The Irish Times reports today on a new study from Dublin University sociologist Majella McSharry about the potential influence of friends and siblings on body image.

The Irish Times reports:

FRIENDS AND siblings have a far greater influence on how teenagers perceive their body shape than celebrity magazines, according to new research to be published later this week. It also highlights the prevalence of undiagnosed eating disorders.

Sociologist Dr Majella McSharry said the popular press validated the “aesthetic-athletic” body, but it was peers who really determined how teens saw themselves.

About the methods:

She polled 242 students across five second-level schools around Dublin, then conducted in-depth interviews with 30 of them about body image.

“I went out like everybody else thinking that they are going to talk about the media and they did, ultimately that was where they got these ideal images from,” she said. “But where they were actually validated and played out was in the real bodies that they met in day-to-day life, the ones that sat beside them in school, the brothers and sisters they came home to, the parents who fed them. They had much more of an influence on them than just the celebrity bodies.”

Teens were aware of tricks like airbrushing and the kinds of body images used to sell products, said Dr McSharry, who did the research for a doctorate at NUI Maynooth.

Read more.

The Los Angeles Times ran a story about recent work from Trinity College sociologist Barry A. Kosmin (the study’s principal investigator) that suggests that Americans are turning away from many denominations with greater frequency. Moreover, Kosmin finds that the percentage of people who do not identify themselves as having a particular religious affiliation has almost doubled since 1990 – to 15%.

The LA Times writes:

Mainline Christian denominations, once bulwarks of the religious landscape, have suffered most from the drift. Methodists, Lutherans and Episcopalians are among the denominations that have seen their ranks decline. Although 86% of Americans identified as Christians in 1990, just 76% said the same last year, the result of onetime adherents rejecting organized religion, the survey concluded. The broad falloff has occurred as some groups, including Catholics, have seen their overall numbers rise. But despite growing by 11 million new members since 1990, Catholics now account for a smaller percentage of the U.S. population than they did then — 25% compared with 26%.

Kosmin’s commentary:

The survey’s principal investigator, sociologist Barry A. Kosmin of Trinity College in Connecticut, described the overall trend as an erosion of the “religious middle ground.” He said many people appeared to be rebuffing denominations altogether or favoring more conservative evangelical groups that have boosted their relatively small memberships by offering emotional and personalized religious experiences.

Kosmin said the changing religious outlook also reflected an increasingly diverse and complex culture that emphasized greater tolerance for diversity while eschewing respect for authority.He pointed to one sign of religious detachment — the fact that 27% of Americans do not expect to have a religious funeral.

“Even the people in the pews are more rebellious than they used to be,” said Kosmin, founding director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture. “Those you would call ‘the religious’ don’t look like what their grandparents did in terms of their worship style, their ritual behaviors.”

Read more.

The New York Times blog ‘Room for Debate: A Running Commentary on the News’ ran an exchange devoted to ‘What to Do When You Lose Your Job,’ particularly appropriate given the latest news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that “the national unemployment rate surged to 8.1 percent in February, its highest in 25 years, with 651,000 jobs lost last month.”

Luckily, the Times solicited comments from a sociologist, Princeton University’s Katherine S. Newman, to be precise…

Newman writes:

In today’s economic landscape, the skills and experience the newly unemployed bring to the table still matter, but will not command the wages needed to preserve the standard of living they know. Stability at a lower plane is weathered most successfully by families that pull together rather than pull apart, especially husbands and wives who avoid corrosive conflict and learn to adjust with as much grace as they can muster, to new roles as earners and house husbands.

Teenage kids who learn how to pitch in to the family coffers and help with the care of their younger siblings make a difference. Neighbors, fellow parishioners and P.T.A. contacts who are still working should remember that anything they can do to help their unemployed friends get back into the game is a blessing. Most of all, the newly jobless need to remember this maelstrom was not of their making and whatever they have to do to survive will be honorable.

Read Newman’s full commentary.

Read more from the exchange. 

This past weekend, the New York Times Book Review highlighted a compelling new book from sociologist William Julius Wilson entitled, ‘More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City.’ 

The Times writes:

In “More Than Just Race,” the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson recaps his own important research over the past 20 years as well as some of the best urban sociology of his peers to make a convincing case that both institutional and systemic impediments and cultural deficiencies keep poor blacks from escaping poverty and the ghetto.

The systemic impediments include both the legacy of racism and dramatic economic changes that have fallen with disproportionate severity on poor blacks. State-enforced racial discrimination created the ghetto: in the early 20th century local governments separated the races into segregated neighborhoods by force of law, and later, whites used private agreements and violent intimidation to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods. Worst, and most surprising of all, the federal government played a major role in encouraging the racism of private actors and state governments. Until the 1960s, federal housing agencies engaged in racial red lining, refusing to guarantee mortgages in inner-city neighborhoods; private lenders quickly followed suit.

