The New York Times has posted a story entitled, “For Teenagers, Hello Means ‘How About a Hug?'” But does the dramatic rise in teen hugging really signal a culture shift?

The Times reports:

There is so much hugging at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, N.J., that students have broken down the hugs by type:

There is the basic friend hug, probably the most popular, and the bear hug, of course. But now there is also the bear claw, when a boy embraces a girl awkwardly with his elbows poking out.

There is the hug that starts with a high-five, then moves into a fist bump, followed by a slap on the back and an embrace.

There’s the shake and lean; the hug from behind; and, the newest addition, the triple — any combination of three girls and boys hugging at once.

There seems to be some inter-generational bewilderment about these rituals…

Girls embracing girls, girls embracing boys, boys embracing each other — the hug has become the favorite social greeting when teenagers meet or part these days. Teachers joke about “one hour” and “six hour” hugs, saying that students hug one another all day as if they were separated for the entire summer.

A measure of how rapidly the ritual is spreading is that some students complain of peer pressure to hug to fit in. And schools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching — or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class — have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule.

Parents, who grew up in a generation more likely to use the handshake, the low-five or the high-five, are often baffled by the close physical contact. “It’s a wordless custom, from what I’ve observed,” wrote Beth J. Harpaz, the mother of two boys, 11 and 16, and a parenting columnist for The Associated Press, in a new book, “13 Is the New 18.”

“And there doesn’t seem to be any other overt way in which they acknowledge knowing each other,” she continued, describing the scene at her older son’s school in Manhattan. “No hi, no smile, no wave, no high-five — just the hug. Witnessing this interaction always makes me feel like I am a tourist in a country where I do not know the customs and cannot speak the language.”

For heaven’s sake, call in the sociologist!

Some sociologists said that teenagers who grew up in an era of organized play dates and close parental supervision are more cooperative with one another than previous generations — less cynical and individualistic and more loyal to the group.

But Amy L. Best, a sociologist at George Mason University, said the teenage embrace is more a reflection of the overall evolution of the American greeting, which has become less formal since the 1970s. “Without question, the boundaries of touch have changed in American culture,” she said. “We display bodies more readily, there are fewer rules governing body touch and a lot more permissible access to other people’s bodies.”

Hugging appears to be a grass-roots phenomenon and not an imitation of a character or custom on TV or in movies. The prevalence of boys’ nonromantic hugging (especially of other boys) is most striking to adults. Experts say that over the last generation, boys have become more comfortable expressing emotion, as embodied by the MTV show “Bromance,” which is now a widely used term for affection between straight male friends.

…But some sociologists pointed out that African-American boys and men have been hugging as part of their greeting for decades, using the word “dap” to describe a ritual involving handshakes, slaps on the shoulders and, more recently, a hug, also sometimes called the gangsta hug among urban youth.

Read more.

University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal this past weekend entitled “The Real Pregnancy Crisis.”

What sparked this piece? Wilcox writes,

Earlier this month, Bristol Palin turned herself into a poster child for the nation’s continuing effort to prevent teenage pregnancies. She made the rounds on the morning TV show circuit and spoke at town hall meetings to drive home the point that other teens shouldn’t make the same mistake she did. Ms. Palin’s campaign could not have come at a better time. According to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. — after witnessing a 14-year decline in teenage childbearing from 1991 to 2005 — saw the number rise from 2005 to 2007. In 2007, the latest year for which data are available, about 450,000 adolescents gave birth.

The recent uptick in teenage childbearing has public-health experts, scholars and government leaders concerned. “Let’s hope this sobering news on teen births serves as a wake-up call to policymakers, parents and practitioners,” said Sarah Brown, CEO of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, “that all our efforts to convince young people to delay pregnancy and parenthood need to be more intense, more creative and based more on what we know works.”

He offers several explanations and recommendations…

Here are three more likely explanations: First, young Americans have been postponing marriage, but they are not postponing sex and cohabitation. Indeed, my own research indicates that cohabiting couples are much more likely to get pregnant than couples who do not live together. Second, working-class and poor men have seen their real wages fall since the early 1970s, which makes them less attractive as husbands to their girlfriends and to the mothers of their children. This also helps explain why nonmarital childbearing is concentrated among blacks, Latinos, and working-class and poor whites.

Third, the meaning of marriage in the U. S. has changed over the past 40 years. As sociologist Andrew Cherlin has noted, marriage used to be the “foundation” for adulthood, sex, intimacy and childbearing. Now, marriage is viewed by many Americans as a “capstone” that signals that a couple has arrived — financially, professionally and emotionally.

