Happy Fat Tuesday to all our friends in New Orleans! The rest of us should have a bourbon and enjoy these posts from previous years:
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Kristina K. sent in a link to an interactive map at the New York Times that shows the results of Gallup’s 2010 polls of well-being. [UPDATE: Reader Danielle pointed out I forgot to provide a link to the map. Sorry! You can find it here.] Gallup surveys 1,000 people per day about a variety of indicators of well-being, including questions about physical, mental, and emotional health, various health-related behaviors, ability to access health care, access to adequate food and housing, and perceptions of their communities. Here are the overall composite scores, by congressional district (a higher score is better):
The general geographic pattern indicates a swath of relatively low well-being curving from Louisiana up through Michigan, while those in the upper Great Plains and the inter-mountain West are doing better than average.
Percent reporting experiencing a lot of stress:
Percent who have ever been told they have depression:
Of course, this may reflect differences in rates of depression, but it could also reflect differences in medical professionals’ likelihood of identifying a set of symptoms as depression and bringing it up with a patient. For example, we see significant differences by state in the frequency of Caesarean sections among pregnant women.
Percent of people who smoke:
Percent reporting an inability to buy sufficient food:
The Gallup page on well-being presents more data. Here is a map of 2009 overall well-being that is a bit easier to read since it’s presented by state rather than congressional district:
Hawaii had the highest overall score, at 70.2; West Virginia had the lowest, 60.5. If you go to their site and click on a state, you can get a breakdown of scores in each area (emotional well-being, physical health, healthy behaviors, and so on).
Finally, the NYT provides some demographic information on who was most likely to have said they spent a lot of the previous day laughing or smiling vs. being sad:
In a comments thread, shorelines linked to a fascinating Scientific American article about adolescence by psychologist Robert Epstein. In it, he points to the invention of the very idea of adolescence and its non-universality. In a sample of 186 pre-industrial societies, for example, only 60% had words for the life stage and most had little or no problems with anti-social teen behavior. This data, however, contrasts strongly with new research suggesting that adolescent brains are quite different from adult brains.
How do we make sense of this?
Epstein suggests that differences in brain structure may be the result of social realities, not their cause. He writes:
I have not been able to find even a single study that establishes a causal relation between the properties of the brain being examined and the problems we see in teens… [Meanwhile, c]onsiderable research shows that a person’s emotions and behavior continuously change brain anatomy and physiology… So if teens are in turmoil, we will necessarily find some corresponding chemical, electrical or anatomical properties in the brain. But did the brain cause the turmoil, or did the turmoil alter the brain? Or did some other factors—such as the way our culture treats its teens—cause both the turmoil and the corresponding brain properties.
By “the way our culture treats its teens,” Epstein is referring to the possibility that we infantilize and criminalize them. He includes a figure illustrating how we’ve increasingly targeted teens with laws:
Teens are subject to, Epstein explains, “…more than 10 times as many restrictions as are mainstream adults, twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, and even twice as many restrictions as incarcerated felons.”
Believing them to be different from adults, we then segregate them:
Today, with teens trapped in the frivolous world of peer culture, they learn virtually everything they know from one another rather than from the people they are about to become. Isolated from adults and wrongly treated like children, it is no wonder that some teens behave, by adult standards, recklessly or irresponsibly.
Epstein has no more data showing that how we treat teens, and how they learn to behave, changes their brain anatomy and physiology, than he does showing the reverse. But the former certainly has substantial neurological precedent. Meanwhile, the latter is comforting to a society awash in out-of-control adolescence: “What is there to do? It’s only natural.” Right?
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Jamal Spencer, a student in Naomi Glogower’s sociology class at Michigan State University, sent in the following promotion for Black History Month, courtesy of the Los Angeles Clippers (source):
Spencer makes two interesting points. First, Black History Month is in February. Oops. Second, and more importantly, notice that the promotion includes admitting “1,000 underprivileged children free.” It is assuming that “Black” is coterminous with “underprivileged,” erasing middle and upper class Blacks and poor Whites. In fact, about half of poor people are White and about 75% of Black people are not poor. This promotion, however, strengthens the conception that the poor are Black, a conception that contributes to the (racist) maligning of and restriction of benefits for the poor. Happy Black History Month indeed.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
The Pew Research Center recently released data on stepfamilies in the U.S. Of the 2,691 respondents, over 40% had at least one step relative in the immediate family:
Note that they include both step- and half-siblings. For readers who might not be familiar with that language, a step-sibling is related to you only through marriage; you don’t share a biological parent. A half-sibling shares one parent with you, but not both. I can see the point of including both categories if you’re interested in seeing the degree to which American family life varies from the culturally-accepted “ideal” nuclear family, but I would think putting both in a single category might hide meaningful differences (such as for the question about obligation, below).
