Curriculum changes have been approved in the state of Texas, one of the largest buyers of textbooks in the U.S. From the New York Times:

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

Proponents cite adding “balance” as an underlying goal:

Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers.

“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.

Notably, some voices were absent from the discussion:

There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

Changes to history and economics curriculum include revisions to sections on the history of the civil rights movement, the conservative resurgence of the ’80s and ’90s, the separation of church and state, U.S. internment practices during WWII, McCarthyism, affirmative action, and Title IX. Additionally:

In the field of sociology, another conservative member, Barbara Cargill, won passage of an amendment requiring the teaching of “the importance of personal responsibility for life choices” in a section on teenage suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders.

“The topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything,” Ms. Cargill said.

Read about more approved changes.

The Daily Mail reports that the face of the U.S. is changing rapidly in the delivery room.

America is reaching a ‘tipping point’ when the babies born to minority parents outnumber whites for the first time.

More white women than ever before are postponing having children until they are older, while minority mothers are still having babies at younger ages, according to a US study published yesterday.

Experts claim the immigration boom has accelerated the historic trend that is likely to leave whites in the minority in America by the middle of the century.

The percentage of children born to minority parents has grown significantly  in recent decades, but this study projects that more than half will be to minority parents this year.

One of the study’s authors, a sociologist, weighs in:

‘For America’s children, the future is now,’ said Kenneth Johnson, a sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire who researched many of the racial trends in the report.

‘Census projections suggest America may become a minority-majority country by the middle of the century,’ he added.

He explained that there are now more Hispanic women of prime childbearing age in the US, who tend to have more children than women of other races.

More white women are waiting until they are older to have babies, although it is not yet clear how much effect that will have on the current trend of increasing minority newborns.

The number of white women of prime childbearing age is on the decline, dropping 19 per cent from 1990.

Broken down by race, about 52 per cent of babies born in 2008 were white.

That’s compared to about 25 per cent Hispanic, 15 per cent black and 4 per cent Asian. Another 4 per cent were identified by their parents as multiracial.

What will the significance of this trend be? The Daily Mail speculates…

The numbers highlight the nation’s growing racial and age divide, seen in pockets of communities across the US, which could heighten tensions in current policy debates from immigration reform and education to health care and Social Security.

There are also strong implications for the 2010 population count, which begins in earnest next week, when more than 120 million US households receive their census forms in the post.

The Census Bureau is running public service announcements this week to improve its tally of young children, particularly minorities, who are most often missed in the once-a-decade head count.

Whites currently make up two-thirds of the total US population, and recent census estimates suggest the total number of minorities may not overtake the number of whites until 2050.

Right now, roughly one in ten of the nation’s 3,142 counties already have minority populations greater than 50 per cent.

But one in four communities have more minority children than white children or are nearing that point, according to the study, which Mr Johnson co-published.

ABC News explores some possible causes of obesity that are often overlooked.

Sure, most of the nation needs to eat less and move more. But is that the only reason America is so fat?

As more scientists and sociologists look at our bulging waistlines, some unusual explanations for the nation’s weight gain in the last 30 years are popping up.

The article discusses an intestinal bacteria that may contribute to weight gain and particular genes that may influence the success or failure of dieting.

Beyond these physical explanations, social factors may also contribute to obesity. A Harvard medical sociologist weighs in:

In 2007, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine used 30 years of data on 12,000 people to show obesity and weight loss may actually be contagious — things that spread among people who know each other.

“They key idea is that people are influenced by the behavior and actions of those around them. This applied to something that people may not have thought of, which is body size,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, author of the recent book “Connected,” which looks at how various phenomena from depression to obesity spreads through society.

Over the three decades, Christakis showed how obesity in one person in a circle of friends statistically meant more people in their circle of friends would become obese. The same was true of weight loss.

“We’re not saying we found the cause of the obesity epidemic. We’re not,” said Christakis. “Social networks have a general property that they magnify what they are seated with.”

While Christakis could show an obesity epidemic spreading through friend networks, he could only make an educated guess why.

“One possibility is that you start doing things — certain behaviors that I copy,” said Christakis.

So if one friend starts serving beer and cookies all the time, perhaps another friend will pick up the habit. Or if one friend joins a running club, perhaps another friend will join it too.

Christakis said another possibility is that “What’s spreading between people is an idea, or a norm.”

For example, if most people a person associates with are overweight, then that person’s idea of “normal weight” is likely to be bigger than what is actually healthy.

Read more.

In a recent Boston Globe story, diversity consultants and social scientists debated the effects of workplace diversity training.  While diversity training programs are a common job requirement these days, they may look very different from one company to the next:

The courses vary widely, in content and duration and method and philosophy: Some are short videos followed by structured discussions, some are multiday retreats, some are informational, teaching participants about their “diversity circle” and the difference between a generalization and a stereotype, others focus on role-playing. But they all promise to help people better navigate the fault lines of race, gender, culture, class, and sexual orientation that can divide co-workers and unsettle offices.

