Minnesota Public Radio ran a segment on ‘Midmorning’ yesterday about how men are increasingly feeling the conflicts that come out of trying to balance work and family. The segment was developed because of “a recent survey from the Families and Work Institute, which found that women in two-worker households are earning more money than their male partners, yet men are feeling more stress about the work-life balance.”

The show featured guests Ellen Galinsky, President and co-founder of Families and Work Institute, and Scott Coltrane, Sociologist and Dean of College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon.

Listen in…

The Christian Science Monitor ran an interesting story earlier this week in which a number of criminologists were consulted about whether recent shootings, murders, and other violent crimes could be linked to the economic downturn in the United States. The paper cites a number of cases that have made the headlines in recent weeks:  “Four Oakland, Calif., police officers shot down. An Alabama man strolling a small town with a rifle, looking for victims. Seven elderly people shot dead at a North Carolina nursing home. And on Sunday, six people, including four kids, died in an apparent murder-suicide in an upscale neighborhood in Santa Clara, Calif.”

The details in all these cases are still emerging. In most, the exact motive has yet to be determined – or may never be fully understood. On a broader level, however, such incidents may be happening more often because an increasing number of Americans feel desperate pressure from job losses and other economic hardship, criminologists say.

“Most of these mass killings are precipitated by some catastrophic loss, and when the economy goes south, there are simply more of these losses,” says Jack Levin, a noted criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.

Direct correlation between economic cycles and homicides is difficult to prove, cautions Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the University at Albany in New York. But an economic downturn of this breadth and depth hasn’t been seen since data began to be collected after World War II, he also points out. “This is not the average situation,” Mr. Bushway says.

Still, criminologists do say that certain kinds of violent crimes have risen during specific economic downturns. The recession in the early 1990s “saw a dramatic increase in workplace violence committed by vengeful ex-workers who decided to come back and get even with their boss and their co-workers through the barrel of an AK-47,” Mr. Levin says.

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The Guardian (UK) ran a story this weekend about bullying in the UK. New research suggests that “clever children are saving themselves from being branded swots at school by dumbing down and deliberately falling behind.”

The Guardian’s Jessica Shepherd reports:

Schoolchildren regarded as boffins may be attacked and shunned by their peers, according to Becky Francis, professor of education at Roehampton University, who carried out a study of academically gifted 12- and 13-year-olds in nine state secondary schools.

The study, to be published in the Sociological Review next year, shows how difficult it is for children, particularly boys, to be clever and popular. Boys risk being assaulted in some schools for being high-achievers. To conform and escape alienation, clever boys told researchers they may “try to fall behind” or “dumb down”.

One boy told researchers: “It is harder to be popular and intelligent. If the subject comes naturally … then I think it makes it easier. But if the subject doesn’t come naturally, they work hard and other people see that and then you get the name-calling.” This may in part explain boys’ perceived underachievement, Francis said.

Clever girls, meanwhile, can be seen as less attractive and less popular in some schools than girls who manage average grades.

One girl told the researchers: “My friends are all really nice people and have [a] really good sense of humour, and they’re all really pretty and stuff, but because they do well in school they’re not popular.” But clever girls were, on the whole, under less pressure to fall behind deliberately.

What counts as a swot varies from school to school, but the threshold for what is constituted “boffin behaviour” tended to be lower at poorer-performing schools.

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USA Today ran a story yesterday about how we are starting to see a shift in conflict in the work-life balance associated with gender roles.

Sharon Jayson of USA Today reports on new data from a telephone interview survey by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute, suggesting that we have reached a ‘tipping point’ in attitudes toward gender roles and the balance of work responsibilities and family life.

Women in two-earner couples are contributing more to family income, but it’s the men who are feeling more conflicted over the work-life balance, according to a survey of 3,500 workers released today.

Asked how much jobs and family life interfere with each other, 59% of fathers in dual-income families reported conflict in 2008, while just 35% did in 1977. For mothers, reported conflict increased from 40% to 45%.

The sociological interpretation…

“It does signal more equality of expectations — that men are no longer let off the hook,” says Scott Coltrane, a sociologist at the University of Oregon. Up until the past decade, “men weren’t doing enough to add stress to their lives,” he says.

Since then, men have been spending more time with their children and more time caretaking, which the survey finds has elevated the inner strife.

“What we see here is that the conflict for women hasn’t increased as fast because it was already so high,” says sociologist Kathleen Gerson of New York University. Other findings show:

•Annual income contributed by women in dual-income couples rose to 44% in 2008; 26% of such women earned at least 10% more than their partners.

