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.

Both ABC news and the New York Times ran stories over the weekend about the relationship between job loss and health. New research by sociologist Kate Strully, a sociologist at the State University of New York-Albany, examines unemployment data from 1991, 2001, and 2003 and finds that job loss is “linked to a higher risk for high blood pressure, heart disease, heart attack, diabetes or depression, even when the person finds a new job. Losing a job through no fault of one’s own, if a company shut down, for example, led to a 54 percent increase in that person reporting poor health.” 

She told ABC News:

“Jobs are so fundamental to who you are and where you fall into society,” said Kate Strully, an assistant professor in sociology at the State University of New York at Albany and the author of a new study. “In looking at what happens to people after they lose such a big component of their class position and social identity … [the study asked] did they lose their job because they were sick or did they get sick because they lost their job?”…

Still, Strully’s data is based on situations from the 1990s and early 2000s, when the economic climate was not as universally challenging as it is now. People who lost their jobs may have been in a better position to find alternate employment or receive financial help via credit, mortgages or family and friends.

“We were looking at a situation where the economy was better than now and there were still sizable health hazards associated with job loss,” Strully said. “Common sense suggests that the situation today for displaced workers is probably worse.”

The New York Times reported:

Workers who lost a job through no fault of their own, she found, were twice as likely to report developing a new ailment like high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease over the next year and a half, compared with people who were continuously employed. Interestingly, the risk was just as high for those who found new jobs quickly as it was for those who remained unemployed.

Though it has long been known that poor health and unemployment often go together, questions have lingered about whether unemployment leads to illness, or whether people in ill health are more likely to leave a job, be fired or be laid off. In an effort to sort out this chicken-or-egg problem, the new study looked specifically at people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own — for example, because of a plant or business closing. The author, Kate W. Strully, said she looked at situations in which people lost jobs for reasons that “shouldn’t have had anything to do with their health.”

Read more from ABC.

Read more from the New York Times. 

The Philadelphia Enquirer reports on new research out of the University of Chicago suggesting that “for older adults, feelings of loneliness can actually be detrimental to their health…  older adults who feel least-isolated are five times more likely to report very good health compared to their lonelier counterparts, regardless of actual social connectedness.”

One of the co-aduthors on the study is sociologist Linda Waite…

“The relationship between social disconnectedness and mental health appears to operate through feelings of loneliness and a perceived lack of social support,” says study co-author Linda Waite, a Professor in Sociology at the University of Chicago and a leading expert on aging.

The study:

Researchers measured the degree to which older adults were socially connected and socially active, as well as whether they feel lonely and expect family and friends to support them in need. The study found that older adults who feel most isolated reported 65 percent more depressive symptoms than those who feel less isolated, despite actual connectedness.

Waite told the Enquirer that the research suggests a need to better understand how adults cope with changing relationships, because older adults who are “able to withstand socially isolating experiences or adjust expectations” are more likely to stay healthy.

Read more.

The Houston Chronicle reported yesterday on the increasingly brazen tactics for crossing into the United States from Mexico. The Chronicle reports, “U.S. Border Patrol agent John Lopez has seen it all: Men hiding in tiny holes in the ground, in car trunks and behind seat backs. He’s even captured an illegal immigrant hiding in a suitcase. ‘You don’t expect to find someone in a suitcase. You never expect that,’ said Lopez, who is based in the Rio Grande Valley.”

These attempts to sneak people and drugs across the border are constantly changing and are often increasingly harmful to the immigrants, an alarming trend illustrated in several recent incidents.

• In Presidio County along the Texas-Mexico border, a man trained illegal immigrants who had just crossed the border to fake illnesses and call 911. Unwitting ambulance attendants took them to an Alpine hospital beyond the Border Patrol checkpoint near Marfa. The immigrants would refuse treatment and run away. Lionel Armendariz-Cabezuela, 38, was arrested in March and pled guilty to smuggling charges in the scheme.

• In the past few months, officials have intercepted three ultralight aircrafts attempting to smuggle drugs into the U.S. The small planes fly so low they evade radar and have been particularly active on the Arizona-Mexico border.

• In California, smugglers meticulously painted vehicles to resemble DHL package delivery trucks and a company contracted to help build the border fence. They used the vehicles to transport illegal immigrants to the U.S. in March and April. Some people in the construction company truck wore reflective vests and hard hats.

But the debate about reform versus enforcement is a complex one, and the Houston Chronicle calls upon sociologist Nestor Rodriguez, who has studied these migrants based at the University of Texas.

Immigrant rights advocates warn that it’s flawed and dangerous to put more focus on enforcement instead of reform. As it becomes more difficult to cross the border, people will take extreme risks, said Jennifer Allen, executive director of Arizona’s Border Action Network.

“People have to rely on smuggling networks. This means that smuggling networks continue to grow and become more costly, and they become more professionalized,” Allen said, adding that she expects smuggling to increase in remote areas.

Said Nestor Rodriguez, a sociology professor at the University of Texas: “What I have learned from talking with migrants is that smugglers try a variety of old and new approaches to cross the border, so I don’t think there is just one approach.”

And another sociologist weighs in…

Unless officials reform immigration laws, though, it doesn’t matter whether border officials step up enforcement, said David Spener, a sociology professor at Trinity University in San Antonio.

“If the past is prologue, this will just mean more danger for migrants and more risky crossings,” Spener said.

Read more.