The BBC World Service Program, The Forum, ran a segment this weekend featuring sociologist Diego Gambetta…

About the program:

This week we take a trip into real and imagined dystopian worlds…

We travel to the future to meet the environmentally friendly humanoids from Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood’s latest book, “The year of the Flood”. She asks whether an environmental religion can prevent the extinction of the human race as we know it, or whether it would accelerate our evolution into a new, unrecognisable species.

The British opposition security minister Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones argues that the right balance needs to be struck between privacy and the efficiency of the state.

And sociology Professor Diego Gambetta peers down into the underworld to crack the codes and signals of criminal communication.

We discuss how we modify our bodies and our communication in order to protect our planet and evade the state, both today and in a possible dystopian future.

LISTEN HERE.

Earlier this week United Press International (UPI) ran a story about research by sociologists Sarah Burgard and James House of the University of Michigan and Jennie Brand at the University of California, Los Angeles, which revealed that “persistent job insecurity — not necessarily job loss — poses a major threat” to workers in the United States.

About the study…

[The authors] analyzed data on more than 1,700 adults collected over periods from 3-10 years. By interviewing the same people at different points in time, the researchers were able to disentangle the connection between poor health and job insecurity, and to control for the impact of actual job loss and other factors.

The first wave of the study was completed between 1986 and 1989 and the second between 1995 and 2005.

The authors note:

“It may seem surprising that chronically high job-insecurity is more strongly linked with health declines than actual job loss or unemployment,” Burgard said in a statement. “Ongoing ambiguity about the future, inability to take action unless the feared event actually happens, and the lack of institutionalized supports associated with perceived insecurity are among them.”

To measure feelings of job insecurity, study participants were asked, “How likely is that during the next couple of years you will involuntarily lose your main job?” At any given time, as many as 18 percent of those surveyed felt insecure about their jobs, the study said.

Read more.

The Washington Post reports today on how the Christian right has “found new life with Barack Obama in office, particularly around healthcare” as many had speculated about the declining potency of the group for cultural and political change.

The state of affairs…

As the president prepares to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night to press for health-care reform, conservative Christian leaders are rallying their troops to oppose him, with online town hall meetings, church gatherings, fundraising appeals, and e-mail and social networking campaigns. FRC Action, the lobbying arm of the Family Research Council, has scheduled a webcast Thursday night for tens of thousands of supporters in which House  Minority Leader John A. Boehner(R-Ohio) and other speakers will respond to the president’s health-care address.

And a sociologist explains the trend!

“Movements do better when they have something to oppose,” said D. Michael Lindsay, a sociology professor at Rice University who studies evangelicals. “It’s easier to fundraise in those kinds of situations. It’s easier to mobilize volunteers because you have an us versus them mentality, and that plays very well right now for the Christian right.”

After seeing their bread-and-butter issue of abortion take a back seat during the election last year, the Christian right has been a prime force in moving it back to the front row by focusing on it as a potential part of health-care reform.

Additional scholarly commentary…

Laura Olson, professor of politics at Clemson University, said health-care reform has been a way to rally Christian conservatives and get them back into the national conversation.

“It has the potential to remind people in that sector. . . of the American electorate that, ‘This is really one of our core concerns, and here’s a new manifestation of it,’ ” Olson said. “It puts a whole new coat of paint on it and makes it even more useful strategically.”

Read more.

The San Jose Mercury News ran a story this weekend about how women’s role in sex crimes has resurfaced as an issue. Citing a handful of recent crimes in which women have played significant parts, the article delves into women’s roles in the crimes and the leniency they sometimes receive in the courtroom.

Charlene Williams of Sacramento lured six teenage girls and four young adults to their deaths as her husband demanded the perfect “sex slave.”

Michelle Lyn Michaud, also of Sacramento, customized curling irons to help her boyfriend torture and murder a 22-year-old student abducted from a Pleasanton street.

In Utah, Wanda Eileen Barzee was accused of helping her husband kidnap 14-year old Elizabeth Smart at knifepoint from her Salt Lake City bedroom so that he could secure another “wife.”

Now along comes Nancy Garrido of the Bay Area. Like the others, Garrido is accused of teaming up with a male partner — in Garrido’s case, her husband of nearly three decades — and allegedly committing unthinkable crimes against other women and children.

