Learn a Language, Change the World

Isabel Arriagada on February 21, 2018
Language Learning Classroom. Photo by Jim George, Flickr CC

Duolingo, the free language-learning platform, has reached more than 200 million registered users around the world. For some, learning a new language is a hobby; for others, it’s a necessity. Whatever the reason, social science research demonstrates that learning a new language has significant social and cultural benefits. 

Learning a new language can improve interpersonal skills. For immigrants, it not only can increase earnings and labor market opportunities, but it can also improve adjustment into a new cultural context. Many factors influence this learning process. One study of 180,000 immigrants found that the societies of origin and destination play the biggest role in determining language proficiency — societies that promote the coexistence of multiple languages can actually encourage newcomers to learn a new language.
Learning a new language also influences the way children form and maintain their friendships. One study demonstrated that fluent bilingual children, and bilingual children whose dominant language was not English, surpassed their peers in getting along with children from different backgrounds, comforting or helping other children, and expressing feelings, ideas, and opinions in positive ways. When children bridge two languages and two cultures at the same time, they are better able to interact with others and build stronger bonds.

In sum, learning a new language is not only about studying words, pronunciation, or grammar structure. The process can have substantial payoffs for social skills and integration.

Political Games at the Olympics

Brooke Chambers and Doug Hartmann on February 19, 2018
Photo by Paul Hudson, Flickr CC

For many across the globe, the Olympics is a chance to celebrate a shared human connection, athletic achievement, and national pride. The Olympic Charter claims the Games encourage friendship, cross-cultural understanding, and world peace, but to do so the games must be free of politics. The Olympics present an opportunity to cross divisive diplomatic lines, like the temporary calming of tensions between North and South Korea. But these ideals may be overly optimistic as these global events have real political effects.

Historically, only the economic and social elite participated in the Olympics, so other versions like the Worker’s Games countered the Olympic Games in the early 1900s. In addition, the Olympics themselves have become a space to challenge the status quo. Protests, or lack thereof, can challenge or reinforce global norms.
Sporting events like the Olympics may allow nations to compete with each other without the consequences of war. Non-violent competition is even more important in the modern world, where technology allows for increasingly lethal methods of warfare. This may be one reason nations financially invest in producing elite athletes and could be behind recent controversies, like the Russian doping scandal.
Though intended to be apolitical, nations may attempt to use the Olympics to sway global public opinion. Foreign policy officials report that political rebranding was a key reason to host the games. Modern media channels make this motivation even more powerful than in decades past, as nations know that the Olympics will have extensive global coverage.

 

Gender, Bodies, and the Valentine’s Day Script

Isabel Arriagada and Allison Nobles on February 14, 2018
Photo by freestocks.org, Flickr CC

Valentine’s Day is a time when our rom-com scripts are in high gear. The quintessential V-Day script assumes a man and a woman in a monogamous romantic relationship celebrate by exchanging gifts, sharing a romantic dinner, and then ending the night with a steamy bedroom scene. In reality, many people challenge this script. However, these challenges are made more difficult by gendered socialization that reinforces norms about men’s and women’s bodies, heterosexuality, and sexual pleasure.

Children learn their bodies are gendered early in life. Institutions like sports and education systems often teach and highlight differences between boys and girls. For instance, preschool teachers construct gender norms by disciplining girls and boys differently — telling girls to be quiet more frequently than boys. And since girls and women have fewer opportunities than men to demonstrate physicality, they tend to underestimate their bodily capacities.
Children also learn to privilege heterosexual relationships in schools. Some preschool teachers encourage what they see as “romantic” affection between boys and girls in their classes, but rarely interpret affection between children of the same gender as romantic. Children reproduce these norms in their own play. For instance, when playing “house” girls rarely play the role of “dad” and boys rarely play the role of “mom.” Further, when parents talk to their children about sexuality they also reinforce gender differences. For instance, mothers talk about relationships, reproductive bodies, and what sexual behaviors are considered “wrong” more with their daughters than with their sons.
These early experiences have consequences for how we view and understand our bodies. Despite the increased awareness of the benefits of developing a healthy sexuality, women tend to know less about their sexual bodies than men. For instance, women report lack of knowledge about the functions of their genitalia. They also tend to rely more on their sexual partners than men for sexual pleasure and are more likely to say they are indifferent about their sexuality.