This also helps to explain why college-educated mothers are bucking the trend toward having children out of wedlock. It is easier for these women to attain the level of achievement that the newer, luxury model of marriage before childbearing requires. Only 7% of college-educated women are having children out of wedlock, compared with more than 50% of women with a high-school degree or less, according to a recent Child Trends study.

So the next time you hear a college-educated academic or advocate talking about marriage and motherhood, do as they do, not as they say.

Read more.

In reporting on the recent swine flu panic that has swept the globe, The Australian
ran a story over the weekend about “sorting panic from pandemic,” citing how “some health experts say that although the latest developments are cause for concern, the extent of the threat has arguably been exaggerated even by other experts and some organisations.”

Luckily, they call in a sociologist…

Sociologist Claire Hooker, co-ordinator of the medical humanities program at the University of Sydney, agrees with Collignon that officials here and overseas did go a bit overboard, at least initially.

“At the beginning I was concerned about some comments that seemed to be unwarranted by events as they then sat … (such as) a call that people may want to get prepared by making face masks,” Hooker says.

She was worried this might alarm the public, although there was scant evidence this happened. “Although there was a run on Tamiflu at the time, which would be a problem if you really had the flu and wanted to get some,” she says.

“Early on there was an attitude that you have to scare people enough to get them to wash their hands properly, but not so much that they turn up in droves to be tested.

“In my view that’s a silly way to look at it: there’s no way you can make people what you imagine to be the right amount of frightened. What’s more important is to treat the general public with respect, and expect them to be able to understand the complexity and the uncertainty.”

Hooker thinks the degree of hype applied to swine flu was modest, and evident only early into the outbreak. Official pronouncements more recently have been measured, she believes. But that doesn’t apply to some measures given the big news treatment, such as thermal image scanners, used to detect feverish passengers disembarking from an airliner.

“I know that thermal scanners were used to scan about 180 million people during SARS, and they detected maybe three cases,” she says. “But they look good on TV.”

Read more.

Inside Higher Education reports this week on the rapidly disappearing rural sociology programs at universities around the country. They report that rural sociologists are now combined with other social science departments in many land grant universities. Inside Higher Education notes, “many professors in the field say that they have seen a slow erosion in support and expertise as retiring professors in these departments are replaced with sociologists who focus on other areas.”

Sociologists have been up in arms about the disappearing field in recent weeks…

These concerns [about putting rural sociology programs in other departments] are nothing compared to the anger that has spread through the rural sociology world in the last few weeks, however, as word spread that Washington State University wasn’t planning to merge its rural sociology program with another unit, but to simply eliminate it.

That a land grant university would simply abolish the discipline — and in particular a rare freestanding program that is well respected nationally — stunned rural sociologists. Many have come to expect that sociology departments (general ones) will be more occupied with issues of criminology and sexuality and suburban youth than with aging populations in rural towns or the new immigration that is changing those communities.

The Rural Sociological Society issued a statement on Washington State’s plan:

“We are deeply concerned for the personal welfare of the department’s faculty members and staff, but we also believe that this action sends a powerful negative message to the land grant university system that applied research and outreach focused on problems and opportunities experienced by rural people and communities is expendable,” says an advertisement published in two newspapers in Washington State Friday and signed by the president, president-elect and 19 past presidents of the Rural Sociological Society.

Rural sociologist Kenneth Pigg comments:

“There aren’t very many rural sociology programs around. There’s a general perception that rural doesn’t matter anymore. Whenever financial problems arise and administrators get a little touchy about how they are going to manage budgets, this is the sort of thing that happens,” said Kenneth Pigg, a rural sociologist at the University of Missouri at Columbia, one institution that still has a freestanding program.

Pigg said that social sciences were once viewed as central to the land grant mission — that departments of rural sociology (or agriculture economics) were applying research to help rural communities. “Now, with the emphasis on life sciences generally, you don’t see that at a lot of universities,” he said. Pigg’s work currently focuses on the impact of technological change in rural areas. While many have said that the Internet is “a savior” for rural life, Pigg said that there’s not nearly enough attention paid to the impact it has and the lack of real access to technology of many people outside of urban areas.