The arrests Aug. 27 of Nancy and Phillip Garrido revealed a stunning story about the 1991 kidnapping of 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard, snatched off the street near her home in Meyers. Authorities say Jaycee, now 29, had been living for 18 years in the Garridos’ backyard near Antioch and is the mother of two children fathered by Phillip Garrido.

While attention focuses on Phillip Garrido’s history of sexual assault, his reduced prison term and evasion of parole oversight, the case also raises haunting questions about what role his wife may have played.

The article draws upon sociological commentary from Jack Levin…

One noted criminologist said he believes that some female offenders actually have benefited by the persistent notion that women could not possibly be the leaders — especially in a sex crime.

“The court typically throws the book at the man, believing that he was the instigator — that he initiated the attack. So he’ll get the death penalty,” said Jack Levin, a professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University in Boston.

“His female companion is considered an accomplice who went along for the love of her man. She gets a much lighter sentence.”

That view is not always accurate, said Levin, an expert in serial murder and hate crimes.

In one case in Canada, he said, a woman caught up in a rape and murder case involving teenage victims testified against her husband in exchange for leniency.

In a move decried in Canada as the “Deal With the Devil,” Karla Homolka got a 12-year sentence in 1993 for manslaughter in the murders of two Ontario teens.

Motivations vary widely

She is now believed to be living in Paris, Levin said. Her former husband, Paul Bernardo, was sentenced to life in prison in Canada, which does not have the death penalty.

But after the deal was struck, Levin said, videotapes showing the rape and torture of the schoolgirls revealed Karla Homolka was a willing participant.

“She was seen enjoying herself and participating fully,” he said. “Karla Homolka was just as guilty as her husband.”

But women in these types of cases can also fall into the category of being so passive they “just go along with the plan,” said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

He said besides women who are battered or psychologically controlled, some are simply “low-functioning” and dependent on their mates.

“It’s not like there’s a single profile,” he said.

Read more.

A new study funded by the Ford, Joyce, Haynes and Russell Sage Foundations and publicized by the New York Times this week revealed that low-wage workers in the U.S. are often cheated out of their pay. The survey of workers in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago found that low-wage workers are “routineley denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage.”

The Times reports:

The study, the most comprehensive examination of wage-law violations in a decade, also found that 68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week.

“We were all surprised by the high prevalence rate,” said Ruth Milkman, one of the study’s authors and a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the City University of New York.

In surveying 4,387 workers in various low-wage industries, including apparel manufacturing, child care and discount retailing, the researchers found that the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of average weekly earnings of $339. That translates into a 15 percent loss in pay.

The researchers said one of the most surprising findings was how successful low-wage employers were in pressuring workers not to file for workers’ compensation. Only 8 percent of those who suffered serious injuries on the job filed for compensation to pay for medical care and missed days at work stemming from those injuries.

“The conventional wisdom has been that to the extent there were violations, it was confined to a few rogue employers or to especially disadvantaged workers, like undocumented immigrants,” said Nik Theodore, an author of the study and a professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “What our study shows is that this is a widespread phenomenon across the low-wage labor market in the United States.”

More of their findings…

According to the study, 39 percent of those surveyed were illegal immigrants, 31 percent legal immigrants and 30 percent native-born Americans.

The study found that 26 percent of the workers had been paid less than the minimum wage the week before being surveyed and that one in seven had worked off the clock the previous week. In addition, 76 percent of those who had worked overtime the week before were not paid their proper overtime, the researchers found.

And…

The study found that women were far more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than men, with the highest prevalence among women who were illegal immigrants. Among American-born workers, African-Americans had a violation rate nearly triple that for whites.

“These practices are not just morally reprehensible, but they’re bad for the economy,” saidAnnette Bernhardt, an author of the study and policy co-director of the National Employment Law Project. “When unscrupulous employers break the law, they’re robbing families of money to put food on the table, they’re robbing communities of spending power and they’re robbing governments of vital tax revenues.”

Read more.

U.S. News and World Report also picked up the story.

On PBS’ NewsHour, business correspondent Paul Solman sat down with sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh to talk about how even though the economy is inching toward ‘recovery’ the perils of jobless and job-seeking Americans suggest a need for new metrics to evaluate economic recovery.

Solman reports:

According to Venkatesh, the days of a company giving someone a job for 10 years may be over; many American companies don’t know where they themselves will be in six months to a year. Instead, as companies hire more people for shorter periods of time, on a contract or freelance basis, we’ll need better ways to evaluate how this type of employment fits within our models of economic recovery.

