Science Daily posted a release on new work by Markella Rutherford of Wellesley College to be published in the upcoming issue of Qualitative Sociology about how children today enjoy more freedom from chores and other demands at home, but are more restricted in their activities when they are outside of the house.

Rutherford’s project:

Children have certainly mastered the art of selecting, negotiating and even refusing the chores their parents assign to them. This growth in personal autonomy at home over the last few decades could be the result of shrinking opportunities to participate in activities outside the home, without Mom and Dad looking over their shoulder, according to Dr. Markella Rutherford from Wellesley College in the US. Her analysis of back issues of the popular US magazine, Parents, maps how the portrayal of parental authority and children’s autonomy has changed over the last century…. She analyzed a total of 300 advice columns and relevant editorials from 34 randomly chosen issues of Parents magazine, published between 1929 and 2006, to see how parental authority and children’s autonomy have been portrayed over the last century.

The findings:

The articles in Parents showed that children were increasingly autonomous when it came to their self-expression, particularly in relation to daily activity chores, personal appearance and defiance of parents. In contrast to this increased autonomy that child-centered parenting has given children, the 20th century has seen, in other ways, children’s autonomy curtailed, through increasingly restricted freedom of movement and substantially delayed acceptance of responsibilities. Children now have fewer opportunities to conduct themselves in public spaces free from adult supervision than they did in the early and mid-twentieth century.

Read more about the study.

Earlier this week the New York Times ran a story about joblessness in the current recession. The article, entitled “The Price of U.S. Recession is Paid in Jobs,” includes commentary from sociologist Thomas Cottle.

The Times reports:

The pain of joblessness extends well beyond the workers themselves, hitting their families and entire communities as home foreclosures mount, neighborhoods decay and crime rises.

“I see long-term unemployment as a real, treacherous disease. And it kills. It kills,” said Boston University sociologist Thomas Cottle, ticking off side effects from stress and hypertension to depression, alcoholism and drug addiction.

Even the rate of dental cavities goes up as the unemployed tend to put off routine medical care, said Cottle, author of “Hardest Times: The Trauma of Long Term Unemployment.”

He worries that the recession is slowly eroding belief in the American ideal that if you work hard enough, you will get ahead. The longer unemployment endures, the more people will feel abandoned and betrayed, he said.

Read more.

The BCC World Service Business Desk ran a story several days ago featuring an interview with Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin. The discussion centered on how ordinary people are changed by the current global economic recession. Cherlin’s work suggests that although one might think that hard economic times would take a more severe toll on marriages, leading to more divorce, this is not the case. Instead, Cherlin explains, divorce is on the decline in our current recession, a trend mirroring the last significant rise in unemployment.

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW.

Late last week Nature.com’s Nature Reports ran a front-page story about sociologists studying climate change and why our discipline has come to study this unique social problem somewhat slowly.

Nature Reports draws upon the work of several sociologists…

“Climate change is the ultimate collective-action problem,” says Steven Brechin, a sociologist at Syracuse University in New York. “How do you get people to agree in the short term to solutions for a long-term problem?” The answer, like the problem, has to be wide-ranging and global, says Jeffrey Broadbent of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who also studies how societies affect their environments. “Its only solution lies in a level of global cooperation that humanity has never seen before.”

More on Broadbent’s work:

Broadbent is just starting to investigate what factors contribute to this kind of cooperation at the national level. He has recently begun a project, called Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks, that aims to find out how information about climate change enters a particular country’s network of interested parties and what happens to it once it’s found its way to organizations and governments.

Broadbent is now one of a band of sociologists that has begun to turn the discipline’s tools towards climate change. In May last year, over 30 sociologists met at the US National Science Foundation’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, to discuss what sociology is already contributing to climate change research and what questions sociologists need to be answering next. “Purely technological ‘fixes'”, concluded the meeting report, “will not be sufficient to mitigate or successfully adapt to climate change^.”

In the context of our discipline…

Environmental sociology, which has its roots in the 1970s environmental movement, fits most naturally into a climate change research remit. But despite the field’s endurance, environmental sociologists are rather isolated from the discipline’s mainstream, featuring sparsely at the bigger conferences and publishing in different journals.

The American Sociological Review, for example, has published “literally a handful” of papers on environmental studies in the last three decades, says Thomas Dietz, director of the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University in East Lansing. According to Dietz, who works at the boundary of environmental science, sociology and human ecology, “Sociology in the US sees environment as not unimportant — but not core.”

