culture

The New York Times explores social science research about a new stage of life: emerging adulthood.

[A] growing body of research shows that the real Peter Pans are not the boomers, but the generations that have followed. For many, by choice or circumstance, independence no longer begins at 21.

Young people in the U.S., it seems, are taking their time reaching the traditional milestones of adulthood:

People between 20 and 34 are taking longer to finish their educations, establish themselves in careers, marry, have children and become financially independent, said Frank F. Furstenberg, who leads the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood, a team of scholars who have been studying this transformation.

“A new period of life is emerging in which young people are no longer adolescents but not yet adults,” Mr. Furstenberg said.

National surveys reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans, including younger adults, agree that between 20 and 22, people should be finished with school, working and living on their own. But in practice many people in their 20s and early 30s have not yet reached these traditional milestones.

Marriage and parenthood — once seen as prerequisites for adulthood — are now viewed more as lifestyle choices, according to a new report released by Princeton University and the Brookings Institution.

One component of this shift is that young people are relying on their parents longer than previous generations. While parents used to invest most in their kids during the teen years, parental support now continues into the 20s.

In the late 1990s, however, parents’ spending patterns began to shift so that the flow of money was greatest when their children were either very young or in their mid-20s.”

More people in their 20s are also living with their parents. About one-fourth of 25-year-old white men lived at home in 2007 — before the latest recession — compared with one-fifth in 2000 and less than one-eighth in 1970.

The sizable contribution from parents not only strains already stressed middle-class and poor families, researchers argue, but could also affect institutions that have traditionally supported young adults in this period, like nonresidential and community colleges and national service programs.

Some young people are not just delaying milestones, but are redefining what it means to be an adult:

For many, marriage has disappeared as a definition of traditional adulthood, as more and more younger people live together. Today 40 percent of births are to unmarried mothers, an increase from 28 percent in 1990.

At the same time, more women are remaining childless, either by choice or circumstance. Twenty percent of women in their 40s do not have children, Mr. Furstenberg said, pointing out that “not having children would have been considered bizarre or tragic in the ’50s; now it’s a lifestyle choice.”

The New York Times features an in-depth look at paternity leave in Sweden:

From trendy central Stockholm to this village in the rugged forest south of the Arctic Circle, 85 percent of Swedish fathers take parental leave. Those who don’t face questions from family, friends and colleagues. As other countries still tinker with maternity leave and women’s rights, Sweden may be a glimpse of the future.

…

Companies have come to expect employees to take leave irrespective of gender, and not to penalize fathers at promotion time. Women’s paychecks are benefiting and the shift in fathers’ roles is perceived as playing a part in lower divorce rates and increasing joint custody of children.

In perhaps the most striking example of social engineering, a new definition of masculinity is emerging.

“Many men no longer want to be identified just by their jobs,” said Bengt Westerberg, who long opposed quotas but as deputy prime minister phased in a first month of paternity leave in 1995. “Many women now expect their husbands to take at least some time off with the children.”

Birgitta Ohlsson, European affairs minister, put it this way: “Machos with dinosaur values don’t make the top-10 lists of attractive men in women’s magazines anymore.” …“Now men can have it all — a successful career and being a responsible daddy,” she added. “It’s a new kind of manly. It’s more wholesome.”

Of course, these policies are not without controversy and do come at a price. Sociologists, along with several other social scientists, weigh in:

The least enthusiastic [about paternity leave], in fact, are often mothers. In a 2003 survey by the Social Insurance Agency, the most commonly cited reason for not taking more paternity leave, after finances, was mother’s preference, said Ann-Zofie Duvander, a sociologist at Stockholm University who worked at the agency at the time.

…

Taxes account for 47 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 27 percent in the United States and 40 percent in the European Union overall. The public sector, famous for family-friendly perks, employs one in three workers, including half of all working women. Family benefits cost 3.3 percent of G.D.P., the highest in the world along with Denmark and France, said Willem Adema, senior economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Yet Sweden looks well balanced: at 2.1 percent and 40 percent of G.D.P., respectively, public deficit and debt levels are a fraction of those in most developed economies these days, testimony perhaps to fiscal management born of a banking crisis and recession in the 1990s. High productivity and political consensus keep the system going.

