methods

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning on an ongoing debate as to the validity of a 2006 study which concluded that Americans have become significantly more socially isolated over the last 25 years. 

David Glenn reports, “In the summer of 2006, several major news outletsgave prominent coverage to a sociological study with a grim message: Americans’ social isolation had increased radically since the 1980s. Whereas in 1985 Americans reported that, on average, they had 2.94 friends or family members with whom they could discuss important matters, by 2004 that number had dropped to 2.08. A quarter of Americans had no close confidants at all. Those findings were …[even] startling to the study’s authors, who are sociologists at Cornell University, Duke University, and the University of Arizona, [J. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Brashears].”

UC Berkeley sociologist and social networks scholar Claude Fisher has some concerns:

The [previous] study’s portrait of collapsing social networks, Mr. Fischer writes, is at odds with other recent findings by social scientists. What’s more, he says, some of the 2006 paper’s data seem internally inconsistent or simply implausible. For example, among people who reported belonging to four or more organizations—presumably a highly sociable bunch—14.9 percent reported having no confidants. And what about married people? Surely they discuss important matters with their spouses, if no one else. In 1985 only 6.6 percent of married respondents reported having no confidants, but in 2004, 22.2 percent did so.

Fisher claims that such errors could be due to errors during data collection or coding. Now the original study’s authors have responded…

ScienceNews.com reports today on a recent sociological investigation into attitudes about global warming. Pollsters from Gallup asked groups of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents about whether they believe that ‘global warming poses a serious threat to the American way of life.’ The emerging results suggest that over the last 10 years, Democrats have increasingly said ‘yes’ (49% today as opposed to 31% ten years ago) while the share of Republicans saying ‘yes’ has grown more slowly (now 26% and previously 20%).

Science News reports: 

… While virtually half of Democrats currently view global warming as posing a serious threat within their lifetimes, only one-quarter of Republicans feel similarly, report Oklahoma State University sociologist Riley E. Dunlap (who’s also a Scholar for the Environment at the Gallup Organization) and sociologist Aaron M. McCright of Lyman Briggs Collegeand Michigan State University.

The pair argue that the polling data suggest Republicans and Democrats are becoming “more ideologically polarized,” at least on the issue of global warming. They attribute the increasingly divergent views on this issue to “party sorting” — that is, people choosing a party on the basis of its general views on this issue, or people within a party increasingly assuming the views on this issue that are espoused by leaders of their party.

Dunlap and McCright find that the tight correlation between party affiliation and attitudes about climate hold even after accounting statistically for other potentially confounding demographic factors such as gender, age, race, income and education. Moreover, they observe, throughout the past decade, “Republicans and Democrats who believe they understand global warming reasonably well [have been holding] more divergent views compared with their presumably less-informed counterparts.”

The bottom line? Democrats’ views about global warming have reflected scientific conclusions on climate change, while Republicans dismiss the scientific assessments.

Read on. 

CBNnews.com reports on a new study out of Baylor University’s Institute for the Study of Religion, which gathered American’s responses to questions about Christianity, religious beliefs and groups, as well as mystical experiences. 

In a poll of 1,700 adults, 55 percent answered yes to the statement, “I was protected by a guardian angel,” and 45 percent said they had at least two spiritual encounters in their life.

“I would never have expected these numbers. It was the biggest surprise to me in our findings,” sociologist Christopher Bader of Baylor University said. Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion conducted the study, which concluded that Americans’ religion is “remarkably stable.”

The Institute at Baylor University conducts this survey every two years and some changes have emerged since it was last administered.

In 2005, surveys showed that about 84 percent of Americans believe in Heaven or that Heaven could exist. Their most recent poll revealed about the same, but it also showed that 73 percent believe Hell absolutely or probably exists. About 46 percent said they were “quite certain” they’d go to Heaven, and 71 percent felt even the “irreligious” or non-believers had a chance at Heaven.

Read more.

NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday featured a report on the results of a new collaborative study from some of our country’s premier immigration scholars — John Mollenkopf, Mary C. Waters, and Philip Kasinitz.

Margot Adler of NPR reports:

In much of the debate over immigration, there is an underlying question: Are today’s immigrants assimilating into the mainstream as easily as past generations? The answer, at least in New York City, is an unqualified “yes,” according to the results of a 10-year study involving more than 3,000 young men and women, most of them in their 20s.

John Mollenkopf, a professor at City University of New York and an author of the study, says that if you look at the children of immigrants, “the kids are doing well compared to their parents and also doing well compared to the native-born comparison groups.”

Link to the story.

Russel Ogden, a sociologist at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia, studies people with terminal illnesses who choose to take their own lives.

Ogden’s research has received significant media attention, including a recent piece from Inside Higher Education. Kwantlen Polytechnic University is trying to prevent Ogden from observing assisted suicides despite the approval he received from an ethics review board at the university. Currently, Ogden is barred from carrying out his research by the university, which has equated Ogden’s proposed observation of assisted suicides with participating in them himself.

Inside Higher Education reports:

The dispute has become public in the last week, with Canadian faculty groups charging that the university’s actions are a violation of academic freedom, and that the principles cited by the university endanger not only Ogden’s research, but the work of social scientists throughout the country who study illegal acts in part by observation. Sociologists in the United States say that the case is important for them as well — and illustrates how studying some of the cutting edge issues in bioethics can create challenging ethical and political issues for academics and universities.