That traditional core of sociology has instead been “tied into just looking at people”, says Broadbent, with its focus purely on the interactions going on between people, societies or nations. “What we’ve had very often is the idea that nature is somehow a stable, unchanging background concept,” says Constance Lever-Tracy, a sociologist studying migration at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Lever-Tracy was compelled by these issues to write an article for the journal Current Sociology last year drawing attention to the fact that her clan have had surprisingly little to say about climate change². “Sociology tries to say something about everything, but to my surprise I found almost nothing,” she says.

Read more.

Earlier this week Reuters Health ran a story about a new study suggesting that “people who get married and stay married may enjoy better health than the perpetually single, but losing a spouse could take a significant health toll…”

In the new study, researchers found that middle-aged and older Americans who were currently married tended to give higher ratings to their health than their never-married counterparts. They also reported fewer depression symptoms and limits on their mobility.

On the other hand, divorced or widowed adults fared worse than the never married on certain health measures — including the number of chronic health conditions reported. “Previously married people experience, on average, 20 percent more conditions and 23 percent more limitations,” the researchers write in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Remarriage seemed to lessen some of the health effects of divorce or widowhood. However, remarried men and women were still in generally poorer health than those in a lasting marriage.

Sociologist Linda J. Waite of the University of Chicago co-authored the report:

“We argue that losing a marriage through divorce or widowhood is extremely stressful and that a high-stress period takes a toll on health,” researcher Linda J. Waite, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, said in a written statement.

“Think of health as money in the bank,” she added. “Think of a marriage as a mechanism for ‘saving’ or adding to health. Think of divorce as a period of very high expenditures.”

Read more.

The Vancouver Sun ran a story yesterday about a new study by sociologist Laurel Davis-Delano of Springfield College, which suggests that “female athletes are still apologizing for smashing stereotypes while they pursue their sports.”

The Sun reports:

A newly published study that included college basketball, soccer and softball players found nearly three-quarters of them engage in “apologetic behaviours” — stereotypically feminine conduct such as cultivating a girlie appearance, apologizing for being aggressive and hanging out with men to emphasize their heterosexuality — to deflect prejudice.

“If you break a norm, you apologize. If I burp out loud, I know this offended other people, so I apologize,” says Laurel Davis-Delano, a professor of sociology at Springfield College in Massachusetts, explaining why researchers label these behaviours apologetic. “If you are offending people’s sense of gender ideals . . . people don’t necessarily realize they’re apologizing, but you are catering to other people’s sense of what’s proper.”

Most sports are still associated with masculinity in Western cultures, so female athletes are challenging gender expectations by their very participation, she says.

So what makes this different from female athletes looking pretty just because they want to?

Apologetic behaviours are different from female athletes having long hair or wearing makeup simply because they like to, Davis-Delano says, because they’re performed specifically in response to this gender tension.

While 73 per cent of the study participants said they engaged in at least one apologetic behaviour, from criticizing unfeminine athletes to being seen with a boyfriend, no one shied away from aggression or competing hard against male athletes.

On one hand, apologetic behaviours may help female athletes gain acceptance and be rewarded in their sport, Davis-Delano says. But they do little to challenge gender stereotypes, she says, and Russian tennis player Anna Kournikova is a “classic example” of the result: a female athlete of lesser talent who gets attention and endorsements for her ultrafeminine looks.

Read more.

This morning the Washington Post is running a story about a new study out of the Pew Charitable Trusts Economic Mobility Project, offering a more nuanced understanding of the forces affecting the income outcomes they documented in a project completed several years ago — “that nearly half of African American children born to middle-class parents in the 1950s and ’60s had fallen to a lower economic status as adults, a rate of downward mobility far higher than that for whites.”

But why? The answer is at least in part due to geographic location. The Pew Center’s new research suggests that “being raised in poor neighborhoods plays a major role in explaining why African American children from middle-income families are far more likely than white children to slip down the income ladder as adults.”

The new study:

This week, Pew will release findings of a study that helps explain that economic fragility, pointing to the fact that middle-class blacks are far more likely than whites to live in high-poverty neighborhoods, which has a negative effect on even the better-off children raised there. The impact of neighborhoods is greater than other factors in children’s backgrounds, Pew concludes.

Even as African Americans have made gains in wealth and income, the report found, black children and white children are often raised in starkly different environments. Two out of three black children born from 1985 through 2000 were raised in neighborhoods with at least a 20 percent poverty rate, compared with just 6 percent of white children, a disparity virtually unchanged from three decades prior.

Even middle-class black children have been more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods: Half of black children born between 1955 and 1970 in families with incomes of $62,000 or higher in today’s dollars grew up in high-poverty neighborhoods. But virtually no white middle-income children grew up in poor areas.

