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…

Over the weekend the New York Times reported on the recent vote by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (or ELCA), the largest Lutheran denomination in the U.S. to “allow gay men and lesbians in committed relationships to serve as members of the clergy.”

The vote made the denomination the latest mainline Protestant church to permit such ordinations, contributing to a halting sense of momentum on the issue within liberal Protestantism.

By a vote of 559 to 451, delegates to the denomination’s national assembly in Minneapolis approved a resolution declaring that the church would find a way for people in “publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous same-gender relationships” to serve as official ministers. (The church already allows celibate gay men and lesbians to become members of the clergy.)

The Times called in a sociologist for some additional commentary…

Wendy Cadge, a sociology professor at Brandeis University who has studied Evangelical Lutheran churches grappling with the issue, said, “It does show, to the extent that any mainline denominations are moving, I think they’re moving slowly toward a more progressive direction.”

Describing the context of Friday’s vote, several religion experts likened it to the court decision last year in Iowa legalizing same-sex marriage.

And…

“In the same sense that the Iowa court decision might have opened people’s eyes, causing them to say, ‘Iowa? What? Where?’” said Laura Olson, a professor of political science at Clemson University who has studied mainline Protestantism. “The E.L.C.A. isn’t necessarily quite as surprising in the religious sense, but the message it’s sending is, yes, not only are more Americans from a religious perspective getting behind gay rights, but these folks are not just quote unquote coastal liberals.”

The denomination has struggled with the issue almost since its founding in the late 1980s with the merger of three other Lutheran denominations.

Read more from the New York Times.

Earlier this week Newsweek ran a story entitled, “You Will Be a Parent to Your Parents,” devoted to the emerging trend of having multiple generations under one roof in American households.

Newsweek reports:

Census data show that the number of U.S. households with three or more generations increased by 38 percent between 1990 and 2000. There were about 4 million multigenerational households in 2000, and that number appears to be on the rise. Between 2000 and 2007, the number of parents living in the homes of their adult children increased by a whopping 67 percent. In other cases, grown children with families of their own are moving back into a parent’s house. Experts say harsh economic realities like high housing costs and low incomes are probably a driving force behind the trend.

One sociologist notes…

“It is so much less expensive to have one kitchen, one living room, one dwelling to heat,” says Frances Goldscheider, professor emeritus of sociology at Brown. “If you can manage to be polite to each other … you can get all the benefits of the reduced costs.” Other forces at work include immigration—certain cultures favor extended-family living—and increased longevity, since multigenerational households can care for aging parents.

The article also draws upon commentary from sociologist Philip Cohen:

Philip Cohen, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the upcoming book Family: Diversity, Inequality and Social Change, predicts that the economic downturn will contribute further to the rise in multigenerational living. “Especially with foreclosures and people losing their homes, where do people turn?” he asks. “They’re most likely to go to their families first.”

Read more.

Yesterday The Guardian (UK) ran a story about a new trend documented by sociologists at Oxford University. The Guardian reports:

More families are eating together at home as a result of the recession, a report by Oxford academics has found.

A quarter of parents questioned say they are trying harder to ensure that everyone in the household eats the same meal to help keep costs down, while 48% of parents say they are eating out less frequently. One in six cited more family time as a side effect of the downturn.

Changing Plates, based on research by the department of sociology at Oxford University and YouGov, and commissioned by Birds Eye, found that 67% of UK adults eat a meal with their families at least three times a week. Almost half do so every day.

The study’s author notes,

Jonathan Gershuny, from the Department of Sociology at Oxford University, said: “The findings of this report suggest that while the family meal is adapting and becoming more relaxed, the social significance of eating together remain.”

Read more.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review ran an insightful essay by sociologist Orlando Patterson of Harvard University entitled ‘Race and Diversity in the Age of Obama,’ yesterday morning.

Patterson begins:

Barack Obama’s historic victory was made possible by two great converging forces that began near the middle of the last century: the civil rights revolution and the changes engendered by the Immigration Act of 1965. The civil rights movement led to the rapid dismantling of Jim Crow and the inclusion of black Americans in politics, the military, the middle class and popular culture. The 1965 immigration act set in motion vast demographic and social changes that have altered the nation’s ethno-racial landscape.

At present, the foreign-born represent 12.6 percent of the total American population (this is still less than the 14.7 percent reached in 1910, during the earlier great wave of migration). A little over half of these immigrants are from Latin America and a quarter are from Asia. Over all, minorities now constitute slightly over a third of the population; in four states, minorities are the majority: Hawaii (75 percent), New Mexico (58 percent), California (57 percent) and Texas (52 percent), as they are in the District of Columbia (68 percent). It has been all too easy to misinterpret and sensationalize these demographic changes.

