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.

At the end of last week, the Economist ran a story entitled, “Primates on Facebook,” about the capability of humans to maintain social networks via websites such as facebook. The answer it seems, is that we are quite limited…

The Economist reports:

That Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other tidbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier?

But perhaps additional friends are not free. Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly. Several years ago, therefore, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

But the Economist wouldn’t write a story like this without calling in the sociologists…

…Moreover, sociologists also distinguish between a person’s wider network, as described by the Dunbar number or something similar, and his social “core”. Peter Marsden, of Harvard University, found that Americans, even if they socialise a lot, tend to have only a handful of individuals with whom they “can discuss important matters”. A subsequent study found, to widespread concern, that this number is on a downward trend.

The rise of online social networks, with their troves of data, might shed some light on these matters. So The Economist asked Cameron Marlow, the “in-house sociologist” at Facebook, to crunch some numbers. Dr Marlow found that the average number of “friends” in a Facebook network is 120, consistent with Dr Dunbar’s hypothesis, and that women tend to have somewhat more than men. But the range is large, and some people have networks numbering more than 500, so the hypothesis cannot yet be regarded as proven.

I’m left wanting to know more about this supposed ‘in-house sociologist’ Facebook is keeping on call…

Read more.

Science Alert released a story yesterday about new research on paternity testing. Public discussion and debate about paternity fraud has become more prominent in the last decade, accompanied by a dramatic rise in the number of people taking genetic paternity tests. While  genetic testing has raised both ethical and legal issues, new research from sociologist Michael Gilding of Swinburne University suggests that it is built upon one central myth — “that cases of misattributed paternity are commonplace.” The results of his research have been published in the latest issue of Sociology: The Journal of the British Sociological Association.

With many authorities publicly stating that between 10 and 30 per cent of men may be raising a child that is not genetically theirs; on first appearance paternity uncertainty does seem prevalent. However after analysing the most recent evidence from the UK, Gilding puts the rate at a much tamer figure, between one and two per cent.

“I analysed data based on medical records, sex surveys, DNA testing laboratories and genetic studies. It clearly shows that claims about the rate of paternity uncertainty have been hugely overstated,” he said. “Basically what this means is that chances are, your dad really is your dad.”

The claims:

While the study examined data from the UK, according to Gilding the results are a reflection of similar patterns in Europe, North America and Australia. He claims the inflated figures of between 10 and 30 per cent originated from some questionable research carried out between the 1970s and 1990s. Despite the dubious nature of this research, these figures have continually been touted as accurate, allegedly due to the commercial interests of the paternity testing industry and influence from fathers’ rights activists.

But why?

“Since the advent of DNA testing in the late 1980s, a commercial paternity testing industry has emerged worldwide, mostly grounded in disputed paternity,” said Gilding.

“The industry is the second most lucrative application of genetic identity testing after forensics, so there is a lot of incentive to raise fathers’ doubts about the legitimacy of their children. It goes right to the heart of people’s insecurities.”

Gilding also believes that evolutionary psychologists have given academic respectability to inflated estimates of paternal discrepancy, as it fits in with their belief that men are ‘hard wired’ to seek as many sexual partners as they can, and women to seek men of superior genetic quality.

Read more.

The Christian Science Monitor reported on a new trend in Iowa where women are poised to ‘lead a farming revolution.’ Reports indicate that as wives inherit their husbands’ farmland, they emphasize conservation above maximizing yield and profits. Today in Iowa women own nearly half of the state’s farmland, but suffer from recurring problems when, “The men they hire to farm their land often don’t treat it with the tender care they expect – and often won’t listen when they complain about it.”

The Christian Science monitor provides a sociological perspective on the issue:

Jean Eells, a sociologist who focuses on environmental education, has studied how Iowa’s large share of older women who own farmland are faring in getting their land-conservation views heard.

“As a whole,” says Ms. Eells, “these women have a strong view of land as community – as a source of food and water for animals, birds, as well as people – rather than just producing a commodity. But while that conservation ethic makes them natural allies for agricultural conservation programs, women often feel their views are out of sync [with state or federal programs].”

Partly it’s because women don’t know or use standard terminology to talk about land conservation, Eells says. Partly it’s that agricultural system representatives tend to think and talk production – even when discussing conservation, she adds.

“If a woman brings up something about farming, and a man blusters authoritatively about it, women are socialized to just clam up,” Eells says. “So to the extent that a woman landowner starts discussing conservation, there are a lot of reasons why this might not go well.”

Read more.