Ogden is no stranger to controversy or to suicide, which he has been studying for 18 years. He first became interested in the subject when “as a teen, I had a couple of close friends who took their lives,” he said. “Those suicides had a profound impact on me.” Ogden doesn’t romanticize suicide. “I regret that they died. I wish that they were still here.”

But with legal and political debates growing about whether people with incurable diseases should be able to end their lives — and with some people not waiting for the law, and doing so — Ogden found the topic to be one in need of sociological inquiry.

Read the full story

The New York Times reports on a new collaborative study by sociologist Philip Kasinitz of CUNY, political scientist John H. Mollenkopf, and Harvard sociologist Mary C. Waters. The findings from this $2 million 10-year project will soon be published in a book titled “Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age” from Harvard University Press.

The study focused on a number of different groups to examine the experiences of adult children of immigrants in the New York region including: Dominicans, Chinese, Russian Jews, South Americans (encompassing Colombians, Ecuadoreans and Peruvians) and West Indians. For the purposes of comparison, the investigators also studied U.S.-born whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans born on the mainland who live in the New York area.

The study pointed to signs of positive progress as many of these adult children achieve more than their parents in education as well as earnings, in some cases surpassing native-born Americans. But on a more cautionary note, the study highlighted how persistent poverty and low academic achievement among Dominicans and the prevalence of racial discrimination again Caribbean immigrants impede universal progress for all groups.

How did they do it?

“The study was based on 3,415 telephone interviews conducted between 1998 and 2000; 333 face-to-face follow-up interviews in 2000 and 2001; and a final round of 172 follow-up interviews in 2002 and 2003. The subjects of the study were 18 to 32 at the time of the initial interviews and were either born in the United States to at least one immigrant parent, or arrived in the United States by age 12. The study covered 10 counties: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Westchester and Nassau in New York and Essex, Hudson, Passaic and Union in New Jersey.”

Charles Tilly, legendary sociologist and Columbia University professor has passed away at age 78. The New York Times obituary cited Tilly’s unique combination of historical and quantitative methods in his work. A prolific scholar, Tilly published 51 books and more than 600 scholarly articles.

Excerpts from the Times obituary:

“In an interview on Thursday, Adam Ashforth, a professor of anthropology, political science and sociology at Northwestern University, called Dr. Tilly ‘the founding father of 21st-century sociology.’ He particularly praised Dr. Tilly’s seamless synthesizing of his own work on witchcraft and politics in South Africa. Dr. Ashforth also mentioned Dr. Tilly’s dizzying output of books, which had been running at more than a book a year for more than two decades.”

“’It was exhausting keeping up with him,’ Dr. Ashforth said. ‘We’ll now have a chance to catch up with our reading.'”

“On April Fool’s Day in 1969, The New York Times asked leading intellectuals what they considered foolish. Dr. Tilly answered, ‘One way I’d like to improve social life is to get a guy to stop for five minutes or one minute or 10 seconds and listen to what the other guy says.’”

Science Daily reports on a new publication from Professor Yang Yang at the University of Chicago that concludes that Americans grow happier with age. The findings from this study, published in the latest issue of the American Sociological Review, also concludes that Baby Boomers are not as happy as other generations, that on average, African Americans are not as happy as whites, and men are less happy than women. The study uses data from the General Social Survey from 1972 to 2004. The paper also highlights the rise and fall of happiness between historical time periods in the United States

Professor Yang Yang comments:

“‘Understanding happiness is important to understanding quality of life. The happiness measure is a guide to how well society is meeting people’s needs,’ said Yang Yang, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago.”

A recent article from OutlookIndia.com focuses on the recent shift in foreign research taking place in India. Current projects are concerned with contemporary issues rather than the more historic Orientalist-focused research programs.

Sugata Srinivasaraju reports:
“Wesley Longhofer, a PhD scholar from the department of sociology at the University of Minnesota, personifies the new kind of research scholar in Bangalore. He is studying how high-profile philanthropic foundations set up by the IT community in the areas of water, education and governance are aiming to transform Bangalore into a world-class city. His research even takes him to places like the city’s ISKCON temple, so that he can understand how corporates like Infosys are supporting the mid-day meal programme run by the temple.”

“Bangalore has many attractions from a social science perspective. From the archetypal sleepy town, it has undergone huge changes in a relatively short period. It is a laboratory in which the globalisation experiment is alive and under way, allowing scholars to examine many trends and their effects on society. Cities like Shanghai may offer similar insights, but the language barrier there puts off many Western scholars.”

A new study from University of Maryland sociologists John P. Robinson and Steven Martin suggests that Americans are getting as much, if not more, sleep than they did 40 years ago. This study also made use of time diaries to determine how long Americans were sleeping, as opposed to previous studies that just asked respondents outright.

Key findings from the report:

“Sleep Patterns 1965-1995: There was little change in sleep averages during this period, particularly in comparison to the far larger shifts in time spent on housework, child care and watching TV. ‘The proverbial figure of eight hours per day (56 hours per week) has remained close to the diary norm for those aged 18 to 64 in each national study between 1965 and 1995,’ the report says.”

“Sleep Patterns 2003-2005: The time diaries collected by the federal government on an annual basis between 2003 and 2005 showed rising sleep averages – 8.2 hours on weeknights, 8.9 on Saturday and 9.5 on Sunday, a total increase of about three hours per week.”

“‘While these recent increases are statistically significant, we’re approaching them with some caution,’ says Maryland sociologist Steven Martin, the co-author of Not So Deprived. ‘The numbers didn’t change for more than 30 years. We want to see if these increases hold up in the long-run.'”