trends

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.

National Public Radio (NPR) commentator Dick Meyer reported on the work of sociologist Wayne Baker in his recent piece titled ‘September 11th and The Non-Crisis of Values’ as part of the series ‘Against the Grain.’

Meyer writes:

Baker is a sociologist at the University of Michigan and the author of America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception(2005). I won’t bury the lead for you: The answer is perception, not crisis. It’s a useful big-picture view of American values at a time when it’s easy to be lost in the worm’s-eye view.

Baker is a wise social thinker who studies our values from the perspective of public opinion research, specifically data garnered from large polls conducted regularly all over the world called the World Values Surveys. He rightly notes that the idea that America faces a crisis of values, or “moral values,” is pervasive and is essentially assumed to be true.

But what exactly would a “crisis” of values entail? Would it be that Americans lost their traditional values? Or American values eroding in comparison with other countries? Are Americans deeply divided on fundamental beliefs? He answers no to each question; he found no crisis in America.

From a broad, global perspective, Baker examines human values on two planes. The first is a range of values from traditional to secular-rationalist. Societies with traditional values emphasize the importance of God and religion; of family and parenting; of national identity and pride; of absolute standards of morality, not relative ones. Secular-rationalist values are pretty much the opposite: nonreligious; open to abortion and euthanasia; skeptical of national pride or patriotism; tilted toward individualism over family, duty and authority.

The second axis of value runs from survival values to self-expression ones. In less developed and stable societies, survival values reign: Physical security and meeting basic material needs are paramount; cultural change, foreigners and ethnic diversity are seen as threatening; intolerance is exaggerated and authoritarian regimes tend to flourish. When material needs are well met, self-expression, self-realization, environmentalism, gender equality and creativity become more important.

Read on…

USA Today recently ran a story about the high profile success stories of adult men who grew up in single parent households, supported solely by their mothers. 

USA Today’s Sharon Jayson writes:

Conventional wisdom is that boys who grow up without fathers are at greater risk of problems, from doing poorly in school to substance abuse. So how does that account for the high-profile successes of standouts such as presidential candidate Barack Obama, Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and others who were reared by single mothers?

The psychologist consulted for the piece suggested that young men raised by single mothers are not predestined to fail simply because they are raised in a non-traditional household. While not all sons will succeed in the same ways as Phelps and Obama, the risk of growing up with a single mom has more to do with financial strain.

The sociologist on hand delves further into the issue…

Another expert on fatherhood, sociologist Tim Biblarz of the University of Southern California-Los Angeles, says the evidence shows economics plays a significant role in the risk for negative outcomes, such as poorer grades and lower educational attainment, substance abuse or poor social adjustment.

“Those who grow up with single mothers with adequate socioeconomic resources tend to do well. The children of poor single mothers are more at risk,” Biblarz says. “Many of the results that say that kids are at increased risk for negative outcomes have to do with economics.”

Read the full story.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a new study about children and housework out of the University of Maryland, and the surprising trend that they are doing very little of it. 

WSJ quips: 

Quiz for the day: How much time each day, on average, does a 6- to 12-year-old child spend on household chores?

If you guessed more than a half-hour, you’re wrong. Children are spending a mere 24 minutes a day doing cleaning, laundry and other housework — a 12% decline since 1997 and a 25% drop from 1981 levels, says Sandra Hofferth, director of the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland, based on a forthcoming study of 1,343 children. In the glacial realm of sociological change, that amounts to a free fall.

And another sociologist’s findings are considered…

Pitching in at home has become a crucial marriage-preservation skill for young men. Studies show parents still assign more housework to girls than boys. Yet these same young women hope as adults to find men who will help out; 90% of 60 women ages 18 to 32 studied by Kathleen Gerson, a New York University sociology professor, said they hoped to share housework and child care with spouses “in a committed, mutually supportive and egalitarian way.” After controlling for other factors, U.S. marriages tend to be more stable when men participate more in domestic tasks, says a study of 506 U.S. couples published in 2006 in the American Journal of Sociology.

And another’s…

Housework has unique value in instilling a habit of serving others. Analyzing data on more than 3,000 adults, Alice Rossi, a proessor emerita of sociology at University of Massachusetts Amherst, found doing household chores as a child was a major, independent predictor of whether a person chose to do volunteer or other community work as an adult. Thus for parents who value service, housework is an important teaching tool.

Read the full story.

This past Sunday’s New York Times book review examined ‘Credit and Blame,’ a new book from the late Charles Tilly. Alexander Star of the Times writes:

Two years ago, the sociologist Charles Tilly, who died this spring at the age of 78, published “Why?,” a slim volume examining our compulsive drive to give reasons for what we do. Explaining, he stressed, is a social art; what counts as a good reason always depends on the relationship between who’s giving the reason and who’s taking it. If you spill a glass of wine on a stranger, you might shrug it off with a conventional remark like “I’m a klutz.” If you spill a glass of wine on your wife, you are more apt to tell a story: “I was feeling nervous because of the bills.” It’s one thing to give someone a bad explanation. It’s even worse to give the wrong kind of explanation. If you expect your doctor to give you a technical account of your illness and you receive a cliché instead, you feel you are not being taken seriously.

In “Credit and Blame,” Tilly looks just as closely at our most ethically freighted explanations. When something happens that alters our environment for the better or for the worse, we are rarely content simply to say, “Oh well, those are the breaks,” or “I suppose I got lucky this time.” Instead, we leap at the chance to deem someone — anyone — responsible. We blame our parents when we are unhappy, and credit them for their sacrifices when they die. Thanking friends and family at the Academy Awards ceremony may be, as another sociologist has written, “the ultimate American fantasy” of giving credit, while winning a lawsuit against a local polluter may be the ultimate fantasy of affixing blame.