Patterson notes:

Until recently, the conventional wisdom among social scientists was that the adjustment of recent immigrants to America would be fundamentally different from that of the European immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It has been claimed that they are from different “races” and are entering a harsher postindustrial America with fewer opportunities for mobility, and also that the ease of communication and travel to their homelands discourages assimilation.

However, these arguments miss the real sociological drama that is now unfolding: the present wave of immigrants and their children are rapidly assimilating into an ever-vibrant American mainstream culture, and at a pace greater than the Europeans who came during the previous large wave. The assumption that the current wave should find adjustment harder because they come from different “races” rests on a hopeless misconception. At the time of their arrival, Jews, Italians and other Eastern and Southern Europeans — and even the Catholic Irish — were viewed by native whites as belonging to very different (and inferior) races. In fact, they did not assimilate because they were white; they became “white” because they assimilated.

Throughout the essay, Patterson draws upon previous research by numerous sociologists including Douglas Massey and William Julius Wilson, among others.

Read the full essay.

Earlier this week Inside Higher Education ran a fascinating story on the impact of parents on low-income high school students’ chances of enrolling in college.

The story begins…

Many studies have found that low-income high school students and those whose parents are not well educated are less likely to enroll in college. And disproportionate numbers of black and Latino youth fall into this group.

One solution to this problem is to increase the availability of aid — as the Obama administration and Congress appear to agree with their plans to increase the maximum Pell Grant significantly. But research presented [in San Francisco] Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association suggested that without shifting the attitudes of parents of low-income students — well before it’s time to enroll for college — any increases may not have the full impact desired.

New work presented by University of Washington sociologist Deborah M. Warnock, entitled  “Inequalities at the Outset,” uses ” a combination of federal and state databases in which parents are interviewed about college for their eighth graders.” According to Inside Higher Ed, Warnock “finds negative attitudes that not only are likely to discourage these youth from enrolling, but that suggest widespread ignorance of the present availability of aid — even before any Pell Grant growth — for those below the poverty line. And she found that low-income white parents may be particularly unaware of aid.”

Additional findings:

• Hispanic and Asian parents of eighth graders are less likely than white parents to think about how to finance a higher education, and black parents are more likely than white parents to think about paying for college.
• Parents with low incomes and less education are less likely than others to have thought about how to pay for college.
• While a majority of parents of all demographic groups who are below poverty level report that they believe they have “no way” of getting funds for college for their children, white parents in poverty are more likely to have this feeling than are minority parents.
• Among middle and upper income families, across the board, only a minority feel there is “no way” to pay for colleges. In this economic group, whites are less likely than minority parents to feel that way.

Read more.

The Washington Post reported earlier this week on new research suggesting that for some highly developed countries, there has been a documented rise in fertility. This trend is surprising after decades of declining births to women in developed countries.

The Post reports:

Now, however, new research has produced the first glimmer of hope that economic prosperity may not be linked to an inexorable decline in fertility. The new analysis has found that in many countries, once a nation achieves an especially high level of development, women appear to start having more babies again.

“This is something like a light at the end of the tunnel for some of these countries whose populations were on the path to decline,” said Hans-Peter Kohler, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania who helped conduct the research. “We project a more optimistic future where fertility will go up, which reduces fears of rapid population decline and rapid aging.”

“…There was a consensus that as countries develop, become richer and provide more education, that fertility would know only one trend — and that trend was downward,” Kohler said. “This raises a broad range of concerns. Systems such as pension systems would not be sustainable. A rapid decline in the labor force could result in an economic decline and a loss of competitiveness and perhaps a loss of innovation.”

About the study itself…

To explore whether economic development is necessarily linked to falling fertility, Kohler and his colleagues examined fertility trends between 1975 and 2005 in 37 of the most developed countries. They used a measure developed by the United Nations known as the human development index (HDI), which combines income data with other measures of advancement, such as longevity and education levels.

Fertility rates did tend to decline as a nation’s HDI rose, the analysis showed. But for 18 of 26 countries that crossed a certain threshold of development — an HDI of at least .9 — their fertility rates began to rise again.

“This basically shattered this notion that as countries develop, fertility would only decline,” Kohler said. “Quite to the contrary, in the very advanced societies, fertility may go up as countries get richer and more educated.”

Read more.