Read more.

Watch the video.

This weekend I came across a press release from Media Newswire highlighting new research by University of Chicago sociologist Mario Small about how child care centers serve a function that is often overlooked — “they connect parents with each other as informal advisors in child rearing and with agencies that help with the challenges of parenting.”

About the study:

The centers become locations where parents can build “social capital”—the contacts they need to navigate through problems, such as concerns for a child’s development and finding good health care and schools. The concept of social capital, developed at the University over decades, helps explain the powerful effect of personal connections on social status and financial success.

Unacquainted parents often become dependent upon each other through networks at their children’s day care centers, said Mario Small, Professor in Sociology at the University of Chicago and author of Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life. The book, one of the first to look at the impact of child care centers on parents, finds a wide range of different outcomes for parents depending on their day care or preschool of choice.

“Parents come to school to find someone to care for their children, and they end up learning ways of taking care of each other,” Small said. “When you are a parent, particularly a first-time parent, the best resource you have is another parent.”

Mothers particularly build up their network, or social capital, in a variety of ways. By working together on fundraising activities or taking field trips, they meet others who can provide helpful advice about a child’s health, or help care for a child when parents have an emergency.

The research showed benefits for poor and non-poor parents. Mothers with children in child care centers had at least one more good friend than other mothers, for instance. Non-poor mothers who made friends at day care centers were nearly 60 percent less likely to be depressed than those who did not make friends. Poor mothers were less likely to experience homelessness if their children were enrolled in day care centers, even if they had experienced homelessness before.

Small’s research included more detailed findings about variations in the benefits of these centers…

Small found that not all the networks are equal, however. Some centers encourage connections by organizing parties and events around Mother’s Day. Child care centers that have strict pick-up and drop-off times are more likely to have strong parent networks because more parents gather at the same time and likely know each other.

The differences emerged from research based on Small’s “Childcare Centers and Families Survey” of 300 randomly sampled centers in New York in 2004. In addition to interviews with parents and center staff, the research also included data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study of 3,500 mothers of children born between 1998 and 2000 in the nation’s 20 largest cities.

The information about services and connections with social service providers was particularly helpful to poor mothers. Agencies find centers a convenient way to reach the families they seek to serve. “Part of the reason the centers can serve as brokers is that they deal with a very targeted population,” Small said.

Non-profit organizations, for instance, interested in reaching disadvantaged children with opportunities such as exposure to arts programs, or gifts at Christmas, find it convenient to work through day care centers, he found. Agencies providing health care assistance and information about domestic violence also find it useful to visit day care centers and post notices of their services on bulletin boards, he found.

“The reason this happens is because of the professional ethos of the centers. Over and over I heard center directors say, ‘You can’t take care of the child without taking care of the family,’” he said.  Some centers, such Head Start, receive government funding and are required to provide resource information.

Small found that centers in poorer neighborhoods, at least in New York, are more likely to get services than those in more well-to-do neighborhoods. The experience may vary in other parts of the country.

Read more.

Earlier this week National Public Radio News ran a story about the emerging trend of women becoming the family breadwinners. NPR host Jennifer Ludden talked with Heather Boushey from the Center for American Progress and sociologist Michael Kimmel of SUNY-Stonybrook about new findings published by the Center for American Progress documenting how women are rapidly becoming the sole breadwinners of the household because men  account for three out of every four jobs lost in this recession. The new study also “looks at how families struggle to afford health care, housing and living expenses on a woman’s salary and how men cope with their changing role.”

Read the transcript.

Listen to the story.

An article about heirloom tomatoes and questions about the snobbery surrounding their consumption have graced the pages of the Washington Post and the Star Tribune in recent weeks. About the rise of the heirloom tomato…

“Heirloom” has become another buzzword, like “farm to table,” complained Jeremy Fox, the chef at vegetarian restaurant Ubuntu in Napa, Calif., which serves farm-to-table heirlooms as well as hybrids invented by the restaurant’s full-time gardener. “It’s about quality,” he said. “If a tomato tastes good, it’s a good tomato. Nothing else matters.”

That wasn’t always the case. Once, only serious back-yard gardeners swooned over heirlooms. Some, undoubtedly, were concerned about flavor. But for most, growing heirlooms — which they defined as any variety that can reproduce from seed and existed before World War II — was more about preserving biodiversity. Only within the past decade did chefs and trend-crazed food writers latch on to the term: NewsBank, a database that tracks more than 2,500 sources, found 1,097 references to heirloom tomatoes in 2008, up from 77 a decade earlier.