•Traditional gender roles have lost favor among both sexes. About 60% of men and women say they disagree with the idea that men should earn the money and women should take care of the children.

•Women under age 29 are just as likely as men to want greater work responsibility, regardless of whether they have children.

“When you get men and women feeling the same, maybe it is a sea change,” says Ellen Galinsky, the institute’s president.

Sociologist Brian Powell of Indiana University, however, says even though “there probably has been real change, I have the sense there’s been more of a change in terms of people’s view that there should be equal division. That’s probably farther ahead of the actual behavior.”

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Forbes Magazine is running a story this week about peripheral effects of the economic meltdown, and for this they turn to the work of famous sociologist and criminologist Sudhir Venkatesh.

Elizabeth Eaves, for Forbes.com writes,

You may think the economic meltdown is hitting bankers and Realtors hard, but spare a thought for members of the underground economy–prostitutes, drug dealers and purveyors of stolen goods, to name just a few participants. That’s what sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh does, having spent much of the last 15 years studying, and sometimes living within, the underground economies of New York and Chicago.

“The recession is engendering more violence,” says Venkatesh, a professor at Columbia University. “There’s far greater competition for whatever meager resources there are. The folks down on Wall Street peddling drugs, they’re fighting. The sex workers are trying as hard as they can to retain their clients,” he says, sitting in a Mediterranean restaurant a short walk from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where he’s on jury duty. Considering his well-documented friendship with a gang leader–the subject of his bestseller, Gang Leader for a Day–one might have expected the court to disqualify Venkatesh, but no such luck.

About today’s economic situation…

Today Venkatesh is watching black market workers slip into despair along with the rest of the population affected by the economy. Lest legal workers consider this a distant problem, one conclusion of Venkatesh’s work is that the underground and mainstream economies are intimately entwined. “The boundaries are fluid, particularly in the global city where the black market has become instrumental–one might even say vital–to the overall economy,” he says. In New York City illegal workers serve sex, drugs and takeout to the wealthiest members of society–or at least they did until financial sector layoffs began in 2008.

The underground economy includes a vast array of people providing services that are off the books but otherwise legal. Venkatesh enumerates those having a harder time in the face of the recession: office cleaners, squeegee men, informal security guards, “canners” who scavenge for recyclables (there’s less consumption now, so less to recycle) and nannies whose employers have been laid off. And as business contracts, underground workers face certain problems unique to their status. They have no unemployment insurance or other benefits, and, with little protection from law enforcement, they tend to resolve disputes by physical means.

Venkatesh prefers to leave detailed prescriptions to policymakers but nevertheless ventures a few. Microcredit loans, as well as education on risk management and planning, could help shift some black market entrepreneurial zeal above ground. He heartily approves of the proposal by Barack Obama–a fellow pickup basketball player at the University of Chicago when Venkatesh studied there–to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to give a bigger break to low-income parents. Sales taxes also hit the poor hard, he says; one way to help would be to let them use prepaid cards to buy goods tax free.

Venkatesh is struck by how much the black market resembles the wider society in which it is enmeshed. In the same Parisian banlieues that erupted in riots in 2005, he observed an “almost aristocratic,” highly centralized criminal operation. In the ghettos of Chicago, by contrast, he observed underground workers convene an ad hoc court to solve a dispute. His dismisses the “culture of poverty” theory, which suggests that poor blacks in America don’t work because they don’t value employment. “People in America want to work,” he says. They do so ever so industriously, even when they’re breaking the law.

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United Press International issued a release this morning about new findings on the spread of AIDS across sub-Saharan Africa, out of Penn State University.

A U.S. sociologist says increased schooling across sub-Saharan Africa might be lowering the number of new HIV infections among younger adults.

If that is true, Penn State University Professor David Baker says it would suggest a shift in a decades-long trend in which a formal education was considered an AIDS risk factor.

“Before the 1990s, in the impoverished regions of sub-Saharan Africa, even modest amounts of education afforded males higher income, more leisure time and, for some males, greater access to commercial sex workers,” said Baker. “HIV-infected higher-status males then spread the infection to both educated and uneducated women, which moved the disease into the general population.”

Baker and graduate students John Collins and Juan Leon report their research findings in the U.N. journal Prospects.

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Forbes Magazine reports on a new study by a sociologist out of the University of Nebraska, which suggests that in a shifting economy and a waning rural population, people are changing the way they do business. Forbes reports, “Randy Cantrell, with the university’s Rural Initiative, says in most rural counties, between 18 percent and 30 percent or more of jobs are now due to self-employment. And, that accounts for virtually all job growth in rural areas.”