Using a study that has tracked more than 5,000 families since 1968, the Pew research found that no other factor, including parents’ education, employment or marital status, was as important as neighborhood poverty in explaining why black children were so much more likely than whites to lose income as adults.

A sociologist authored this new report…

Patrick Sharkey, the New York University sociologist who wrote the report, said researchers still need to pinpoint which factors in neighborhoods matter most, such as schools, crime or peer groups. But overall, he said, the impact of the contrasting surroundings for black and white children was indisputable.

“What surprises me is how dramatic the racial differences are in terms of the environments in which children are raised,” he said. “There’s this perception that after the civil rights period, families have been more able to seek out any neighborhood they choose, and that . . . the racial gap in neighborhoods would whittle away over time, and that hasn’t happened.”

And other scholars offered feedback…

Ideally, said several scholars who read the report, investments in struggling neighborhoods would improve them to the extent that the middle-income families would not feel the need to leave.

“These findings do suggest that those with the means or resources should try to escape these neighborhoods,” said Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson. “But . . . the exodus of middle-class families from poor black neighborhoods increases the adverse effects of concentrated poverty.”

Read more.

As many of you have probably read in the newspapers this week, the case of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s mistaken arrest has stirred debates about racial profiling in numerous media outlets as well as among academics. The New York Times summarizes: “Henry Louis Gates Jr., a prominent Harvard scholar of African-American history, was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Mass., last week by an officer investigating a report of a burglary in progress. Although charges for disorderly conduct were dropped, the incident has caused a stir over the issue of racial profiling.” (See the full story here.)

Although the some of the details of the case are still contested by the Cambridge police and Professor Gates, the events have generated some thoughtful sociological commentary on the course of events.

NYTimes blog ‘Room for Debate‘ hosted a discussion that featured commentary from scholars of law, psychology, criminology, criminal justice, and sociologist Peter Moskos, who noted:

As long as race matters in America, racial profiling will exist. But counter intuitively, police need to have more discretion, not less, to lessen profiling.

Police, at least in theory, are trained to avoid profiling. The same can’t be said for the public. If a citizen calls to report a suspicious person, police are suddenly forced into a situation that could very well stem from the ignorance or racism of some anonymous caller. And ignorance, which comes from all races, does not lend itself to effective community policing. Unfortunately, the age of the knowledgeable local foot officer is over.

There is a small segment of the population — street-corner young male high-school drop-out drug dealers come to mind — that should be profiled. Police attention will and should focus on high-crime corners. If these corners are black, well, reality often isn’t politically correct. In New York City, there are about 40 white and 330 black homicide victims per year.

Read more.

Earlier this week, a Crawler reader pointed me to a fantastic video interview with well-known sociologist Mary Pattillo as part of the Conversations from Penn State series from Penn State Public Broadcasting. The interview covers Pattillo’s path through academia, her two books on the black middle class, as well as what the Obama family means for the study of race and family.
See the video below, or link to the site here.

A few days ago the Washington Post ran a story about how University of Washington sociologist Pepper Schwartz tutored an elderly friend in the basics of online dating…

The Post reports:

A few weeks ago Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist who studies relationships at the University of Washington, spent the day giving a friend a crash course in online dating. Never mind that the friend in question is an 80-year-old woman — she wants “what every girl wants,” Schwartz says, “love, compatibility, someone to experience life with.”

And with a few clicks, Schwartz’s octogenarian pal joined the legions of seniors turning to their computers for a second (or third or fifth or 25th) shot at romance. By 2007, the over-50 set had become the fastest-growing group of subscribers for online dating companies, and double-digit growth has continued since, according to industry watchers.

But keep in mind that Schwartz actually works for one of these companies:

Schwartz, an adviser to online dating company Perfectmatch.com, cheers the trend. If a person in their 60s or 70s lost a spouse 20 years ago, “the chances of pairing again were small,” she says, because the avenues to meet new people were limited mostly to churches, senior centers and friends of friends.

Today single seniors can go online and “be opened up to literally thousands of options,” she says.

The story concludes with some of the potential risks for seniors using these services, but ends on an optimistic note.

…Schwartz says the desire for companionship doesn’t decrease with age: “Neither love, nor romance, nor adventure are the private property of the young.”

There are pitfalls, of course. Safety is always an issue with online dating, and so is disappointment. Just like their younger counterparts, seniors who log on to find love are also risking heartbreak. “The downside,” Schwartz says, “is when you meet someone you think is wonderful, but they don’t think you are. You’ve gotta be resilient.”

And about that 80-year-old friend of hers? She had a coffee date lined up by the end of her first day online

Read the full story.