Different Dimensions of Racism

Neeraj Rajasekar on February 8, 2018
Photo by Johnny Silvercloud, Flickr CC

During the month of February, the United States observes Black History Month, importantly celebrating the accomplishments of African Americans and acknowledging the racist history of the United States. Racism is not only part of the past, nor is it not limited to prejudicial attitudes and overtly discriminatory practices against people of color. Social scientists demonstrate how racism is also institutional and cultural, and how these forms of racism powerfully reproduce racial inequalities — even in the absence of explicitly racist attitudes or beliefs.

Social scientists commonly rely on two concepts to describe racism: institutional racism and symbolic or cultural racism. Institutional racism refers to how institutions and legal systems in the 21st century do not overtly consider race, but still promote racial inequality. Historically rooted inequalities in institutions — economy, housing markets, the education system, and the criminal justice system — help perpetuate persistent racial disparities.
Social scientists utilize the concept of symbolic or cultural racism to discuss attitudes. Though explicitly prejudicial attitudes in the United States have declined, Americans today often use coded or symbolic language — especially when discussing political figures, immigration policy, or the criminal justice system. For example, instead of explicitly claiming people of different races are biologically inferior, individuals may point to “problematic” values or attitudes of other racial groups. Such beliefs allow those people to maintain that racial inequality is the fault of racial minority groups themselves.

Sporting Mega-Events and Urban Inequality

Caity Curry on February 6, 2018
Photo by Sam Churchill, Flickr CC

Large-scale sporting events, including the Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl, are in the international spotlight this winter. These mega-events are often heralded for promoting economic mobility and social cohesion, and cities across the world bid for events like the Olympics to cement their identities as world-class cities. For sociologists, these events also highlight how inequality operates in urban spaces.

Under the assumption that stadium construction promotes local growth, many cities rely on both tax subsidies from their local populace along with private investment. Financial investors tout the unprecedented trend of stadium-building in the past decades as opportunities for job growth, tourism, and other revenue boosts. However, much research suggests that stadiums and major sport events do not have broad economic benefits for their host cities, as benefits tend to be distributed unequally along racial and class lines. While local resistance has grown substantially in recent years, resource-laden investing firms and political coalitions that advocate for such projects are largely successful at squelching these efforts.
The role of sporting events in perpetuating inequality demonstrates how the geography of urban space reflects a deepening divide between the “haves” and “have nots.” For example, sociologists demonstrate that cities often implement policies and practices that criminalize and punish behaviors of homeless individuals in public spaces. Other studies indicate that sporting events in the United States, especially the Super Bowl, contribute to the militarization and surveillance of public space in the post-9/11 era.

So, as we watch these sporting spectacles from our television screens, see them up close (if we’re lucky), or experience the negative consequences outlined above (if we’re not), it is important to be aware of how these events are manifestations of both society’s triumphs and social ills.

Groundhog Day and the Purpose of Strange Rituals

Allison Nobles and Jacqui Frost on February 2, 2018
Photo by Anthony Quintano, Flickr CC

Every February, people in the United States participate in this strange ritual where we entrust a large rodent to predict whether winter will last six more weeks (about average for much of the northern United States) or if spring will come early. Yep, it’s Groundhog Day. And as strange as this practice might seem, superstitions and rituals like it actually play an important role in how people form identities and communities.

While scholars first studied rituals primarily in relation to religion, eventually they realized that rituals, whether religious or not, were important ways of bringing people together through shared practices. Emile Durkheim was the first to point to ritual’s community forming potential. He argued that rituals are the collective representations of the social group itself — rituals arouse passion, feelings of connectedness, and an experience of something larger than the individual. These features of ritual are conducive to identifying with social groups in an emotional and empowering way.
However, rituals are not just any set of shared practices — in order to be meaningful, rituals need to feel natural. Rituals present themselves as unchanging and timeless, and until very recently, most people’s experience of ritual was such that to “create” or “invent” a ritual meant it was inauthentic. However, all rituals are products of human creation that become naturalized and taken-for-granted over time.

