youth

The Houston Chronicle ran a front page story earlier this week about how new numbers from the Pew Center indicate a shift in immigrant demographics. Nearly one in ten Texas children has an undocumented parent, while 73% of the children of illegal immigrants are U.S.-born citizens.

The Chronicle reports:

The Pew Hispanic Center released a report Tuesday estimating that about 73 percent of the children of illegal immigrant parents were U.S.-born citizens in 2008, up from roughly 63 percent in 2003. During that time frame, the estimated number of children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents increased from 2.7 million to 4 million. The report estimates that at least one in 10 Texas school children has a parent in the country illegally.

Pew’s estimates were based largely on March 2008 Census Bureau survey data, which was adjusted to account for census undercounting and legal status.

The report’s findings highlight an emotional issue in the immigration debate: mixed status families of undocumented parents and U.S.-born children. High-profile immigration enforcement raids across the country in recent years have generated stories of American schoolchildren coming home to find out their parents had been picked up by immigration officials.

The demographic shift will have significant implications through the summer as the immigration reform debate heats back up. Last week, the Obama administration indicated it was gearing up to tackle reform, including creating a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants.

The sociological commentary…

“These are American citizens, and we’re rounding up and deporting their parents,” said Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg, calling the overall immigration strategy “totally bankrupt,” and in need of repair.

Sociologist Katherine Donato elaborates…

Vanderbilt Sociology Professor Katharine M. Donato said the Pew Center’s findings highlight a marked shift in illegal immigration patterns, which in turn have changed the demographics of the nation’s undocumented population.

Donato said the U.S. immigration system used to be largely cyclical, with workers — legal and undocumented — returning to their home countries on a regular basis, until the massive buildup of agents and infrastructurealong the Southwest border in early 1990s.

Facing more dangerous treks and steeper smuggling fees, many illegal immigrants opted instead to bring their families to the U.S. and settle in here, which accounts for the growth in the share of births in the U.S., she said.

Read more.

Earlier this week USA Today ran several articles  on the tenth anniversary of the school shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. They called upon several sociologists to talk about how the Columbine shootings changed the culture of American high schools.

The first featured work from sociologist Katherine Newman…

School shooters almost always tell classmates of their plans, so schools should provide “confidential avenues for reporting what they hear,” says Princeton sociologist Katherine Newman, who co-authored Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings. It’s tough to get teenagers to “tell,” since creating a social culture apart from adults is so important to adolescent development, Newman says. But if adults guarantee confidentiality, results can be dramatic. Examples:

•Colorado has a Safe2Tell anonymous tipline that covers any potential threat to safety. The program also includes anonymous and encrypted Web-tipping, says Susan Payne, special agent in charge of school safety and homeland security for the state. In the past 4½ years, the line has prevented 28 planned school attacks, she says. In one incident, there were 33 weapons found. About two-thirds of the calls come from kids, Payne says. “All of us have seen these unspeakable tragedies. I can’t think of one that could not have been prevented.”

•Safe School Ambassadors is a program created by the non-profit Community Matters in 2000. It has trained staff at more than 650 schools in 23 states on how to set up so-called ambassadors — influential student leaders of varied cliques who learn how to squelch minor fires of bullying and other behaviors, and to report potential rampages.

The second highlighted sociologist David Osher…

The Secret Service found that 71% of shooters they studied felt “persecuted, bullied, threatened, attacked or injured by others.” In several cases, they’d experienced school bullying and harassment that was “long-standing and severe.”

“These kids didn’t pick the local movie theater to blow people away, and there’s a reason they picked school,” says David Osher, a sociologist and vice president at the American Institutes for Research.

Schools that tolerate lots of bullying and look the other way from petty acts of violence are more vulnerable to escalating violence, including rampages from shooters, he says.

And where relations between teachers and kids with emotional problems are harsh or distant, violence becomes more likely.

“These are rage shootings,” he says, “kids suffering from depression largely creating public suicides in school environments where they feel alienated.”

Read more on how ‘Post-Columbine Programs Help Prevent Rampages.’

Read more on ‘Lessons from Columbine.’