“There are remarkably few complaints,” said Linda Haas, a professor of sociology at Indiana University currently at the University of Goteborg. With full-time preschool guaranteed at a maximum of about $150 a month and leave paid at 80 percent of salary up to $3,330 a month, “people feel that they are getting their money’s worth.”

Despite the challenges that Sweden’s extended parental leave may present for some employers, the trend doesn’t shows signs of slowing:

But in a sign that the broader cultural shift has acquired a dynamic of its own, a survey by Ms. Haas and Philip Hwang, a psychology professor at Goteborg University, shows that 41 percent of companies reported in 2006 that they had made a formal decision to encourage fathers to take parental leave, up from only 2 percent in 1993.

Check out the rest of the article.

Lest you think that sociologists are not discovering things relevant to your day-to-day life, rest assured. Sociologist Dan Myers of Notre Dame, along with his son, claims to have discovered the shortest possible Monopoly game.  As reported on NPR:

The shortest possible game of Monopoly requires only four turns, nine rolls of the dice, and twenty-one seconds, Daniel J. Myers, a professor of sociology at Notre Dame University, told NPR’s Robert Siegel…

In short, here’s what has to happen:

“One player moves around the board very quickly, to buy Boardwalk and Park Place, and places houses on them,” Myers explained. “And the other one ends up drawing a Chance card that sends them to Boardwalk, and they don’t have enough money to pay the rent with three houses, and the game is over.”

So, what is the statistical probability of that particular game happening?

The odds are very, very, very slim.

Statistically speaking, it would happen “once every 253,899,891,671,040 games,” Josh Whitford, an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University, says.

Not only is this discovery fun, it’s also not without its sociological parallels. From Myers’ interview with NPR’s Robert Siegel:

SIEGEL: Monopoly, famously, was popular in the Great Depression, when people were going broke. And now, you’ve come back during the Great Recession of the 21st century, with this theory.

Mr. MYERS: Yeah, well, there have been some comments out on the blogosphere about how it’s representative of what’s going on in our economy, that people could go bankrupt so quickly. We didn’t intend to parallel but certainly, it’s been drawn by a number of people out there.

Myers’ next project will be the shortest possible game of Risk.

SIEGEL: Well, what will fill the void, now, that’s occupied you for the past few weeks?

Mr. MYERS: Well, we’ve been getting suggestions from those out in the blog world. So the next one is to try to play the shortest possible game of Risk.

SIEGEL: Which you think might be more complicated or…

Mr. MYERS: I think it will because making someone go bankrupt isn’t quite as complicated as world domination.

The Los Angeles Times reports that there can be a disconnect between our “real life” and virtual personalities:

Just because popular social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, encourage members to use their actual identities doesn’t mean people are presenting themselves online the way they do in real life.

Some psychologists and sociologists who have studied usage habits on Twitter, Facebook and popular dating sites say there’s little correlation between how people act on the Internet and how they are in person.

A sociologist argues that people may polish up their online selves, and she thinks that what happens on the web is likely to have consequences for the real world person:

Online, people tend to exaggerate their personas because they have much more time to revise and calculate the content they present than in spontaneous face-to-face interactions.

“The persona online may be much more fabulous, much more exciting than the everyday life that they’re leading,” said Julie Albright, a digital sociologist at USC, “because they see everybody else doing it.”

Twitter, in many ways, has become a personal broadcast medium.

“It has turned people into mini-broadcasters,” Albright said. “It makes them in a way stars of their own reality shows.”

Albright points out that actions online can, however, influence real-life behavior. A new batch of followers on Twitter could translate into a more positive outlook.

“They can go back to their lives and have a boost of confidence,” she said.

The Globe and Mail has published an interview with two University of Toronto sociologists who have written a new book on “foodies.” According to the article:

As the authors explain in their new book Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape, for which they interviewed 30 people and analyzed hundreds of articles, today’s foodies might find classic French haute cuisine stuffy. They may be willing to try goat testicles and sheep brains. And they’ll happily visit the city’s best hole-in-the-wall eateries, no matter how dumpy the decor. But one thing foodies flat-out refuse to eat is dinner at a mundane, generic chain restaurant.