The chances of having a step-relative in the immediate family vary quite a bit based on demographics, reflecting differences in marriage, divorce, and non-marital childbearing rates:
The vast majority (70%) of people with step-relatives said they were very satisfied with their family lives, undermining some of the cultural stereotypes of stepfamilies as inherently filled with conflict. However, the survey also asked participants if they would feel “obligated” to help a family member who was facing serious problems and needed either financial help or caregiving. The results show more feelings of obligation to biological family members than to step-relatives:
I presume perceptions of obligation vary widely based on how old a person was when their parent married their stepparent, the quality of the relationship, and perhaps even whether the stepparent has biological children. The data would seem to have important implications for our ability to draw on family networks for resources. Who is responsible for caring for elderly parents, for instance? Only their biological children? Should someone feel obligated to help a person who they’re related to only because of a parent’s marital choice? Unclear cultural norms about obligations to step-relatives bring up a number of complex issues that many Americans will be forced to grapple with in the future.
I submit to you Lady Gaga’s new music video for “Born This Way.” Have at it! Is Lady Gaga breaking new ground? Or is this a strategic ploy to be played more or less constantly in every gay bar in America? Or something else? What do you think?
See also a previous post on Lady Gaga’s disability imagery and my cynical and controversial post critiquing the Gaga-inspired site, Born This Way. Oh, and that dude with the skeleton face, we totally featured him in a post about the self-fulfilling stereotype.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
In and around the apartment complex where we live in Nanning, China, there are no less than five coffee shops. They are part of what make our neighborhood so much, well, like a neighborhood. Several of them have free wi-fi and they all have finely crafted, good quality kafei (coffee).
But my wife and I have learned the hard way that if we want coffee in the morning, we either have to go to McDonald’s or make it ourselves. While your average US Starbucks employee arrives at work before the sun peeks its head above the horizon, baristas in China report to work around 10 am. And while some Starbucks and rare other coffee shops in the US are open until ten or even midnight (at the latest), their Chinese counterparts stay open until two in the morning every night.
Needless to say we found these business hours confounding, and poked around to find out why anyone would want to drink such strong coffee (and, do not doubt, this coffee is stout!) so late at night.
As it turns out, China’s coffee history dates back to the early 19th century, but in all those years, coffee never “caught on.” And it is not really a mystery as to why. China’s tea culture has a centuries-long monopoly on China’s liquid ingestion. Coffee? Well, its OK, if you like that sort of thing.
But if for 200 years the Chinese have resisted coffee, why now are coffee shops finding enough success that there is room for five in one small neighborhood? The answer is in the picture of my wife below. Chinese cafes are dimly-lit, quiet, and “romantic” (or at least that is the goal of the decor) rendezvous points. A new high school couple might take their xiuxi (afternoon rest – the Chinese version of a siesta), flirting with each other while sipping on lattes. After a night out on the town, young couples flood the cafes, taking lots of pictures, drinking beer and maybe a couple of iced macchiatos.
The marketing scheme is actually quite impressive. If you can’t win them over with quality, lovingly brewed, pristinely presented coffee, make the coffee shop a romantic oasis. Draw them in with the promise of passion and mystery and win them over with brilliantly executed coffee.
The pictures are just a bonus.
Evan Schneider is a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary. He teaches English at an education college in Nanning, China. While in China he enjoys learning to cook Chinese food and discovering the differences between the way that Chinese and American people think about food. He blogs about it at Cooking Chinese.
The word “proletariat” “proletarian” refers to a member of the working class of a capitalist society, or the “proletariat.” Combining the word with “precarious,” economist Guy Standing coined the term “precariat” to try to describe the reality of low wage workers in our modern, global economy.
In the ten-minute segment below, sent in by Jordan G., an interview with Standing is complimented by interviews with workers and activists in Britain. He explains that new international labor markets have weakened the power of labor and strengthened that of employers. The result is more jobs that are part time, with unpredictable hours, low wages, and few benefits. This has been good for employers in that the risk inherent in capitalist enterprises has been transferred to the workers. For example, if the hotel isn’t full, then the managers simply bring in fewer housekeepers. This is hard on housekeepers, but easy on hotels. Workers’ lives, then, are increasingly precarious, thus the term “precariat.”
Found at The Guardian via Global Sociology.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
