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.

The Los Angeles Times reports on the importance of the middle class for the city’s future, with special emphasis on middle class Latinos:

With this year’s census likely to show a Latino majority in both the city and county of Los Angeles, it’s obvious that our collective future is linked to the social health of that group of people. And if you think of Latinos only in the dysfunctional terms described in so many media reports, then a Third World L.A. seems like an inevitability.

While the experiences of poor and working-class Latino immigrants are often the focus of scholars and the media, other immigrants may go unnoticed:

You might not think about L.A.’s Latino middle class much. But USC sociologist Jody Agius Vallejo has eschewed more exotic topics to investigate its middling peculiarities.

Agius Vallejo’s research looks at the “pathways to success” that allow even people of humble immigrant origins to reach middle-class status. Her work rebuts the widespread perception that Mexican immigrants and their offspring are following what she calls a “trajectory of downward mobility into a permanent underclass.”

More on Agius Vallejo’s research:

Agius Vallejo interviewed 80 subjects who possessed at least three of these four characteristics: college educations, higher than average income, white-collar jobs and home ownership. Seventy percent of the people in her sample grew up in “disadvantaged” communities. Their parents had, on average, a sixth-grade education.

The members of this arriviste Mexican middle class might look like their white counterparts on paper, Agius Vallejo said. But in other ways they are different. Among other things, they have stronger social ties to poorer relatives.

Another of Agius Vallejo’s subjects is a lawyer who has recently visited jail (to bail out a cousin) and the social-security office (to help an uncle). Relatives turn to the lawyer in times of need because “she’s the one in the family with knowledge,” Agius Vallejo said. “She’s the one who’s made it to the middle class.”

Each person who achieves social mobility improves the overall well-being of the community. Social climbers show others behind them the way forward. “The future of the city really hinges on the mobility of immigrants,” Agius Vallejo told me.

The importance of the immigrant middle class extends beyond the city of Los Angeles, though:

A healthy middle class with Latin American roots is critical to the entire country’s future too. That’s what another USC professor, Dowell Myers, argues in his book “Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America.”

Myers, a demographer, says our aging country needs to invest in its younger, immigrant communities as an act of self-preservation. Immigrants’ incomes and rates of homeownership rise the longer they stay in this country, he writes, and provide potential members of the taxpaying middle class that will fund the retirement of the boomer generation.

Immigration researcher, Marta Tienda, was recently profiled on NJ.com:

She is one of the world’s foremost sociologists, an achievement she insists has little to do with genius and everything to do with “trying harder than everybody else.”

“What I bring to the table is proof that anybody can make it if they do the work,” says Tienda, 59. “I want what I am and where I came from to resonate with people, particularly young Hispanic women.” …

Tienda’s road to excellence began as a child migrant worker in the farm fields of the Midwest, where she picked vegetables alongside her three sisters, brother and her father, an illegal immigrant from Mexico.

It is a journey that involved loss, sacrifice and decades of 18-hour workdays.

At college, she developed a passion for social change:

Tienda studied Spanish literature on a full scholarship at the University of Michigan. Her plan to become a teacher was derailed by a summer job working with immigrants. Tienda discovered she could mediate change, for instance, when she convinced growers it was in their best interest to provide day care for workers. She vowed to become “a problem solver.”

She recognized that sociological research could be a tool to help improve the lives of Hispanic people in the U.S.:

For more than 20 years, Tienda has done just that, although her research has expanded to cover other minorities.

Her seminal work, “The Hispanic Population of the United States,” was published in 1987 and is still used in college classrooms. Analyzing demographic patterns over a 20-year period, it was the first authoritative description of this country’s diverse Hispanic population. It led to a professorship for Tienda at the University of Chicago.

There, she helped rebuild the population studies office into a world-renowned research center and eventually became chairwoman of the sociology department. She collaborated with Israeli sociologist Haya Stier on another benchmark study — “The Color of Opportunity: Pathways to Family, Welfare and Work,” published in 2001. Based on a survey of Chicago’s racially diverse, inner city poor, it documented ways in which race limited economic opportunity.

Her strengths, colleagues say, lie in the breadth of her knowledge, her grasp of the mathematics that drive quantitative demographic research and, of course, that prodigious energy.

The New York Times reports a rise in employee theft via gift cards:

At the Saks flagship store in Manhattan, a 23-year-old sales clerk was caught recently ringing up $130,000 in false merchandise returns and siphoning the money onto a gift card.

“Gift card fraud is spiking,” said Joshua Bamfield, author of the Global Retail Theft Barometer, an annual international survey of retailers. “To employees, this is like currency. It’s almost as good as the U.S. dollar.”

Gift card fraud is growing portion of overall retail theft:

Employee fraud involving gift cards appears to be growing sharply as retailers struggle to contain overall theft, now estimated at $36 billion a year in the industry, or 1.51 percent of retail sales, according to a leading national study. Even as total sales have been falling, employee theft and shoplifting have been rising across the United States, industry experts say, with occasional arrests making headlines.

Many of the gift card crimes are straightforward, frequently involving young sales clerks and smaller amounts than the Saks theft. Among the variations of such crimes, cashiers often do fake refunds of merchandise and then, with the amount refunded, use their registers to electronically fill gift cards, which they take. Or sometimes when shoppers buy gift cards, cashiers give them blank cards and then divert the shoppers’ money onto cards for themselves.

A criminologist who studies employee theft comments:

“The retail industry has come to the realization that, as the Pogo comic strip said, ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us,’ ” said Richard C. Hollinger, the survey’s principal author and a professor of criminology at the University of Florida.