Sociologists Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann argue that being a foodie isn’t just about consuming good food, it’s also about garnering cultural capital. Says Johnston:

A lot of elements of foodie culture are still relatively exclusive, and part of what foodie culture is about is dabbling in all sorts of different ethnic cuisines and food traditions. What makes that a kind of privilege is to have the kind of knowledge to go to all of these kinds of places [whether it’s a fancy restaurant or hole-in-the-wall eatery], so you’re not just familiar with one type of ethnic cuisine, you’re familiar with the whole range of them. And that can end up constituting a kind of cultural capital people use to display their sophistication.

However, this may entail ignoring inequalities. Says Baumann:

…if you’re going to be a foodie and value authentic and exotic cuisine, it’s going to lead you to places of poverty, to contexts of impoverished food production and consumption. Through romanticizing those conditions of poverty, you can get the good food without having to dwell on the uncomfortable fact of poverty.

The authors also noticed gender differences among foodies:

Johnston: One thing that was surprising to me was the different ways that men and women embody their foodie culture. Men often emphasize their expertise more, and they’re often much more interested in the exoticism, especially eating things that are wildly unconventional, like goat testicles. And women didn’t do that as much. They talked more about how their interest in food was also about protecting the health of their family.

The Irish Times commented on a recent craze among social science bloggers:

When a viral craze spreads across the internet, it usually features cute cats or embarrassingly bad singing, or a combination of the two.

Last month, however, a new idea caught the imagination of a certain corner of the web, and it was as far from feline karaoke as is possible to imagine. Tyler Cowen, the intimidatingly erudite US economist whose blog Marginal Revolution has become massively influential in recent years, started it all when he replied to a reader’s suggestion to list the 10 books that most influenced his view of the world.

This quickly caught on:

Within days, dozens of America’s top blogging economists, political scientists, sociologists and pundits were busy composing lists of the books that influenced their thinking, and the conversation spread and spread.

As an exercise, this was all quite instructive for readers, but it also served as a kind of intellectual arms race, with each blogger establishing their credentials via their chosen books. The competitive element was unmistakable, or in economics’ parlance, there was a lot of signalling going on. Many of the lists were almost comically esoteric, as if to prove the individualism behind the intellectual journey.

One particular sociologist attracted some attention:

One of the most animated conversations followed the list created by Kieran Healy, an Irish sociologist at Duke University who is a member of the academic supergroup blog Crooked Timber. “Everyone else is doing it, at least for ‘American/ white/ politics/ economics/ mostly libertarian type guys’ values of ‘everyone’,” he wrote, and his terrifically diverse list, which features works by Clive James, Pierre Bourdieu and game theorist Thomas Schelling, as well as books on biomechanics, the collective dietary habits of ravens and power dynamics in medieval German society, led to a long and engaging discussion about what it is to be shaped and influenced by books.

Check out Healy’s list here.

The New York Times examined what appears to be a rise in violent behavior in women’s sports:

Brittney Griner, Baylor’s 6-foot-8 freshman center, was supposed to deliver her transformative moments by slamming a basketball through the rim, not punching an opponent in the face.

Yet, Griner’s most visible performance came not while displaying her exquisite skills, but by breaking the nose of Texas Tech’s Jordan Barncastle after being slung about the lane this month. Griner received a two-game suspension but is eligible for the N.C.A.A. tournament, which began here Saturday for Baylor.

It was the latest of several highly publicized moments of violent behavior in women’s college basketball this season. A reported tripping incident led to players from Georgetown and Louisville trading punches before a game in January. A male coach and a female player from Trinity Valley Community College in Texas were arrested in a postgame episode in February after a tirade over officiating and a confrontation with the campus police at a rival college.

These incidents followed the infamous soccer confrontation last fall in which Elizabeth Lambert of New Mexico yanked a Brigham Young player down by her ponytail.

