culture

The Columbia Daily Tribune (Missouri) ran a story on Friday about sociologist Maria Kefalas’ work on how “poor women find redemption in having a baby.”

When Maria Kefalas started visiting low-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia to interview the young, single and often welfare-dependent mothers who lived there, many of the grandmothers were her age. When one mother heard Kefalas, at 32, had just become pregnant with her first child, she said, “Isn’t it wonderful that the doctors were proved wrong and you were able to get pregnant?”

The woman, who had her own first child in her teens, assumed Kefalas had been trying without success to have a baby since 19 or 20. This wasn’t true, of course. In her early 20s, Kefalas had college to think about. Summer vacations spent traveling. Her future career. But this was still an assumption she encountered in these neighborhoods while conducting research with another sociologist. One 14-year-old told her, “I’ve been trying to have a baby ever since I could.”

As Kefalas puts it, childbirth has very little “competition” in these women’s lives.

“The stylish careers, fulfilling relationships and exceptional educations that will occupy middle- and upper class women’s twenties and thirties are unattainable dreams to the women driving the non-marital childbearing trend,” she writes on her blog on the Huffington Post. She sees children out of wedlock not as a decline in family values in poverty-stricken areas but as yet another symptom of the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots in the United States.

In a phone interview, Kefalas said she believes talking to these women allowed her to dig past survey and statistical data that provide information but few answers. When the question “Why do poor women have children outside of marriage?” comes up, society responds that individuals in low-income neighborhoods don’t believe in marriage.

The innovative and important contribution of this work…

Kefalas and Edin’s research doesn’t refute the notion that repairing family structures will help end welfare dependency by stabilizing homes. But it does challenge the assumption that the women living in Philadelphia’s worst neighborhoods didn’t care about marriage. In fact, the young women they met cared deeply about it.

“Everyone’s notions of marriage have changed in society,” Kefalas said. The difference is, “upper-class young couples are able to achieve those raised” expectations, although “among low income couples you see the raised standards like everybody else, but actually more diminished opportunities to achieve those goals.”

For example, if the dream for marriage is a stable, dependable husband, these women had little hope of finding him. Many don’t go to college and remain in the neighborhood where they grew up. The men around them are engaged in high-risk behavior and are often involved in the drug economy. Many spend some time in prison. Seen in this light, marriage is far from a stabilizer. The relationships are very “volatile,” and the divorce rate for these low-income couples is significantly higher than the national rate.

Having a child, however, does seem to provide new sense of purpose for the women Kefalas interviewed. It can act as a stabilizer in a neighborhood, family or financial situation that is otherwise chaos.

“Having a child offers a source of redemption,” Kefalas said. “You go from being this teenager who is wild and out of control to being this young woman with a baby, and if your baby’s clean, people stop you on the street and say, ‘You’re such a wonderful mother.’

“These young women say, ‘Having a baby saved my life.’ ”

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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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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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With the recent panic about the salmonella poisonings resulting from tainted peanut butter, The Star Press (Central Indiana) ran a story about moms who struggle with deciding whether or not to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their children — once a household staple for meals and snacks.

Who better to quell this fear than a sociologist?

It’s reasonable for parents to react strongly to the initial news of the recalls, said Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California, but unnecessarily avoiding peanut butter in the long run could teach children to be afraid of food.

Many more children will die from being hit by lightning than tainted peanut butter, said Glassner, author of The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food is Wrong.

“Are you going to prohibit your child from going outside every time it rains?” he asked. “If you’re rational, what you’ll do is, if there’s lightning outside, you’ll keep them in, and when that’s done, you let them go out safely and go to school in the rain. I think this is the same thing. It’s very reasonable to take peanut butter off the menu until we knew what was going on, but then it’s not anymore.”

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