Opinions about the programs are also varied, and good social science evidence for either side of the debate has been scarce:

Currently, heterosexual couples who live together before marriage and those who don’t have about the same chance of marital success, reports USA Today:

The report, by the National Center for Health Statistics, is based on the National Survey of Family Growth, a sample of almost 13,000. It provides the most detailed data on cohabitation of men and women to date.

Past research — using decades-old data — found significantly higher divorce rates for cohabitors, defined as “not married but living together with a partner of the opposite sex.” But now, in an era when about two-thirds of couples who marry live together first, a different picture is emerging in which there are few differences between those who cohabit and those who don’t.

Sociologists weigh in on the findings:

Sociologist Pamela Smock of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor considers the data definitive. “On the basis of these numbers, there is not a negative effect of cohabitation on marriages, plain and simple,” she says.

Paul Amato, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University, says the new data suggest that “maybe the effect of premarital cohabitation is becoming less of a problem than it was in the past. If it becomes normative now, maybe it’s not such a big deal.”

However, according to the study’s co-author, Bill Mosher:

“There’s a real difference in the types of cohabitations out there.  We can show that now with these national data.”

The data show that those who live together after making plans to marry or getting engaged have about the same chances of divorcing as couples who never cohabited before marriage. But those who move in together before making any clear decision to marry appear to have an increased risk of divorce.

Additionally:

Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, says the report may quell fears of cohabitation “as a long-term substitute for marriage,” as in some European countries.  “American cohabitors either marry or break up in a few years,” he says.

MSNBC also joined the fray this week in reporting on cohabitation.  Check it out here for more fabulous sociological commentary on shacking up.

According to USA Today, the 2010 Census will

remind Americans that racial classifications remain an integral part of the country’s social and legal fabric while, at the same time, recognizing that racial lines are blurring for a growing number of people…The government will give the nation’s more than 308 million people the opportunity to define their racial makeup as one race or more.

Some suggest that Obama’s presidency may affect how individuals report their race this time around. But how Obama himself will record his race remains a mystery.

Obama, born to a black father and a white mother, is not only the first black president but the first biracial president.

During his successful campaign in 2008, Obama referred to himself as black but also referred to his roots in Hawaii, where he was raised by his white mother. When the Obamas’ Census form arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., will he identify himself as black or as black and white? The White House declines to say.

A sociologist weighs in:

“The issue of perception is central,” says Ann Morning, a sociology professor at New York University. In an article titled “Who is Multiracial?” she estimated that about one-third of the U.S. population has some mixed-racial ancestry going back several generations. She predicts young generations will be more embracing of their multiracial heritage.

Morning is African American. But she also has English, Chinese and American Indian ancestry. Since 2000, she has checked off black, white, Asian and American Indian.

“The bigger thing is how I will mark my daughters,” Morning says. Their dad is Italian and she believes most people will look at her daughters as white. For now, she’ll check all the boxes for them, too.

Some question whether counting race is a good idea at all.

Roderick Harrison, a demographer at Howard University and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. “But for a lot of others, it’s like, ‘OK, are you going to turn your back on the rest of us?’ … A lot of the racial and ethnic politics of the Census are that we want the biggest numbers possible for our groups.”

The Census has a long-lasting effect on politics and money. Population counts every 10 years decide the number of seats every state gets in the U.S. House of Representatives and determine how more than $400 billion a year in federal aid is allocated.

“I know it’s valuable information if you’re doing economic development or dispense certain amount of money to areas that need it,” says Stewart Cockburn, 39, who lost his job in textile sales in September. “My point about race in general in this country is that we’re just never going to get past it if we keep asking about it.”

Cockburn, of Greensboro, N.C., says he’s Scottish and Irish and has a great-grandmother who was Cherokee.

“I don’t understand why everyone makes such a big deal about race,” he says. “Maybe one day we will no longer care about race, ethnicity or the color of another person’s skin.”

Donna Edwards, of Santa Monica, Calif., says it’s important that the federal government allows people to identify more than one race. “It’s about time, isn’t it?” says Edwards, who is half Japanese and half German/Scottish/Welsh and spent years frustrated by forms that boxed her into one or the other.

Also, yesterday the Chicago Tribune discussed whether disasters cause people to behave selfishly or altruistically.

When the ship is sinking is it really women and children first, or every man for himself? The answer, it seems, may depend on how fast it’s going down.

Comparing who survived two of history’s most famous sinkings — the Titanic and the Lusitania — indicates sharply different behavior on the two doomed vessels, neither of which had enough available lifeboats for all passengers.

When a torpedo sent the Lusitania to the bottom in just 18 minutes, claiming 1,198 lives, most survivors were young, fit people age 16 to 35 who could rush to a spot in the lifeboats and hang on to it.

By contrast, it took 2 hours and 40 minutes for the Titanic to slip beneath the waves, time for people to consider what to do rather than just react. While 1,517 people perished, the survivors tended to be women, children and those accompanying a child.

Economist Benno Torgler led a study about how people act in extreme situations. He comments:

“In the environment of the Titanic, social norms were enforced more often, and there was also a higher willingness among males to surrender a seat on a lifeboat,” researcher Benno Torgler of Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia said of the findings.

Why might this be?