The Times turned to sports sociologists to explain whether these incidents are part of larger trend, as well as what may be causing them:

So what is going on? Experts say they cannot be precisely sure. Little research has been done on excessive behavior of elite female athletes. The N.C.A.A. did not respond to a question about whether statistics were kept but called violent acts “isolated” and said they would not be tolerated.

“Only time will tell if this is an aberration, but what I think is a clear trend, as the stakes get higher in women’s sports, you see more pressure to win,” said Mary Jo Kane, the director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota.

“This could be a natural progression to women entering into big-time college sports. You take the bad with the good; you take sold-out arenas with academic scandals. For us to think that women would enter the big time and have it be pristine and without controversy is naïve.”

Baylor Coach Kim Mulkey said that she did not believe violence had escalated in women’s basketball since her playing days at Louisiana Tech in the early 1980s, but that it was more likely to be exposed during a 24/7 news cycle.

At the same time, overall coverage of women’s sports has declined on network news and on ESPN, said Michael Messner, a professor of sociology and gender studies at Southern California who tracks television coverage.

Messner cautioned that these incidents could be less reflective of a disturbing pattern than an echoing of misbehavior that is blown out of proportion, given that it is reported against a backdrop of “almost no women’s coverage at all.”

Experts also weighed in on the potential consequences for women’s sports:

Still, advocates of women’s sports are concerned that such untoward behavior could spur opponents of Title IX, the gender-equity legislation that facilitated great participation of female athletes after its passage in 1972, to try to roll back gains that women have made.

“Is there going to be a gender backlash, where some people say, ‘We give these opportunities to girls and they’re not deserving of them?’ ” said Kristine Newhall, a doctoral candidate in women’s studies at the University of Iowa and a co-founder of the Title IX Blog.

Sports cannot be divorced from gender roles and stereotypes, Kane said. Women will probably be much more restricted in the type of aggressive behavior permitted by society, she said, noting for instance that checking is not allowed in women’s hockey.

“Physical intimidation and violence is central to the sports experience of males,” Kane said. “That is not yet the case for women. I don’t think it will become that. If it does, I hope I’m not around to see it.

Newhall argues that we shouldn’t limit our concern to violence in women’s sports:

The conversation should move beyond whether women are increasingly behaving like men to a broader examination of a college sports culture that is perhaps fostering an increase in violence and dirty tactics, said Newhall, the doctoral candidate.

“What kind of athletic department environment is being fostered that clearly indicates it’s so important that you have to yell at the refs and get into fights?” Newhall said.

“Why did a Georgetown player trip a Louisville player? That’s third-grade behavior. This is a game.”

ABC News explores some possible causes of obesity that are often overlooked.

Sure, most of the nation needs to eat less and move more. But is that the only reason America is so fat?

As more scientists and sociologists look at our bulging waistlines, some unusual explanations for the nation’s weight gain in the last 30 years are popping up.

The article discusses an intestinal bacteria that may contribute to weight gain and particular genes that may influence the success or failure of dieting.

Beyond these physical explanations, social factors may also contribute to obesity. A Harvard medical sociologist weighs in:

In 2007, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine used 30 years of data on 12,000 people to show obesity and weight loss may actually be contagious — things that spread among people who know each other.

“They key idea is that people are influenced by the behavior and actions of those around them. This applied to something that people may not have thought of, which is body size,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, author of the recent book “Connected,” which looks at how various phenomena from depression to obesity spreads through society.

Over the three decades, Christakis showed how obesity in one person in a circle of friends statistically meant more people in their circle of friends would become obese. The same was true of weight loss.

“We’re not saying we found the cause of the obesity epidemic. We’re not,” said Christakis. “Social networks have a general property that they magnify what they are seated with.”

While Christakis could show an obesity epidemic spreading through friend networks, he could only make an educated guess why.

“One possibility is that you start doing things — certain behaviors that I copy,” said Christakis.

So if one friend starts serving beer and cookies all the time, perhaps another friend will pick up the habit. Or if one friend joins a running club, perhaps another friend will join it too.