He said that there is nothing theoretically wrong with having rural sociology as part of other departments, but that the discipline in its entirety doesn’t pay much attention. A list of sections of the American Sociological Association includes on on urban sociology, but nothing specifically on rural areas. And while there is a section on animals and society, paper and book topics there appear more focused on pets than on farms.

Read more from Inside Higher Ed.

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg has been called upon by several media outlets seeking to understand the panic surrounding the swine flu epidemic including On the Media (NPR) and World Focus.

In a piece entitled ‘Stop, Drop and Roll,’ On the Media asked Klinenberg to explain the situation. They write, “While some news outlets have been trying to put the H1N1 flu virus in perspective, others just can’t resist a good panic story. They’ve been contacting New York University Sociology Professor Eric Klinenberg asking him to talk about the widespread panic in reaction to the flu. Only problem, there is no widespread panic. Klinenberg explains.”

Well, the problem is, if there’s one finding that’s consistent in the sociology of disasters over the last, say, five decades, it’s when there are crises, people don’t panic. And yet no matter how hard we try to make this point, we always get emails and phone calls along these lines.

So I immediately responded in an email and said, look, I’d be more than happy to speak with you, but here’s the thing. It turns out that sociology of disaster mostly tells us that people don’t panic, in general.

And furthermore, if we look specifically at what’s happening here in New York City, I don’t see any signs of panic. I walk to work and haven’t seen a single person wearing a mask at this point, no violence, no screaming, no people keeping their kids home from school en masse.

And I said, look, even, at Mexico City. I’m seeing images of people who are being cautious, far more people wearing masks, but the scenes from the streets that we’ve seen in the news, at least, don’t suggest that there’s panic.

World Focus featured a video interview with Klinenberg…

Read more from NPR.

Read more from World Focus.

The Orlando Sentinel ran a story over the weekend about a sociologist at the University of Central Florida who undertook a study of the homeless population in Orlando, Florida. Estimates put this population around 10,000 people this year, although this study actually documented less than half that number.

“The economy is just spitting out homeless people in droves,” said lead researcher James Wright, a sociology professor at the University of Central Florida who has studied the poor and homeless for years. “A lot of these families were living right on the economic edge — and now that economic edge has retreated.”

The methods:

The analysis of the homeless population in Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties is largely based on a single-day count, conducted in January, of emergency shelters, transitional housing, soup kitchens, homeless camps, food pantries, drop-in centers and day-labor pools.

The single-day tally — 3,970 — may actually underrepresent the problem by excluding, for instance, individuals and families who stay in pay-by-the-week motels, those doubling up with relatives in violation of a lease or housing code, or those who “sofa surf” by taking turns sleeping at the homes of family and friends.

The study documents a dramatic increase in the homeless population there.

At the Coalition for the Homeless shelter in downtown Orlando, for example, officials report that the number of homeless women and children is up 10 percent to 20 percent from the same time a year ago.

Of the three local counties covered in the report, Orange had 63 percent of the region’s homeless population, while Osceola had 19 percent and Seminole 18 percent. But all have witnessed a striking increase in homeless students — from 2,700 at the end of last school year to more than 4,200 so far this year, according to school-district figures.

“Being homeless has a lasting impact for those children,” said Cathy Jackson, the Homeless Services Network’s executive director. “You are going to see a 1 1/2 – to two-year drop in academic performance. You’re going to see an increase in developmental delays. You’re going to see an increase in psychological and physical-health problems because medical care isn’t available and their environment is disrupted.”

Read more. 

The National Center for Health Statistics published a report earlier this week about the increase in unwed mothers having children in the United States. The Washington Post covered the story and included some sociological commentary…

The number of children being born out of wedlock has risen sharply in recent years, driven primarily by women in their 20s and 30s opting to have children without getting married. Nearly four out of every 10 births are now to unmarried women.

“It’s been a huge increase — a dramatic increase,” said Stephanie J. Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics, which documented the shift in detail yesterday for the first time, based on an analysis of birth certificates nationwide. “It’s quite striking.”

Although the report did not examine the reasons for the increase, Ventura and other experts cite a confluence of factors, including a lessening of the social stigma associated with unmarried motherhood, an increase in couples delaying or forgoing marriage, and growing numbers of financially independent women and older and single women deciding to have children on their own after delaying childbearing.

One sociologist weighs in…

“I think this is the tipping point,” said Rosanna Hertz, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wellesley College. “This is becoming increasingly the norm. The old adage that ‘first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage’ just no longer holds true.”

