place — a point made in the recent Lee Daniels film “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire.” When John (Lenny Kravitz) asks the 16-year-old Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) and her friends whether they’ve ever seen a male nurse before, all answer no amid giddy laughter.

Nursing is what sociologists call “gender typed.” Mr. Gross said that “professors and a number of other fields are politically typed.” Journalism, art, fashion, social work and therapy are dominated by liberals; while law enforcement, farming, dentistry, medicine and the military attract more conservatives.  “These types of occupational reputations affect people’s career aspirations,” [Gross] added.

Gross adds a bit of history to where this typecasting came from:

From the early 1950s William F. Buckley Jr. and other founders of the modern conservative movement railed against academia’s liberal bias. Buckley even published a regular column, “From the Academy,” in the magazine he founded, The National Review.

“Conservatives weren’t just expressing outrage,” Mr. Gross said, “they were also trying to build a conservative identity.” They defined themselves in opposition to the New Deal liberals who occupied the establishment’s precincts. Hence Buckley’s quip in the early 1960s: “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

In the 1960s college campuses, swelled by the large baby-boom generation, became a staging ground for radical leftist social and political movements, further moving the academy away from conservatism.

Gross and Fosse also note that stereotyping is not the only reason for the liberal leanings of the academy:

The characteristics that define one’s political orientation are also at the fore of certain jobs, the sociologists reported. Nearly half of the political lopsidedness in academia can be traced to four characteristics that liberals in general, and professors in particular, share: advanced degrees; a nonconservative religious theology (which includes liberal Protestants and Jews, and the nonreligious); an expressed tolerance for controversial ideas; and a disparity between education and income. 

According to the Seattle Times, evidence gathered by University of Washington sociologists Katherine Beckett and Robert Crutchfield overturned the state of Washington’s law banning incarcerated felons from voting.  The case, Farrakhan v. Gregoire, was decided on January 5, 2010:

The surprising ruling, by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle, said the law violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act by disenfranchising minority voters.  The decision is the first in the country’s federal appeals courts to equate a prohibition against voting by incarcerated felons with practices outlawed under the federal Voting Rights Act, such as poll taxes or literacy tests.

The two-judge majority apparently was persuaded by the plaintiffs’ argument that reams of social-science data filed in the case showed minorities in Washington are stopped, arrested and convicted in such disproportionate rates that the ban on voting by incarcerated felons is inherently discriminatory.

The article details the sociological research in question:

[The case] was built on research by University of Washington sociologists who found that blacks are 70 percent more likely — and Latinos and Native Americans 50 percent more likely — than whites to be searched in traffic stops.

The research also showed that blacks are nine times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, despite the fact that the ratio of arrests for violent crime among blacks and whites is less than four-to-one. One result of that: 25 percent of black men in Washington are disenfranchised from voting.

The decision, written by Judge A. Wallace Tashima, said the studies “speak to a durable, sustained indifference in treatment faced by minorities in Washington’s criminal justice system — systemic disparities which cannot be explained by ‘factors independent of race.’ “

The state of Washington is appealing this ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.  To read a somewhat sociological editorial on this decision, you may also want to check out an editorial by Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large.

Voter Disenfranchisement Statistics:

TIME reports that a sociology doctoral student at Cornell University has found that knowing when to fold ’em is a valuable skill beyond the poker table.

You can learn a lot about gambling if you’re willing to analyze 27 million hands of online poker. Don’t have time for that? No worries; sociology doctoral student Kyle Siler of Cornell University has done it for you. His counterintuitive message: the more hands you win, the more money you’re likely to lose — and this has implications that go well beyond a hand of cards.

Siler, whose work was published in December in the online edition of the Journal of Gambling Studies and will appear later this year in the print edition, was not interested in poker alone but in the larger idea of how humans handle risk, reward and variable payoffs. Few things offer a better way of quantifying that than gambling — and few gambling dens offer a richer pool of data than the Internet, where millions of people can play at once and transactions are easy to observe and record.

Why the more you win, the more you lose?