The Vancouver Sun (Canada) reports this morning on new work from University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby about The Emerging Millenials. The Sun suggests, “The kids are all right. Better than all right — in fact, they just keep getting more and more virtuous in their behavior and optimistic in their expectations. Maybe too optimistic. When teens see their futures, they see large, happy families, stable marriages and the jobs they want — not just merely ‘good jobs’ — according to a major survey of 4,500 teens.”

In a forthcoming book based on the survey, called The Emerging Millennials, University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby notes that today’s teens expect a very bright future — 95 per cent say they will get to where they want to be in life. They expect things will just keep on getting better, said Bibby, who has tracked adolescent trends since 1984.

“In large part, it’s because they are showing signs of having learned much from us about the good things they want to pursue and the not-so-good things they don’t want to repeat.”

Overall, teens reported to being very close to their parents, with almost eight in 10 teens saying they received a high level of enjoyment from their mothers and more than seven in 10 saying the same about their fathers (although a quarter are concerned their parents are too busy.) Teens are rewarding their vigilant parents with good behavior, said Bibby. They are less likely to smoke, drink or take drugs than they were eight years ago. And 56 per cent of teens have never had sex, up from 51 per cent in 2000.

“Given the resources we’ve been directing toward teens, I think we should be shocked if things have not been improving over time,” he notes. “I’d like to think after all these decades and the money we’ve been spending that some of the message finally is taking.”

But it’s not all good news…

Sometimes their expectations don’t match up with reality, and Bibby says their expectations “seem to be nothing short of naive in thinking that little is needed by way of job adjustments in order to make optimum family life possible.”

For example, though about 70 per cent thought good benefits were “very important” in a job, only half thought flexible hours were important.

And Bibby was disappointed to find that only about half of the girls and slightly less of the boys identified a “good job” as one that would let them take family responsibilities into account, well below the work being interesting or the job itself paying well.

Bibby suggests ‘millennials’ need to have a chat with their Baby Boomer parents about having it all.

Read more.

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.

Read more.

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.

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.

The New York Times blog City Room, ran a story this week about a sociologist’s new book about graffiti…

Gregory J. Snyder, a Baruch College sociologist, spent years hanging out with graffiti writers, earning their trust and conducting scores of interviews. The new book based on his studies, “Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York’s Urban Underground,” reveals that he became more than an observer in that decade and a half: On very few occasions he wrote graffiti himself, scrawling his tag perhaps seven times.

The books discusses the origin of graffiti culture as well as the diversity amongst those who engage in in…

Professor Snyder, 40, argues that while graffiti culture emerged around the same time as hip-hop, in the early 1970s, graffiti in fact comes from a variety of cultural sources:

Whatever their class, race, ethnicity, religion, or age, writers define themselves not by what they look like, or what language they speak, or what clothes they wear, but by what they do. Their identities are as writers first, and as members of ethnic, religious, and other subgroups second.

He adds, “In its purest form, graffiti is a democratic art form that revels in the American Dream.”

The book, just published by New York University Press, argues that graffiti culture has, in some ways, been uniquely democratic. “What is lost sometimes in the cacophony of the debate over whether graffiti is art or vandalism is that when it’s art, it is free art,” he writes. “You don’t need money, or special knowledge, or the right outfit, or a car, or an ID to see it. This is why the graffiti subculture has inspired such a diversity of young people.”

Snyder addresses the where and why…

A provocative map in the book points out that unlike other “quality of life” crimes, graffiti does not tend to be focused in poor neighborhoods with high rates of violent crime. Professor Snyder writes:

Graffiti writers write in order to get fame and respect for their deeds, and therefore they write in places where their work is more likely to be seen by their intended demographic. It is not the amount of disorder that determines a good spot to write graffiti, but the number of potential viewers and the unlikelihood that the graffiti will be painted over. These spots tends to be where young people from all over the city are likely to congregate, and thus the East Village, the Lower East Side, and SoHo are the places where most of the illegal New York City graffiti can be found. These are not poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Indeed, he adds, “Despite all of the negativity associated with graffiti, it remains one of SoHo’s selling points, literally.”

Read more.

Yesterday USA Today reported on new research out of Michigan State University suggesting that many students who apply for and receive early admission to the college of their choice regret the decision. The newspaper presents this study as further evidence that high school students should avoid the early-admission rush so they will not regret the decision later in life.