“Women can have children on their own, and it’s not going to destroy your employment, and it’s not going to mean that you’ll be made a pariah by the community,” Hertz said. “It’s much more socially acceptable.”

And another….

Other couples today feel less compelled to marry just because they are having a child.

“It seems to be more wrong to be in a marriage with someone who you don’t love and consider to be your best friend than not to be in a marriage at all,” said Barbara Katz Rothman, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York. “It’s not that people care less about marriage. In some ways, it’s because they care more.”

Read more. 

What is ‘weisure,’ you ask? The term ‘weisure time,’ coined by sociologist Dalton Conley, is used to describe the increasingly blurred line between work and leisure time for Americans. In their article on this emerging phenomenon, CNN noted, “The increased mixing of work and play doesn’t mean bankers will be refinancing houses during their kids’ piñata parties. But what it does mean is more and more Americans are using smartphones and other technology to collaborate with business colleagues while hanging out with their families. It doesn’t mean tax attorneys will be getting makeovers during their tax-law seminars. But they may be chatting with Facebook friends while participating in a conference call.”

CNN reports:

Many who haven’t already abandoned the 9-to-5 workday for the 24-7 life of weisure probably will do so soon, according to New York University sociologist Dalton Conley, who coined the word. It’s the next step in the evolving work-life culture.

“Increasingly, it’s not clear what constitutes work and what constitutes fun,” be it “in an office or at home or out in the street,” Conley said. Activities and social spaces are becoming work-play ambiguous, he says, as “all of these worlds that were once very distinct are now blurring together.”

Conley used the 1950s as a point of reference. “Back then, there were certain rules, such as ‘don’t do business with friends, and keep those spheres separate.’ It was just one of the hallmarks of capitalist social life. That has completely changed.”

But what is the problem?

Perhaps more disturbing is the idea that weisure is changing us. “We lose our so-called private sphere,” Conley said. “There’s less relaxing time to be our so-called backstage selves when we’re always mingling work and leisure.”

If you’re thinking that a backlash may be around the corner for the weisure concept, you’re right. In fact, Conley says, the backlash has begun.

“You can see that in the populist anger against the bankers” who’ve been blamed in part for the current economic downturn, Conley says. The backlash is evident in the rise of alternative social movements involving people “who live in a more frugal and environmentally conscious way,” he says.

But, short of a nuclear winter or some cataclysm sending us back to the stone age, there’s no turning back the clock on the spread of weisure, he says. The weisure lifestyle will engrain itself permanently in the American culture.

Read more…

By now you may have heard of the Wikipedia hoax perpetrated by Shane Fitzgerald, a sociology major at Dublin University. The soc student posted a falsified quotation on the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre, a French composer who passed away at the end of March.

MSNBC reported, “[Fitzgerald] said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news. His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked. The sociology major’s made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.”

Fitzgerald weighed in…

“I was really shocked at the results from the experiment,” Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.

“I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”

Read more.

The Chicago Tribune noted that the summer concert season is overwhelmingly dominated by 60-somethings. They cite the upcoming concerts in Chicago by Elton John (age 62), Billy Joel (age 60), and Crosby (67),  Stills (64), Nash (67) and Young (63). The Tribune also noted that Bob Dylan (age 68) celebrated a No. 1 album last week, and is about to embark on a tour with Willie Nelson (76) and John Mellencamp (57).

The paper reports,

This cataloging of rock’s geriatric movement is meant simply to point out what’s both obvious and startling: Rock’s biggest names have gotten old.

“I think all of us are pretty amazed at the lengths of the careers of the acts that pretty much defined rock ‘n’ roll,” said Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of the concert-industry trade publication Pollstar. “If you look at the ones that demand the highest prices, it’s all acts that date back to the ’60s and ’70s.”

A sociologist explains how these aging musicians are still able to rock…

How sustainable can this business be when so many key players could be cashing retirement checks?

Celia Berdes, a sociologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Buehler Center on Aging, Health & Society, thinks rockers who maintain a healthy lifestyle and diet can keep going for a while.

“In gerontology, we think that people can continue their level of activity and productivity well into their 70s,” she said, noting that guitarists probably maintain excellent dexterity thanks to the continual finger exercise. “The worry I would have for the rock musicians is they’ve burnt the candle. It’s possible they may be aging at a faster rate, particularly with regard to hearing.”

Singers go through other types of changes as well. Elton John’s voice is much deeper than it was in his ’70s heyday, and many older singers typically key down their songs to compensate for their range loss on the high end.

Read more.