Cantrell believes the popularity of self-employment is on the rise.

As rural areas continue to see their population numbers fall, Cantrell says he expects that to put pressure on employers to shift away from the traditional way of doing business and rely on private contractors.

Cantrell details the phenomenon in a new report based on 2007 census data and other federal statistics.

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Inside Higher Education reports on new work from Neil Gross, a sociologist at the University of British Columbia, whose research explores today’s faculty politics. This new study engages the contentious and ongoing debate over professors politics. Inside Higher Ed notes, “Right-wing critics make much of the fact that many surveys have found professors — especially in the humanities — to be well to the left of the American public. This political incongruence is frequently used as a jumping off point to suggest that professors are indoctrinating students with leftist ideas.” 

The analysis, Neil Gross explains, indicates that “conservative critics are correct about humanities professors’ leanings, but incorrect about their views of what classroom responsibility entails.”

In fact, Gross finds — in a study based on detailed interviews of professors’ in various disciplines — that faculty members take seriously the idea that they should not try to force their views upon students, or to in any way reward or punish students based on their opinions. And this view is shared by professors who see their politics playing a legitimate role in their research agendas, not just those who view their research agendas as neutral.

The aim of this new research is, in part, Gross writes, to shift the discussion of professorial politics away from the unsurprising (many professors are liberal) to “a more systematic” study of how “academicians in various fields and at various points in time understand the relationship between their political views, values, and engagements and their activities of knowledge creation and dissemination, and to how such understandings inform and shape academic work and political practice.” It’s not enough to simply document professors’ politics, Gross writes. What is needed is more attention to how professors handle the “knowledge-politics problem” in their work.

Specifically, the findings in the interviews Gross conducted raise questions about the assumptions of some critics of academe that one can draw conclusions about what goes on in classrooms based on the political and research writings of professors.

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Newswise (a press release service) highlighted a recent study out of the University of Chicago, which suggests that “not having many close friends contributes to poorer health for older adults, those who also feel lonely face even greater health risks and that older people who are able to adjust to being alone don’t have the same health problems.”

The study is the first to examine the relationships between health and two different types of isolation. Researchers measured the degree to which older adults are socially connected and socially active. They also assessed whether older adults feel lonely and whether they expect that friends and family would help them in times of need.

“Social disconnectedness is associated with worse physical health, regardless of whether it prompts feelings of loneliness or a perceived lack of social support,” said study co-author Linda Waite, the Lucy Flower Professor in Sociology at the University of Chicago and a leading expert on aging.

However, the researchers found a different relationship between social isolation and mental health. “The relationship between social disconnectedness and mental health appears to operate through feelings of loneliness and a perceived lack of social support,” Waite explained.

Older adults who feel most isolated report 65 percent more depressive symptoms than those who feel least isolated, regardless of their actual levels of connectedness. The consequences of poor mental health can be substantial, as deteriorating mental health also reduces people’s willingness to exercise and may increase health-risk behaviors such as cigarette smoking and alcohol use, Waite explained.

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USA Today reports on new numbers released from the National Center for Health Statistics, indicating that 2007 set an all-time record for births in the United States, with some interesting changes in the motherhood landscape.

The USA’s banner year for babies in 2007 set a record of 4.31 million — and was driven in large part by growing numbers of unmarried adult women giving birth, new government data show. Childbearing by unmarried women reached “historic levels,” the report says, to an estimated 1.7 million, or 40% of all births. There were increases in the birth rate and the proportion of births as well as an increase in the number. Teen moms accounted for 23%. The report, based on preliminary data, was released Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics.

Since 2002, all measures of childbearing by unmarried women have been “climbing steeply,” says Stephanie Ventura, a demographer who worked on the government report, which is based on birth certificates. The report found 60% of women 20-24 who had babies in 2007 were unmarried, up from 51.6% in 2002. Among ages 25-29, 32.2% of births were to unmarried women, vs. 25% in 2002. For ages 15-19, almost 86% were unmarried, compared with 80% in ’02.

But what about the number of births we can expect during the recession? Call in the sociologist!

Evidence from the Depression and past recessions has shown that numbers of births fall in hard economic times.

But University of Chicago economist and sociologist Gary Becker says that may not hold true anymore, with greater numbers of women in the labor force. Women laid off from their jobs might see unemployment as the time to have a child, he says: “Births might go up during recession.”

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