Bad timing is the culprit. “Many young people are being pressured to making college choices before they are developmentally ready,” says Michigan State University sociologist Barbara Schneider, author of a report released today that examines the psychological and social implications of admission policies. Though she says that case “has yet to be made empirically,” she cites her forthcoming research suggesting “students who make these choices very early, without having opportunities to explore other options, (in their 20s) report some dissatisfaction with their college choices and lives.”

Although it looks as though this needs to be fleshed-out more before any definitive claims can be made, USA Today found additional anecdotal support for the idea…

David Hawkins of the non-profit National Association for College Admission Counseling says the findings support some members’ concerns that students are being rushed. The group’s 2005 survey found that 25% of responding colleges accept some applicants before they start their senior year. Some recruiters have waived application fees or offered priority housing to students who apply as juniors. The group now bars colleges from admitting a student until after they get a junior year transcript. Harvard, Stanford and other selective schools have softened binding early-admission policies so that admitted students could apply elsewhere, too.

Read more.

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story about how kids these days aren’t into planning in advance – attributing this ‘new’ phenomenon to the rise of mobile communications via text messaging and web-based chat. The Inquirer reports:

The ubiquity of cell phones and text messaging, especially among young people, has changed the whole idea of the word plans – most significantly, it allows people not to make any.

“One of the consequences of the mobile phone is that you can postpone any decision until the last minute,” said James E. Katz, chair of the Rutgers University communications department, where he directs the Center for Mobile Communications Studies. “Since you have up to that last minute to obtain information for the decision, cell phones can give you the opportunity to delay it. What do you want for dinner? Hmmm, I’ll tell you when I am really hungry.”

But a sociologist isn’t so sure that this is a new trend…

Ted Goertzel, a professor of sociology at Rutgers-Camden, is not nearly as worried, saying that the late-planning habit, especially for young people, started at least a generation ago, or even before, with the countercultural 1960s and ’70s.

“There was a value of being spontaneous and free of entanglements,” said Goertzel, 66, whose own children, now 43 and 39, weren’t big on making long-term plans when they were younger. In comparison, when he and his wife were younger, she had to know Tuesday what they were doing Saturday.

“Even with wired telephones, there was a lot of last-minute communication,” he said. “It might also be cyclical, a matter of generational culture, an ‘uptight’ generation followed by a ‘laid-back’ one.”

Read more.

This morning the New York Times ran a story about new research indicating that teen pregnancies are on the rise once again. The Times’ Tara Parker-Pope reports, “Parents have worried for generations about changing moral values and risky behavior among young people, and the latest news seems particularly worrisome. It came from the National Center for Health Statistics, which reported this month that births to 15- to 19-year-olds had risen for the first time in more than a decade.”

Building the case that this is a myth:

The news is troubling, but it’s also misleading. While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that in many ways, today’s teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations.

Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.

A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.

The rates also went down among younger teenagers. In 1995, about 20 percent said they had had sex before age 15, but by 2002 those numbers had dropped to 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys.

Call in the sociologist!

“There’s no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and are much wilder than they ever were,” said Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. “But when you look at the data, that’s not the case.”

One reason people misconstrue teenage sexual behavior is that the system of dating and relationships has changed significantly. In the first half of the 20th century, dating was planned and structured — and a date might or might not lead to a physical relationship. In recent decades, that pattern has largely been replaced by casual gatherings of teenagers.

In that setting, teenagers often say they “fool around,” and in a reversal of the old pattern, such an encounter may or may not lead to regular dating. The shift began around the late 1960s, said Dr. Bogle, who explored the trend in her book “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus” (N.Y.U. Press, 2008).

And another…

“There is a group of kids who engage in sexual behavior, but it’s not really significantly different than previous generations,” said Maria Kefalas, an associate professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and co-author of “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage” (University of California Press, 2005). “This creeping up of teen pregnancy is not because so many more kids are having sex, but most likely because more kids aren’t using contraception.”

“For teens, sex requires time and lack of supervision,” Dr. Kefalas said. “What’s really important for us to pay attention to, as researchers and as parents, are the characteristics of the kids who become pregnant and those who get sexually transmitted diseases.

“This whole moral panic thing misses the point, because research suggests kids who don’t use contraception tend to be kids who are feeling lost and disconnected and not doing well.”

Read the full story.