So, Groundhog Day is not celebrated because Americans truly believe a groundhog will predict the coming of spring. Rather, it’s one of many ways we ritualize our life to make meaning out of the passage of time and to feel connected to our fellow humans.

Missing Crime Data and Why We Need It

Caity Curry on January 31, 2018
Photo by Tony Webster, Flickr CC

Every year the FBI releases its Uniform Crime Report (UCR), an annual collection of crimes reported to local police agencies across the United States.  When the FBI released the 2016 report last year, it was missing many key tables, spurring a letter from criminologists asking that Jeff Sessions and the FBI director, Christopher A. Ray, release the report in its complete form (as it had been in previous years). Although the FBI claims that the trimming of the report was planned for many years, other reports suggest that this may not be the case. So what exactly is missing from the UCR and why does it matter to social science research?

The 2016 UCR is missing tables from the Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), which include data on homicide victims’ relationships to perpetrators and other situational circumstances of homicides. Without these data, researchers — like those studying intimate partner and family violence — will be unable to track these aspects of homicides over time. In the past, researchers used the SHRs to examine how declining marriage rates, increased access to domestic violence services, and the improved economic standing of women contributed to a sizable decrease in spousal homicide from the 1970s to the 1990s. Others used the SHRs to examine the geography of interpersonal homicide, indicating that rural residents may be more susceptible to intimate partner and familial homicides than residents of metropolitan areas.
Like many other national databases, the Supplemental Homicide Reports suffer from some data quality issues. One study finds that data establishing the relationship between a victim and perpetrator in the SHRs may be particularly unreliable. While this may suggest that dropping some tables from the UCR may have been a strategic move by the FBI, most studies of the SHR data quality call for more efficient and effective data collection prior to compiling an SHR, as well as better variable measurement by the SHR, rather than complete dismissal of the reports.

Beyond homicide data, which also includes gang and drug-related homicides, the 2016 Uniform Crime Report is missing many additional tables. One of these is drug arrests by specific drug types, including synthetic opioids or heroin. This is a particularly surprising omission considering the opioid epidemic is a major policy concern for the Trump administration. The recent call to action by criminologists appears to have been successful — FBI Director Wray indicated at a December House Judiciary Committee hearing (see 3:28:35 for Wray’s statement) that the FBI now plans to republish the UCR with all of the missing tables included. This is good news for social scientists, who argue that we cannot have effective policies on social issues such as crime and drug use without the data that drive these critical decisions.

Push for Completion May Harm First-Generation Students

Jean Marie DeOrnellas on January 22, 2018
Photo by COD Newsroom, Flickr CC

Of the many so-called crises in higher ed, University of Wisconsin-Superior recently announced its plan to suspend 25 academic programs (including sociology). Administrators claimed their decision is part of a larger effort in higher education institutions to decrease the time students spend in college in order to increase graduation rates and lessen debt for low-income, first-generation students. Social science research, however, suggests curriculum shifts may not address first-generation students’ needs. 

First-generation students are more likely to come from low-income minority families, delay entry into college, attend college part-time, and work full-time while in school — all characteristics that reduce the likelihood of completing a degree. Only 27 percent of first-generation college students at four-year institutions graduate in four years, compared to 42 percent of students whose parents graduated from college. And only five percent of low-income, first-generation students who begin at two-year community colleges completed a bachelor’s degree within six years. Further, first generation students often have limited access to the “cultural capital” that privileges wealthier students.
The completion agenda — an effort to increase completion rates, especially among community college students — aims to compensate for differences in cultural capital by making graduation requirements clear and accessible. It can also include limiting course or curricular options in an attempt to reduce “wasted” credits. But simply reducing the number of credits taken does not address the fundamental challenge of how to to pay for both tuition and basic needs, a major reason why students drop courses, take semesters off, and leave school. In addition, a completion agenda may limit low-income, first-generation students to low-quality programs, while more prestigious institutions offer privileged students broad selections that are transferable across many professions.