The Associated Press ran a story today by reporter John Rogers, about the initial fascination with and current backslash against Nadya Suleman, the now famous woman who gave birth to the longest-surviving octuplets. But, Rogers writes, ” in short order the public learned that Miracle Mom was also Single Mom, Unemployed Mom and Welfare Mom. And as fast as you could Twitter ‘I hate Nadya Suleman,’ scores of Web sites were dedicated to denouncing the so-called Octomom, others to making fun of her…”

Rogers consulted Julie Albright, a sociologist at the University of Southern California who said that Suleman finds herself “caught in a perfect storm of events guaranteed to outrage the public, some of her own making, some not.”

“First, we’re in particularly sensitive economic times, people are losing their jobs,” Albright said. “Second is that physical resemblance to Angelina Jolie.”

Whether it’s coincidental or not, Albright said, the resemblance has led many to think Suleman is a “copycat” trying to elicit the goodwill much of the public feels for actress Jolie, who with partner Brad Pitt has adopted three of their six children from other nations.

People might normally overlook that as just silly if they weren’t already worried about losing their jobs and their homes and if California wasn’t broke and facing the prospect of paying more than $1 million in medical bills for Suleman’s babies while the state issues IOUs instead of tax refunds.

“If someone isn’t stressed and something happens like their car breaks down, that’s just annoying,” Albright said. “But if their parent has just died and they lost their job and their kid’s in jail and then their car breaks down, that risks a nervous breakdown. … That’s what’s triggering this angry, emotional response in so many people.”

Read more.

United Press International reports this morning on new work published in Research in the Sociology of Work, from Ithaca College sociologist Stephen Sweet, about how in our current dual-income economy, the loss of one person’s job can put a family at significant financial risk. The result is significant anxiety for some families trying to make it in a floundering economy.

“Nine in 10 dual-income couples in New York state feel there is some risk that one or both of their jobs might not exist in the next couple of years,” lead author sociologist Stephen Sweet of Ithaca College said in a statement.

“In the old economy, we largely depended on the male bread winner. The wife was a homemaker and the men were much more likely to have jobs that were secure; this is especially true for white middle-class families where job security increased with seniority.”

In the old economy, if the husband lost a job the wife was reserve labor and she could go out into the labor force and make ends meet, whereas to maintain a middle-class lifestyle in today’s economy, dual-income couples are the norm to make ends meet, Sweet added.

The study, published in Research in the Sociology of Work, described how the new economy dismantled the systems that made workers more confident they would hold their jobs as they aged and their family investments increased.

“Most working middle class families have next to no savings and the savings they do have are often in things they can’t touch, like their 401(k). They are often in debt so they are living paycheck to paycheck,” Sweet said.

Read more.

Yesterday the Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran a story on the state of teenage girls in the United States. The article featured the work of sociologist Mike Males, who is fighting the myth that these young women are floundering. Instead, he argues, they are doing better than ever.

Mike Males believes it, and he’s preaching that message to anybody willing to listen. All he needs now is a strong set of fins to propel him upstream. That’s because Males, a sociologist, author and senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, says popular culture prefers to keep tweener and teen girls in familiar boxes labeled vulnerable, shallow, mean, violent and depressed.

“Girls are doing spectacularly well,” said Males, who spoke to a packed house this month at a lecture sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s Konopka Institute for Best Practices in Adolescent Health.

But Males is quick to acknowledge that there are still many challenges facing teen girls in the US.

He doesn’t dismiss the challenges, whether eating disorders, substance abuse, bullying or pornography. “But these problems exist throughout adult society, as well,” he said. “To generalize these problems to all girls is simply wrong.”

Columnist Gail Roseblum asks, “Why such a discrepancy between belief and reality?”

Males says it could be because of racial stereotyping, (these shifts are occurring amid unprecedented racial diversity in this country); or sexism (we seem more comfortable with the idea of girls being “innately vulnerable”), or simple data manipulation. A new book, “The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls from Today’s Pressures,” for example, correctly reports that suicide rates among girls ages 10 to 14 increased 76 percent between 2003 and 2004. In real numbers, though, the jump was from 56 to 98 deaths, among nearly 10 million girls of that age group. While not dismissing the profound grief experienced by those families, Males said that “a high-schooler is three times more likely to suffer a parent’s suicide than the other way around.”

The biggest sin in his mind? Omission. We know the ugliest demon our girls face, Males said. We just don’t want to talk about it.

“Violence in the home is the Number 1 cause of injury to females,” Males said. “This issue is too important to trivialize, but the media gloss right over it.”

Read more.