The article draws heavily upon research by sociologist Jennifer Jordan…

Indeed, heirloom tomatoes rose to such prominence that sociologists began to study them as a cultural phenomenon. In a 2007 article in the journal Sociologia Ruralis, Jennifer Jordan examined the pressing question of why a growing number of consumers had acquired a taste for $7-a-pound “bug-eaten, calloused, mottled and splitting tomatoes that may or may not taste good.”

Jordan concluded it was because heirloom tomatoes had evolved into a “marker of distinction.” The lumpy, imperfect fruit had become a kind of mascot for the good-food movement that is against industrial agriculture’s embrace of pesticides, against the development of genetically modified foods, in favor of preserving small farms and in support of local and seasonal food.

Some people sought out heirlooms for their flavor, a reaction to the pretty but insipid industrial hybrids. (Jordan reports that university labs were instructed “to imagine the tomato as a projectile” in their efforts to develop fruit that could survive long-distance shipping and extended refrigeration.) But for many, the growing or purchase of heirloom tomatoes was about making a statement.

Read more.

Several media outlets have been buzzing about a recent sociological study that has been used to explain the proliferation and perseverance of a number of myths related to current debates about U.S. healthcare reform.

Bernie Mooney of Examiner.com writes:

Whether you support healthcare reform or not, one thing should be a given, that whatever decision you reach should be based on the facts. Despite efforts to inform people of what the bill is and what it isn’t, many still believe the myths about the not-yet finalized bill.

You would think that with easy access to the overwhelming amount of information available on the internet and elsewhere, people would be more informed. Maybe that’s the problem. With access to massive amounts of information, people can cherry pick the information that most validates and supports their original view. People want to be right, so they seek out information that supports their worldview rather then information that challenges it. Is this stupidity or is there a more deep-rooted psychological reason for this?

There just might be something at play here beyond simple stupidity. A study done by researchers from four major research institutions* may explain it. The study, There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam and Inferred Justification, was published in the journal Sociological Inquiry. They focused on the belief, held by many Americans, that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 despite all evidence to the contrary.

About the study:

Dr. Steven Hoffman, co-author of the study, said of the findings, “Our data shows substantial support for a cognitive theory known as ‘motivated reasoning,’ which suggests that rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.”

“We form emotional attachments that get wrapped up in our personal identity and sense of morality, irrespective of the facts of the matter. The problem is that this notion of ‘motivated reasoning’ has only been supported with experimental results in artificial settings. We decided it was time to see if it held up when you talk to actual voters in their homes, workplaces, restaurants, offices and other deliberative settings.”

Hoffman says, “For the most part people completely ignore contrary information. We did not find that people were being duped by a campaign of innuendo so much as they were actively constructing links and justifications that did not exist.”

“They wanted to believe in the link,” he says, “because it helped them make sense of a current reality. So voters’ ability to develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information, whether we think that is good or bad for democratic practice, does at least demonstrate an impressive form of creativity.”

Newsweek also picked up on the story. Health columnist Sharon Begley writes:

Some people form and cling to false beliefs about health-care reform (or Obama’s citizenship) despite overwhelming evidence thanks to a mental phenomenon called motivated reasoning, says sociologist Steven Hoffman, visiting assistant professor at the University at Buffalo. “Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief,” he says, “people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.” And God knows, in the Internet age there is no dearth of sources to confirm even the most ludicrous claims (my favorite being that the moon landings were faked). “For the most part,” says Hoffman, “people completely ignore contrary information” and are able to “develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information.”

His conclusions arise from a study he and six colleagues conducted. They were looking at the well-known phenomenon of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Some people, mostly liberals, have blamed that on false information and innuendo spread by the Bush administration and its GOP allies (by former members of the Bush White House, too, as recently as this past March). (As Dick Cheney said in June, suspicion of a link “turned out not to be true.”) But the researchers think another force is at work. In a paper to be published in the September issue of the journalSociological Inquiry(you have to subscribe to the journal to read the full paper, but the authors kindly posted it on their Web site here), they argue that some Americans believe the Saddam-9/11 link because it “made sense of the administration’s decision to go to war against Iraq . . . [T]he fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11,” they write.

Read more from Examiner.com
Read more from Newsweek.
UPI.com also picked up the story…
The New York Times also picked up the findings…