Meanwhile, economic and demographic changes that had nothing to do with race aggravated the problems of the ghetto. Encouraged by recently built highways and inexpensive real estate, middle-class residents and industry left the inner city to relocate to roomier and less costly digs in the suburbs during the ’60s and ’70s. Those jobs that remained available to urban blacks further dwindled as companies replaced well-paid and unionized American workers with automation and cheaper overseas labor. The new economy produced most of its jobs at the two poles of the wage scale: high-paying jobs for the well educated and acculturated (lawyers, bankers, management consultants) and low-paying jobs for those with little education or skills (fast food, telemarketing, janitorial services).

And today…

Today many ghetto residents have almost no contact with mainstream American society or the normal job market. As a result, they have developed distinctive and often dysfunctional social norms. The work ethic, investment in the future and deferred gratification make no sense in an environment in which legitimate employment at a living wage is impossible to find and crime is an everyday hazard (and temptation). Men, unable to support their families, abandon them; women become resigned to single motherhood; children suffer from broken homes and from the bad examples set by both peers and adults. And this dysfunctional behavior reinforces negative racial stereotypes, making it all the harder for poor blacks to find decent jobs.

Read more.

Late last week, the Financial Times (UK) ran a story about how men are more ‘prone to credit crunch blues’ than women in the same situation. The story is focused on men who think they might lose their jobs, who become more depressed and anxious than women. This assessment comes out of a study from Cambridge University sociologist Brendan Burchell. 

The Financial Times reports, 

This anxiety reflected males’ “macho” belief about “men being the breadwinner”, said Brendan Burchell, the Cambridge sociologist who carried out the research. “Men, unlike women, have few positive ways of defining themselves outside of the workplace between when they leave school and when they retire,” he said.

More from Burchell:

The stress and anxiety of people who had become unemployed “bottomed out” after about six months as they adapted to their new circumstances. By contrast, people who had not lost their jobs but thought they might be fired showed steadily worsening mental health for one to two years.

Mr Burchell said: “Given that most economic forecasts predict that the recession will be long with a slow recovery, the results mean that many people – and men in particular – could be entering into a period of prolonged and growing misery.”

Commenting on possible solutions, Mr Burchell stressed the need “to restabilise the City” – adding a mental health angle to the well-rehearsed economic arguments for shoring up the banking system.

Read on…

This past weekend, the New York Times ran a story about how humanities and social science PhD students are experiencing high levels of anxiety in the midst of a shrinking academic job market and grim prospects for the future.

The article opened with the story of Chris Pieper.

Chris Pieper began looking for an academic job in sociology about six months ago, sending off about two dozen application packets. The results so far? Two telephone interviews, and no employment offers.

“About half of all the rejection letters I’ve received mentioned the poor economy as contributing to their decision,” said Mr. Pieper, 34, who is getting his doctorate from the University of Texas, Austin. “Some simply canceled the search because they found the funding for the position didn’t come through. Others changed their tenure-track jobs to adjunct or instructor positions.”

“Many of the universities I applied to received more than 300 applications,” he added.

Mr. Pieper is not alone. Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis. So a chill has set in at many higher education institutions, where partial or full-fledge hiring freezes have been imposed.

 

Read more about Pieper and other struggling PhDs…

Share your own stories of the difficult academic job market, comment below:

Fox News reported earlier this week on the new campaign funded by the federal government intended to promote marriage. Their report suggests that supporters of this program insist that they are merely providing information to those who want it, while “critics say Washington is walking a fine line between providing information and advocacy.”

What does the campaign entail, according to Fox News?

Washington plans to soon pour $5 million into a national media campaign aimed at 18-to-30 year olds, outlining the benefits of marriage and tips on having a healthy one. The campaign hinges in part on the Web site, TwoofUs.org, which cycles readers through advice on the traditional stages of a relationship: dating, engagement, marriage and eventually parenting.

Fox News talked to sociologist Paul Amato about this new initiative…

“There is a huge tax burden involved with divorce and non-marital child bearing,” said Paul Amato, sociology professor at Penn State University who is providing research for the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center’s campaign. “Every year divorce and non-marital child bearing costs us taxpayers over $100 billion a year. That’s year after year after year. That’s a lot of money.”

Amato said the campaign is not trying to govern romance.

“The government shouldn’t be in the job of telling young people what to do with their lives,” he said. “Marriage and relationships are very personal decisions. We just want to provide information for people who choose to seek it out.”

Read more.

NYU sociologist Dalton Conley was featured on ‘Marketplace’ this past Tuesday. Host Kai Ryssdal talks with Conley about the blurring line between work and family now that more Americans are taking fewer vacations and clocking in more hours at the office.