The reason for the paradoxical results was straightforward enough: the majority of the wins the players tallied were for relatively small stakes. But the longer they played — and the more confident they got — the likelier they were to get blown out on one or a few very big hands. Win a dozen $50 pots and you’re still going to wind up far behind if you lose a single $1,000 one. “People overweigh their frequent small gains vis-à-vis occasional large losses,” Siler says.

According to Siler, these results can be applied to life in general.

Investing, driving, buying a house and merely crossing the street are all acts that involve discernible risks and uncertain rewards. The more small returns you get from your small investments in stocks, the likelier you are to make — and lose — a big investment. The more times you get behind the wheel and speed a little bit, the likelier you are to speed a lot — with deadlier consequences.

“These kinds of calculations are made every day,” says Siler. “Adultery is another good example. People get away with it countless times but they get caught just once and they lose everything.”

The social implications?

And unlike the risks at the poker table, where your losses are just yours, in the larger world, you can take down a lot of other people with you. “Organizational malfeasance in general depends on this kind of risk analysis,” says Siler. “Look at a place like Enron. People took a lot of small chances and won, then took big chances and lost big.” Indeed, Siler points out, during the recent financial crisis, an entire nation — Iceland — went bankrupt in a similar way, trusting high-risk, high-reward investments that quit paying off.

The San Francisco Chronicle explains Yahoo Inc.’s new effort to integrate social science into computer science:

In the last year, Yahoo Labs has bolstered its ranks of social scientists, adding highly credentialed cognitive psychologists, economists and ethnographers from top universities around the world. At approximately 25 people, it’s still the smallest group within the research division, but one of the fastest growing.

The recruitment effort reflects a growing realization at Yahoo, the second most popular U.S. online site and search engine, that computer science alone can’t answer all the questions of the modern Web business. As the novelty of the Internet gives way, Yahoo and other 21st century media businesses are discovering they must understand what motivates humans to click and stick on certain features, ads and applications – and dismiss others out of hand.

Yahoo Labs is taking a scientific approach to these questions, leveraging its massive window onto user behavior to set up a series of controlled experiments (identifying information is always masked) and employing classic ethnography techniques like participant observation and interviews.

Some, such as computer scientist John Seely Brown, praise Yahoo’s innovation:

He complimented Yahoo Labs’ efforts, both because increasingly few companies pursue basic research in Silicon Valley – and fewer still are applying a sociologist’s eye to a medium that is increasingly becoming a social phenomenon.

“Today, you really have to take much more seriously what captures attention,” he said. “Yahoo’s next competitive advantage may be taking a different attitude toward this … than Google, which tends to look at what they do as engineering efforts.”

But not all of Silicon Valley is convinced:

However, there are risks when a for-profit company adopts an academic approach, which calls for publishing research regardless of the outcome.

New research on the social network effects of obesity was recently reported in the Guardian UK:

Children at schools where older students are obese or otherwise overweight are significantly more likely to suffer weight problems themselves, researchers report.

For each one per cent increase in the prevalence of obese students aged 16 to 18 years, the odds of a student at 14 to 16 years old attending that school also being overweight increased significantly.

“It was the one risk factor that held true across every school we looked at,” said Dr Scott Leatherdale, the chair of research at Cancer Care Ontario and lead investigator with the School Health Action, Planning and Evaluation System.

Commenting on the obesity connection between older and younger students, Leatherdale says:

It could be that younger students look up to older students, and so emulate their sedentary behaviour and bad eating habits and do not judge the older children’s body shape.  Or it could be that the school doesn’t encourage enough physical activity among its students, and the older students’ weight issues are an indication of that.

Sociologist Steve Fuller at Warwick University concurs with his assessment:

Obesity is one phenomenon that medical sociologists have nominated as an ‘epidemic’ that is transmitted by copying the behaviour of peers.  Certain connections between overeating and social activities become contagious. Young people gather together in more stationary modes than in the past: in front of computers and video games rather than sports.

The reason it’s called an ‘epidemic’ is because the pattern is reinforced by regular contact, so that if one is not in regular contact with the pattern, one doesn’t spontaneously do it The idea is that you overcome obesity by breaking up the networks where it’s transmitted.