Archive: Feb 2020

Refugees seek to start a new life in an unfamiliar place because of persecution, war, or violence. On arrival, they face challenges as they learn to live in a new society. New research shows how social ties affect refugees’ quality of life as they navigate these challenges. Specifically, it highlights the importance of what sociologists call strong and weak ties, and how the types of relationships matter greatly.

R. Neil Greene used quantitative and qualitative data from the Refugee Well-Being Project, a 5-year community-based study of refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and the Great Lakes region of Africa who had recently resettled in the United States. Refugees answered questions about their mental and emotional well-being, as well as their support networks.  Refugees who settled in the United States long ago played an especially important role as “cultural brokers” because they were able to provide both emotional support and help new refugees with more practical tasks.

Strong family ties were associated with a higher quality of life for refugees. These ties were especially important for emotional support and comfort. In addition to strong family ties, refugees reported relying on weaker ties for their more practical needs, like finding work and navigating new systems. 

Refugees who settled in the United States long ago played an especially important role as “cultural brokers” because they were able to provide both emotional or psychological support, as well as help new refugees with more practical tasks, like how to find a job or get a driver’s license. In other words, settled refugees represented the best of both strong and weak ties.

For more data on refugee resettlement in the United States, check out the Migration Policy Institute or read the Pew Research Center’s “Key Facts about Refugees Coming to the U.S.“

The recent news and research on student loans identify graduate degrees as a major culprit of mounting debt. Although 75% of people with student loans borrowed for an undergraduate degree, over 40% of the $1 trillion of student debt is a result of borrowing for graduate school. In a new paper, Jaymes Pyne and Eric Grodsky present trends of graduate student borrowing, who borrows, and the graduate wage premium.  

Pyne and Grodsky look at 1996-2016 data from three nationally-representative datasets. They find that one trend is simply more people getting masters degrees — a result of what they call “a perfect storm” of changes to funding in higher education, a greater demand for higher credentials, and increased returns to graduate degrees. Masters students are also borrowing more to complete those degrees than past students. Across all degree types women, historically underserved students, and students of low socioeconomic background on average borrow more for graduate degrees than their counterparts. Graduate debt has especially risen among Black students.New research on student loans identify graduate school as a major contributor to rising debt, but some students are better positioned by their degrees to pay it off.

Scholars of mobility worry about the large debts for Black graduate students. Carrying lots of student loan debt may prevent individuals from accruing wealth and perpetuate generational inequality. But the graduate wage premium, or the amount that a person makes as compared to a similar person without a graduate degree, is greatest for Black students. In short, we will have to wait and see whether borrowing for a graduate degree will turn out to be worth it. 

Popular culture complains that parents have become too focused on making kids feel good about themselves and not focused enough on encouraging hard work and effort. However, in their new article, Nomaguchi and Milkie demonstrate that support for passing on the value of working hard to children has actually increased over the past forty years.

Nomaguchi and Milkie analyzed which traits adults ranked as most important for children to learn on the General Social Survey between 1986 and 2018. Survey respondents ranked five traits from most to least important: obedience, autonomy, diligence, compassion and likability. The authors wondered if rising economic uncertainty would increase emphasis on survival skills, like hard work, or whether “self-expression” values like thinking for oneself and helping others (autonomy and compassion) would remain popular, as they had between 1920 and 1980.Support for passing on the value of working hard to children has actually increased over the past forty years. 

They found that although thinking for oneself remains the most popular, adults increasingly emphasized passing on the value of hard work. Between 1986 and 2018, the number of adults who considered autonomy as the most important trait for children to learn declined by about 10% while support for hard work more than doubled.  Nomaguchi and Milkie also found that since 2010 Americans have ranked hard work either as important or more important to pass on to children than thinking for oneself. Importantly, they found that if changes to the population, such as the increased number of college graduates, had not occured support for hard work would have been greater. 

Nomaguchi and Milkie speculate that the increased preference for survival values instead of “self-expression” values reflects the greater sense of economic precarity in the United States. Other social scientists have documented how shifts in the labor market since the 1980s have left more people feeling economically insecure. 

Nomaguchi and Milkie’s finding demonstrates the importance of investigating parenting values, like which traits to pass on to children, to better understand people’s sense of the economy and culture they are living in. People’s increased focus on hard work, and not self-expression, may demonstrate that Americans are concerned about the economy they are living in and will pass onto their children. 

Over 50% of men’s NCAA Division 1 basketball players are black, but over 75% of coaches at that level are white. In new research, Ryan Seebruck and Scott Savage examine who is likely to fill vacant coaching positions as a way to better understand the continued racial inequities in D1 basketball. 

The authors looked up biographical information for every NCAA Division I basketball assistant coach who had the opportunity to get an internal head coaching hire from 2008-2013 (over 700 assistant coaches at 239 schools that had head coach openings). They then tested what variables affect the likelihood of a coach receiving an internal promotion, including whether their race matched the race of the outgoing head coach. 

White assistant coaches under white head coaches are the most likely to benefit from an internal hire, so basic social reproduction is part of the story. But there is an important organizational dimension here, as well. It involves the racial composition of the coaching staff as a whole. Schools were more likely to promote an assistant coach to the head spot if the racial composition of the staff matched the race of the previous head coach. In other words, if the outgoing coach was white, the likelihood of promoting one of the assistant coaches was highest when all of the assistant coaches were white. As the number of Black assistants increased, schools were more likely to pass over all of the assistant coaches and hire an outside coach. For Black head coaches the situation was symmetrical — the likelihood of internal promotion increased as the number of black assistant coaches increased.  Schools were more likely to promote an assistant coach to the head spot if the racial composition of the staff matched the race of the previous head coach.

This research adds to our understanding of how racial matching and organizational structure can maintain inequality, and how and when change can occur. Individual black coaches may be hired to assist with recruiting and player development in the college ranks, but their path to the top job at predominantly white institutions will be difficult. As protests and legislation across the country bring more attention to racial inequities in college athletics, this research suggests that coaching may be the next area of contention.