Christakis said another possibility is that “What’s spreading between people is an idea, or a norm.”

For example, if most people a person associates with are overweight, then that person’s idea of “normal weight” is likely to be bigger than what is actually healthy.

Read more.

This week, the Christian Century reviewed sociologist Christian Smith’s new book on religion and spirituality in “emerging adulthood”:

Souls in Transition, the impressive second installment of findings—and the first longitudinal sounding—from the massive National Study of Youth and Religion, is about [18- to 23-year-olds], the most religiously disengaged cohort in the U.S. Principal investigator Christian Smith, assisted by Patricia Snell, returned to young people originally interviewed in 2003 to see how their religious lives had changed.

Smith, a professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, is a gutsy sociologist who does not mind tipping sacred cows or poking around in areas that theologians like to claim for themselves such as religious formation. His earlier book (with Melinda Lundquist Denton), Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, reported the first wave of NSYR findings. In 2007 Mark Oestreicher, then president of Youth Specialties, called Soul Searching one of the ten most influential youth ministry books—a first for a secular book on the sociology of religion.

Some findings:

Souls in Transition is a denser and in some ways more sobering volume [than Smith’s previous book] that represents a field-shaping contribution to the growing literature on emerging adults (young people roughly between the ages of 18 and 30). As developmental tasks once associated with the teen years reach into the twenties and thirties, ministry with emerging adults shows signs of becoming the new youth ministry of 21st-century congregations. Compared to people in other age groups, emerging adults are less likely to attend religious services weekly, pray daily or affiliate strongly with a religious tradition (a fact consistent with their tendency to resist institutional affiliations generally). Yet on some measures (thinking about the afterlife, taking the Bible literally, self-identifying as liberals) they reflect the adult population as a whole.

The big story in Souls in Transition is continuity: highly devoted emerging adults almost always start out as highly devoted teenagers, and religiously disinterested youth are unlikely to become interested as they grow older. (Most teenagers in the NSYR who committed to God did so before age 14.) When religious change occurs in emerging adulthood, it tends to be in the negative direction. What makes the faith of some young people more durable than that of others seems to be the presence of formative religious influences in their lives while they are teenagers (especially religious parents, but also other faithful adults), teenagers’ personal embrace of faith, a lack of religious doubts, multiple religious experiences, and personal faith practices, especially prayer and Bible reading.

Another intriguing argument:

Smith saves his most intriguing analysis for a discussion of the implicit cultural influences of mainline Protestantism and American evangelicalism (for example, a Muslim girl describes her “personal relationship with God”). Drawing on sociologist N. Jay Demerath’s thesis that “liberal Protestantism’s core values—individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of personal experience—have come to so permeate the broader American culture” that these values no longer need liberal Protestantism to survive, Smith makes a fascinating move: he argues that young people are not more involved in American religious life because they don’t have to be. The values of America’s dominant religious outlook for the past century are now carried forward by American culture itself. Smith contends that many emerging adults have bought into an implicit “mainline-liberal Protestant” perspective on American culture and “would be quite comfortable with the kind of liberal faith described by the Yale theologian H. Richard Niebuhr in 1937 as being about ‘a God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.'”

The Santa Barbara Independent reports:

In 2004, demonstrations and protests in favor of marriage equality were observed by civil rights activists and same-sex couples across the United States. These acts were largely spurred by the mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, and his act of defiance in ordering the County Clerk to issue marriage licenses, against California’s Defense of Marriage Act. This was seen as a sign of things to come by many optimistic activists until 2008 when Proposition 8 banned gay marriage in California.

The story draws on Verta Taylor and colleagues’ study in the American Sociological Review:

In the article, Taylor alludes to the pivotal role of the 2004 protests and shows the likely historical significance by saying: “The San Francisco weddings served as a public and dramatic tactic to claim basic civil rights for gay and lesbian people … Our research shows that the month-long wedding protest sparked other forms of political actions, including legal challenges and the formation of social movement organizations that ignited a statewide campaign for marriage equality in California.”

Check out abstracts from the December 2009 issue of the American Sociological Review.