WARNING: Spoiler Alert

As a sociologist, Tilly was more interested in how we assign credit and blame than when it’s right to do so. Should we care that when a chief executive attributes his company’s success to his own intelligence or decisiveness, he’s probably wrong? Why do we put more blame on someone who drives through a stop sign at night and kills a child than on the countless others who drive through stop signs and kill no one? Tilly does not answer such questions, but his analysis suggests that for all the bad judgments we may make about the supposed malfeasance of terrorism-neglecting bureaucrats or the homeless, our habits are not easily reformed. Blaming, he argues, is not a vice or an aberration but an essential habit that allows us to maintain and repair our relationships with others. Our justice detectors are not fundamentally defective. They are suited to the task of setting things right — approximately.

The full review. 

Tara Parker-Hope of the New York Times recently posted a piece on her blog discussing new sociological research that has identified a surprising new risk factor for bad behavior — college. 

Parker-Hope writes: 

Men who attend college are more likely to commit property crimes during their college years than their non-college-attending peers… Sociologists at Bowling Green State University in Ohio examined data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which tracks education, crime levels, substance abuse and socializing among adolescents and young adults. Beginning with 9,246 students who were seventh through twelfth graders in the 1994-1995 academic year, the survey followed the students again in 1996 and 2001. 

The researchers found that college-bound youth were less likely to be involved in criminal activity and substance use during adolescence than kids who weren’t headed for college. But college attendance appears to trigger some surprising changes. When male students enrolled in four-year universities, levels of drinking, property theft and unstructured socializing with friends increased and surpassed rates for their less-educated male peers.

But why?

The reason appears to be that kids who don’t go to college simply have to grow up more quickly. College enrollment allows for a lifestyle that essentially extends the adolescent period, said Patrick M. Seffrin, the study’s primary investigator and a graduate student and research assistant in the department of sociology and the Center for Family and Demographic Research at Bowling Green State University.

College delays entry into adult roles like marriage, parenting and full-time work. Instead, college students have lots of unstructured social time. Other studies have linked unstructured socializing or “hanging out” with higher levels of delinquency and risk taking.

“College attendance is commonly associated with self-improvement and upward mobility,” Mr. Seffrin said. “Yet this research suggests that college may actually encourage, rather than deter, social deviance and risk-taking.’’

USA Today reports that new Census data released this week suggest that 6.4 million opposite sex couples live together (as of 2007), up from less than one million thirty years ago. This means that cohabiting couples now make up nearly 10% of all opposite sex couples, including those who are married. 

In comparison, the Census bureau reported 5 million unmarried, opposite-sex households in 2006, but that figure was based on a question that many respondents found to be unclear. In the 2007 supplemental survey sample of 100,000 households, the Census questions asked more directly whether respondents had “a boyfriend/girlfriend or partner in the household” and found 1.1 million more couples.

The USA Today article included comments from two sociologists:

Pamela Smock,. a sociologist at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who studies cohabitation, says the new data gets closer to the truth, but because it’s a point-in-time survey, it still misses the extent of cohabitation in today’s society.

“It’s a snapshot,” she says. “It’s not telling you how many people have ever cohabited, which is much more than that.” …

Sociologist Linda Waite of the University of Chicago, who has done extensive research into marriage and cohabitation, says living together in the USA isn’t very stable or long-term, compared to some Scandinavian countries where it’s more likely to be a long-term committed relationship.

But in the USA, she says, it’s become “part of the life course.” “It’s something people do that leads to somewhere,” she says. “If it doesn’t lead to marriage, it leads to splitsville.”

The full story.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports on the difficulty graduates face finding employment after completing college. Some of these students are choosing programs like the Peace Corps which are becoming increasingly difficult to be placed in.

Star-Tribune reporter Emma Carew writes:

This year, as the economy hit a downturn and employers cut jobs instead of creating them, a record number of graduates applied to programs that try to change the world — something experts believe is a top priority for today’s youth.

At Teach For America, a two-year program that places college graduates in low-performing schools around the country, the number of applicants fell in 2007 but this year jumped 36 percent to nearly 25,000 would-be teachers. Only 3,700 are placed. When the program began in 1990, 2,500 students applied. Even the Peace Corps, now in its 47th year, has had a 14 percent increase in applicants so far this year over last.

And the sociological commentary…

Teresa Swartz, professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, said current college graduates are experiencing an extended period of adolescence, as the gap between high school and adulthood widens.

It’s harder for students to make livable wages right out of school, so they spend a few years exploring, she said.

Read more.

CNN reports:

From the frontiers of mirth research, scholars offer these words of comfort: If you are mortified of dancing for fear of being the butt of jokes, don’t worry, you are far from alone. There’s even a word for it — gelotophobia. Sound like a disease involving Italian ice cream? No, it’s the potentially debilitating fear of being laughed at. This condition — the term comes from gelos, Greek for laughter — was among the topics discussed this week at a four-day meeting of the International Society for Humor Studies, an Oakland, Calif.-based collective of psychologists, sociologists, linguists and other academics who probe funniness from every conceivable angle

The setting for all this debate is the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of “Don Quixote,” the mad knight who was always good for a laugh as he tilted at windmills. The president of the humor society, British sociologist Christie Davies, offered insights Tuesday on the state of humor in today’s world. Among other things, he said, jokes in eastern Europe were a lot better when the communists ran the show.

“Once you have a democracy with free speech, you have fewer jokes,” said Davies, an emeritus professor at the University of Reading, in England. “Jokes, in many ways, are a way of getting around restrictions on what you can say. That was a very important factor in eastern Europe.”

The full story.