{"id":36903,"date":"2011-06-22T10:00:43","date_gmt":"2011-06-22T15:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/familyinequality.wordpress.com\/?p=2821"},"modified":"2017-09-17T12:44:01","modified_gmt":"2017-09-17T17:44:01","slug":"unemployment%e2%80%99s-greenjobs-porn-google-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2011\/06\/22\/unemployment%e2%80%99s-greenjobs-porn-google-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"Unemployment, Green Jobs, and Porn on Google"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Family Inequality<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

A blue-collar worker gets laid off<\/a>. Maybe he\u00a0or she reads an\u00a0article in the\u00a0Boston Globe<\/em> with an image of a wind farm, like this<\/a>.\u00a0So he or she types \u201cwind energy jobs\u201d into Google, and ends up at one<\/a> of\u00a0many<\/a> websites promoting wind energy\u00a0jobs, with an upbeat graph like this:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Was this a common pattern during the recession, during which Obama has promoted the idea<\/a> of moving workers into the wind energy sector? Honestly, I never would have thought of that question if not for the results of today\u2019s poking around.<\/p>\n

Action in context<\/strong><\/p>\n

New kinds of data have the potential to open up vast new territory in the study of patterned individual behavior. Finding and understanding aggregate patterns in micro-level behavior is more feasible than before. My prior poking around has included tracking the relentless\u00a0decline of the name\u00a0Mary<\/em><\/a> given to children born in the U.S., the\u00a0search patterns associated with having a baby<\/a> across millions of Google users leading up to the recession, or\u00a0patterns of divorces across states<\/a> according to their unemployment levels.<\/p>\n

In each of these situations, individual behavior assumes a social form that emerges when the data are aggregated and analyzed in relation to other patterns or time periods. And in each case it appears that separate individuals are responding similarly to larger forces \u2014 allowing us to understand those forces in new ways.<\/p>\n

In today\u2019s exercise I plugged the weekly number of initial claims for unemployment<\/a> into\u00a0the Google Correlate<\/a> tool, and asked it for the 100 search term trends that were most closely correlated with the unemployment trend since 2007.* On the list were \u201cwind energy jobs\u201d and \u201cgreen jobs.\u201d Beyond those, it was pretty easy to group the 100 search terms into categories: 38 of them were searches for songs and lyrics (especially MGMT lyrics), 17 were Internet\/technology related (such as \u201croadrunner webmail login\u201d).\u00a0I have no explanation for those.<\/p>\n

But the last large group was clearly recession-related: those about loan modifications (such as \u201cloan modification,\u201d \u201cloan mod,\u201d or \u201cmortgage hardship.\u201d) All of these were very highly correlated with the initial unemployment claims trend (.93 or higher on a scale of -1.0 to 1.0). Here they are, plotted by week since the start of 2007.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Google search volumes are relative (on the right axis), so we don\u2019t know how many people were doing these searches, only that they were doing it in the same weeks that unemployment claims occurred.<\/p>\n

A final, small group of terms were related to porn. Maybe there are just so many porn search terms that something is correlated with any trend. But the search terms \u201csnake tube,\u201d \u201cuncoached\u201d and \u201ccoomclips\u201d track initial unemployment claims very well, with correlations over .94. Here they are together:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Maybe some brave Sociological Images reader will explain why these particular terms might follow the unemployment trend. (It could just be that they were new sites that became popular and then tapered off in 2008-2009.)<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the point?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not news to people interested in sociology that individual, intimate behavior follows common patterns, which are related to cultural forces. What\u2019s interesting to me here is that capacity to find patterns we couldn\u2019t before. For example, does losing a job lead to more porn consumption? Are those porn searchers different from the people typing in \u201cgreen jobs\u201d? I\u2019m hoping that other people will dig further and turn these tools to productive uses.<\/p>\n

——————————<\/p>\n

* To avoid big seasonal spikes unrelated to unemployment, I used the seasonally-adjusted unemployment claims, which basically tamp down the big jump in layoffs after Christmas and when school gets out each summer.<\/p>\nPhilip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality<\/a>. You can follow him on Twitter<\/a> or Facebook<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are porn searchers also looking for green jobs?\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[129],"class_list":["post-36903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-media"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36903"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71427,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36903\/revisions\/71427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}