The most common type of employee theft is “sweethearting,” in which cashiers fail to ring up or scan goods that friends or relatives present at the register, Professor Hollinger said. Stealing from the till remains a problem, too. But with gift cards continuing to grow in popularity, they are an increasingly easy target.

And…

Professor Hollinger says the rate of theft is greatest among retailers with high turnover rates and many part-time workers, who may be less loyal and under more financial pressure than full-time workers.

He also found higher theft among younger workers. “Older workers know they have a lot more to lose — promotional opportunities, health insurance, 401(k)’s and pensions,” Professor Hollinger said.

Countries are looking for ways to boost organ donation, according to the New York Times. Most recently, Israel has created a policy to give priority for organ transplants to those who sign up to be organ donors themselves.

Officials hope the incentive will increase the supply of available organs — of which there is a shortage across the world, but especially in Israel, where only one in 10 adults carries a donor card.

This is sure to be a closely watched change, as most countries have tried different measures to increase willingness to donate organs. Here’s a rundown of some of those efforts, which include (1) creating markets for organs; (2) making all citizens organ donors by default, unless they explicitly exempt themselves; and (3) investing in more health care infrastructure.

Such plans have raised a few ethical eyebrows, however:

Proposals to change the organ procurement systems in the United States and Great Britain to “presumed consent” have frequently provoked ethical objections. Critics worry that such a system would effectively coerce people into donating organs, even over the wishes of the next of kin.

Ethics aside, it’s also not clear that such programs actually produce more donations.

A sociologist comments on the quandry:

Perhaps this is because — as Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University has found — “opt-out” and “opt-in” systems are really not that different in practice. In both, doctors still typically defer to the wishes of the deceased’s family, whatever the official donor status of the deceased.

In a 2006 article in the DePaul Law Review, Professor Healy argued that presumed consent laws didn’t seem to be the key to improving cadaveric organ donation rates. Rather, infrastructure investments did.

Countries that experienced the biggest donation increases in recent years, like Spain and Italy, were those that hired more transplant coordinators, started public awareness campaigns, installed 24-hour organ retrieval teams at hospitals and improved training for doctors who talk to grieving families.

He concludes:

Arguments about altruism versus self-interest and disputes over presumed and informed consent together constitute a good portion of the public discussion about organ donation. Yet neither debate helps us explain why some countries have many more organ donors than others. As best we can tell, countries with high procurement rates do not owe their success to any distinctive legal conception of consent, nor to any special way of institutionalizing exchange in human goods. Rather, more fine-grained organizational differences– specifically in logistics and process management — are responsible for their success.

The Bakersfield Californian welcomes 2010 by reflecting on the past decade:

Naming this decade — and we must, because we are Americans, and we name things — isn’t going be so easy. Some decades, at least in retrospect, are easy calls. The Gay Nineties. The Roaring Twenties. The Psychedelic Sixties. But naming the ’00s is a challenge best postponed, because nothing we’ve considered rings with authenticity.

So,

All we can do is look at the evidence that historians and sociologists not yet born will consider. And one thing, beyond the bookend disasters of 9/11 and the Great Recession, stands out: Technology reshaped who we are and how we interact. Social media took hold of America in the last few years of the ’00s, with 350 million users on Facebook, 100 million on MySpace, and 18 million using Twitter.

Sociologist Rhonda Dugan weighs in:

“I’d call it the Decade of Self-Importance,” she said. “Everyone is networking online, but they’re not doing it just to find jobs. They’re doing it to talk about themselves. The ‘Me Decade’ was all about me. Now it’s about me and telling everyone about it. I use Facebook myself. And now I’m asking myself, ‘Why am I posting that I ran a half-marathon?’ We’ve become more narcissistic, and social media has helped push it along.”

Retired sociologist Russell Travis also comments:

“I’d call it the PTSD — the Post-Traumatic Stress Decade,” he said. That name “reflects the cumulative stress from the aftermath of two ongoing wars and the many coming home afflicted with (real) PTSD; the aftermath of a seriously tanked economy; … and the aftermath of the 2001 bombing of the Twin Towers.”

Maybe this is how we’ve come to deal with events just too big and too profound to process — by blocking out the wider world and turning inward, going to our own, personal safe place where the mundane trumps the abstract, the ordinary blocks out the incomprehensible, and 140 characters (or less) just about covers it.

The Christian Science Monitor recently reported on shifting trends in divorce rates during the Great Recession:

The divorce rate fell 4 percent in 2008 to 16.9 divorces per 1,000 married women, according to Census Bureau data. It had previously been on an upward path, rising from 16.4 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2005 to 17.5 in 2007.

The economy may play a role in this decline:

“Many couples may be rediscovering the long-standing sociological truth that marriage is one of society’s best social insurance plans,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociology professor and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, in a new report on the state of US marital unions.

Some couples may be staying together only temporarily. If past trends are any guide, some of the decline in the divorce rate may be due to couples delaying divorce because they cannot afford it, or need the resources of an estranged spouse.

But others may be rediscovering why they got married in the first place. Recession reminds them that marriage can be more than an emotional relationship. It is also an economic partnership and social safety net, points out the National Marriage Project report, “The State of Our Unions 2009”.

“There’s nothing like the loss of a job, an imminent foreclosure, or a shrinking 401(k) to [help spouses] gain new appreciation for a wife’s job, a husband’s commitment to pay down debt, or the in-laws’ willingness to help out with childcare or a rent-free place to live,” according to the report.