An excerpt from the interview:

RYSSDAL: This [Conley’s book, Elsewhere, USA]  is fundamentally, I guess, a book about work-life balance, but really what you do is you tell us how we’re not getting any of it right.

CONLEY: Yeah, it’s really about work-life imbalance and the underlying forces — some of them very visible but some of them more invisible — that have created this new social and economic landscape that we work in.

RYSSDAL: And the visible ones we know about, right? I mean everybody’s got their Blackberry, they’re on the computer all the time, the kids have 14 different things to do after school. What are the ones though that maybe we’re not entirely aware of?

CONLEY: Well, a couple of big socio-demographic changes have occurred since the 60s. First is rising economic inequality. Every year since 1969 economic inequality has risen in the United States and has particularly been concentrated in the top half. In fact, the higher up you go, the more inequality has risen and the gaps get bigger. And I think this causes what I call an economic redshift, no matter where you are on the top half, it looks like everybody is rushing away from you.

RYSSDAL: That’s insane. I mean, on the face of it, that’s nuts, right?

CONLEY: It’s a brave new world. For the first time, it was people with incomes over $200,000, in a New York Times poll, that said that they feel poorer when they’re around rich people as compared to people who are actually poor. That’s stunning to me. And for the first time in labor history, the further up the income ladder you go, the more hours you work.

Listen to the show.

The Washington Post ran a story this morning on a new bill that would put tobacco under FDA control. The article provides a thorough look at the positions of both advocates and critics on the issue and benefits from the sociological commentary included in the reporting.

Post reporter Lyndsey Layton writes:

Legislation that the House Energy and Commerce Committee will take up today would place tobacco under the control of the Food and Drug Administration. Among other things, the bill would restrict the ways tobacco companies market cigarettes, require them to disclose the ingredients in their products and place larger warning labels on packages, and give the FDA the authority to require the removal of harmful chemicals and additives from cigarettes.

The legislation also seeks to crack down on techniques tobacco companies have used to attract children and teenagers, making it illegal to produce cigarettes infused with strawberry, grape, cloves and other sweet flavors. And it would prohibit tobacco makers from using the terms “low tar” and “light” when describing their products, suggesting a health benefit that scientists say does not exist.

Bring in the sociologist… Patricia McDaniel…

“It’s crazy — here’s this product that kills half of its longtime users, and there are very few restrictions on how it’s made and marketed,” said Patricia McDaniel, a sociologist at the University of California at San Francisco who has studied the history behind the bill.

“There’s a lot of opportunity for the FDA to do some pretty remarkable things: adding more visible warning labels, banning misleading descriptors, some authority over ingredients and allowing the FDA to prohibit certain types of marketing,” she said. “But there are a lot of unknowns. And there are questions about whether the FDA is the agency to regulate tobacco, especially now with the trouble it’s having regulating food and drugs.”

Read more.

The Australian paper, The Cannbera Times, ran a story yesterday about a sociologist who suggests that climate change may change some of our most basic hygiene habits. The paper reports that British sociologist Professor Elizabeth Shove says that in 50 years we won’t be showering every day, and maybe even not at all.  Shove notes, ”No, we won’t be dirty, smelly and unhygienic. This kind of social change isn’t about people being forced to give up showers it’s about new habits, new ideas about cleanliness that will become more acceptable, and probably even more popular and enjoyable, than standing under a hot shower.”

About Shove’s work:

Professor Shove, recently awarded a British Economic and Social Council climate change leadership fellowship, is visiting Australia for a lecture series on the challenges of tackling unsustainable consumption.

She has published academic papers on topics as diverse as how casualisation of food is driving house design (bigger kitchens) why the home office is obsolete (wireless connection, laptops and the status of portability) and the colonial origins of our fear of sweat.

In her lecture tour, she is putting a case for governments to send in the sociologists when it comes to giving advice on getting people to switch from over-consumption to greener, more sustainable habits in everyday life.

She said economists and policy wonks don’t understand how systems of social practice, everyday routines and patterns of consumption emerge, persist and disappear.

The sociologist’s take on the shower…

Take the shower, or ”the social history of getting wet every day”, as an illustration of how sociologists differ from economists in their approach to a climate change dilemma. It’s not about bottom lines and price signals.

”What are we really doing when we stand under hot shower? Given the time we spend, the frequency of showering, it can’t really be about getting clean. Is it about privacy, about having a moment to ourselves?” That yearning for privacy, or self-indulgence, may be the seed of a new social habit that will supersede the shower, replacing it with sleek new bathroom designs and desirable cleanliness rituals.

”It’s not a simple picture because you’re also looking at changes in housing design, the emergence of new products, the routines that develop around those changes, and new notions of what we consider to be comfort and cleanliness.”

Read more.