Torgler points to the “procreation instinct,” which holds that because the survival of a species depends on its offspring, a high value must be placed upon females of reproductive age as a valuable resource.

Aboard the Titanic, where social norms had time to come into play, women had a 53 percent higher probability of surviving than males, Torgler said. “But no (such) effect was observable in the Lusitania.”

The Titanic went down after colliding with an iceberg on the night of April 12, 1912. It was three years later, May 7, 1915, that a torpedo sank the Lusitania.

The researchers note that it is likely that those aboard the Lusitania were familiar with the Titanic disaster and that also might have affected their thinking more toward self-preservation.

A social psychologist weighs in:

Col. Thomas Kolditz, head of the department of behavioral sciences at the U.S. Military Academy, said the researchers’ explanation for this behavior difference is plausible, “but they underestimate the role of leadership.” Competent leaders in dangerous situations influence people, but this takes time, said Kolditz, who was not part of the research team.

“It is unlikely that the mere passage of time led to the emergence of pro-social and selfless behaviors. It is much more likely that, in the case of the Titanic, leaders were able to impact the process of abandoning ship in a more direct way, whereas the effect of leadership was minimized in the fast-breaking circumstances on the Lusitania,” Kolditz said.

Additionally, social class affected survival chances in these disasters:

The study found a higher survival rate for first-class passengers on the Titanic, but not on the Lusitania, where first-class passengers fared even worse than third-class passengers in the scramble to exit the ship.

In the case of the Titanic, upper class passengers also had more time to assert the privilege to which they were accustomed, calling on the ships officers whom they knew and perhaps even bargaining for seats in the lifeboats.

Read more.

The Chicago Tribune noted that sociology students from Northern Illinois University are headed to Florida for spring break, but…

they won’t be relaxing in the sunshine.

They plan to build two Habitat for Humanity homes in four days.

Jack King of NIU’s Department of Sociology leads the annual outing. NIU crews have helped the nonprofit build about 25 homes in the Pensacola, Fla., area over the years.

Sociology graduate and undergraduate students come back, some year after year, to lend a hand.

BBC News recently reported on the concept of “parental determinism,” as discussed by Kent University (England) sociology professor Frank Furedi:

There was a pervading prejudice that virtually all of society’s problems were caused by poor parenting.  There was an attempt to “weed out” unfit parents and intervene before they even had children, he said.  In an article for Spiked online, he likened “parental determinism” to Hitler’s eugenics and Stalinism.

He said: “The idea of a one-dimensional causal relationship between parenting and socioeconomic outcomes, dreamt up by the British think-tanks and policy makers, threatens to take public discourse to a new low.

He points to the roots of “parental determinism” in Britain:

The idea of early intervention was conceived by Tony Blair’s regime which “promoted the fantasy that the government could fix society’s problems by getting its hands on the nation’s toddlers before their parents had chance to ruin them”.

“He believed it was possible to spot tomorrow’s ‘problem people’ even before they were born,” he added.  This notion of parental determinism allowed politicians to promote the “most absurd prejudices…Over the weekend, Iain Duncan Smith the former Tory leader, argued that children from broken homes and dysfunctional families have underdeveloped brains and start school with the mental capacity of one-year-olds,” he said.

Furedi argues that “parental determinism” is particularly damaging in the realm of education:

This was because of the way it could erode adult responsibility and authority, he said.  If adults were reluctant or confused about giving guidance to the younger generation, then the challenge facing the teacher in the classroom could be “overwhelming”, he said.  “It is hard to be the last bastion of authority in a society where adult authority seems to be crumbling,” he added.

He called for adult authority to be affirmed both in and out of the classroom and for the relationship between parents and teachers to be re-drawn.  “There is a difference between raising children and educating them, and this distinction must be re-established to allow for a clearer and more constructive relationship between parents and teachers,” he concluded.

Click here to read Furedi’s full article in Spiked.

The Philadelphia Inquirer recently examined Americans’ tendency to turn on the poorest members of their society during hard economic times:

Last month, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer of South Carolina said that when the government helps the poor, it’s like people feeding stray animals that continually “breed.”

And just last week, Colorado state legislator Spencer Swalm said poor people in single-family homes are “dysfunctional.”

Both statements riled some Americans from the Piedmont to the Rockies and underscored a widely held belief: In tough times, people are tough on the poor.

It’s not just politicians playing the blame game, either:

In an April 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center in Washington, 72 percent agreed with the statement that “poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs.” That’s up from 69 percent in 2007.

“The economic downturn has made the middle class less generous toward others,” said Guy Molyneux, a partner at Hart Research Associates, a Washington firm that researches attitudes toward the poor. “People are less supportive of the government helping the poor, because they feel they’re not getting enough help themselves.

The Inquirer also featured sociological commentary on the phenomenon:

Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University, agreed: “Hatred of the poor is fueled by the middle class’s fear of falling during hard times.”

Americans don’t understand how the poor are victimized by a lack of jobs, inefficient schools, and unsafe neighborhoods, experts say.

“People ignore the structural issues – jobs leaving, industry becoming more mechanized,” said Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson, renowned for his study of the Philadelphia poor. “Then they point to the poor and ask, ‘Why aren’t you making it?’