 

Best of 2017: The Immigration-Crime Paradox

Ryan Larson on January 10, 2018
Photo by Minnesota Historical Society, Flickr CC

Originally posted April 10, 2017.

From Trump’s attempted restriction on immigration to his talk of building a wall on the country’s southern border, immigration policy has received renewed attention among both politicians and the public. A common reason for restricting immigration flows is association between immigration and crimes, which was explicitly mentioned by Trump along the campaign trail.  Social science agrees that immigration and crime are interconnected, but not in the way Trump and others claim.

Individual level data show that immigrants are actually less likely to engage in violent behavior than non-immigrants, with first generation immigrants being the least likely to commit crime as compared to second or third generation immigrants. Similarly, studies also find that areas with high proportions of immigrant residents are associated with lower levels of neighborhood violence and drug-crime when compared to similar neighborhoods with fewer immigrants. This association is best explained by the increases in social organization — culturally-based buffers like strong familial and neighborhood ties — and the associated economic gains stimulated by the influx of immigrants.
This association between immigration and lower crime rates is stronger in areas with more opportunities for immigrant political action. Cities with higher levels of minority political representation and pro-immigrant legislation enhance the buffering effect of immigration on both homicide and robbery.
What’s troubling is that even though immigrants and the areas they inhabit are associated with lower levels of crime, both documented and undocumented individuals are more likely to be incarcerated and receive longer prison sentences, even when controlling for race/ethnicity, crime severity, and other factors.

Navigating Multiracial Identities

Allison Nobles and Amber Joy Powell on December 21, 2017
Photo by taylormackenzie, Flickr CC

Church bells ring in England, as the country prepares for the royal wedding between Prince Harry and American actress Meghan Markle next spring. While royal weddings have long stirred excitement among local and foreign regions alike, commentators have been quick to speculate how Markle’s identity as a biracial woman – African American mother and white American father – might shape the future of the British monarchy. The speculation surrounding Markle’s racial identity highlights the complexities of being multiracial in an increasingly diverse, yet still discriminatory, global world. Sociological studies can help us better appreciate how mixed-race individuals navigate the societal perceptions of their identities.

The recognition and visibility of mixed-race individuals and identities has grown in recent decades, yet the histories, meanings, and responses to mixed racial identities vary considerably within and across international contexts. While the U.S. primarily emphasizes “bi-racial” as rooted in a white and nonwhite racial system, in Latin America, mixed-race identities fall within a more flexible “tri-racial”system. For instance, individuals from Brazil and the Caribbean trace their mixed-race origins back to colonial conquest centuries ago, and thus mixed-race people have been considered a central part of the national identity in these locations. Understanding these differences further our understandings of how race is socially constructed.
While some mixed-race people embrace a multiracial identity, others use strategies to appear as monoracial. For black-white biracial individuals, this means attempting to appear as either white or black. Individuals in one U.S. study reported tanning, combing their hair, speaking, and dressing in a certain way to appear as more white or black depending upon the potential social gains in any given context. Nevertheless, as we might expect from the experiences of other people of color, mixed-race individuals often face mistreatment from whites and non-whites alike for their appearance. Biracial women, for example, report receiving frequent mistreatment from non-biracial black women, who often accuse them of thinking they are “all that” because of their light skin and hair texture.
In some contexts, multiracial individuals are preferred above whites. And dating is no exception. Within romantic relationships, sexual and dating partners tend to exoticize biracial individuals. For some, perceived racial ambiguity makes biracial individuals ideal for casual sexual encounters, while others are sought after because their partners believe they will make beautiful babies. One recent study suggested that mixed-race women may be more likely to self-identify as “multiracial” than mixed-race men because the multiracial identity is more associated with traditional perceptions of feminine beauty. Despite individual and systemic preferences for biracial people, this preference often comes at a cost of commodifying their bodies, and many cannot escape discrimination that have historically oppressed people of color.