The sociology of housing has clear implications for and overlaps with sociological studies of inequality. However, gender is still overlooked and undertheorized in housing research. Drawing on gender scholars, we caution against the tendency to treat gender as a synonym for women, as a variable that compares outcomes to those of men, and/or as synonymous with binary roles (e.g., poor mothers of color versus affluent, White gentrifiers). We demonstrate how a subset of scholars departs from these tendencies and model avenues for further research, for example by viewing housing and gender as coconstitutive. Overall, we argue that the measurement of inequality at the city and neighborhood level stymies focus on gender. However, by taking housing units—and, crucially, the households that they contain—as their unit of analysis, sociologists of housing are well-positioned to merge attention to the importance of gender identities, expectations, and roles with analyses of multiple overlapping levels and sites of inequality.

Affirmative action began as a bipartisan policy to address racial inequality in the workplace and in higher education. Given its small footprint in college admissions (most colleges never practiced it), its bipartisan support in the early years, evidence documenting its positive impact, and renewed attention to racial inequality since 2020, why did it come to an end in 2023? This review traces the dominant cultural framings of affirmative action in college admissions and their changing usage in US political and legal systems over time, the relationship between framing and public support for affirmative action, and evidence for the central frames used to defend or critique the policy. I argue that understanding affirmative action's framing over time by political actors is key to understanding its demise. During the 1960s and 1970s, university leaders framed affirmative action as a mechanism to promote racial equity. From the late 1970s, advocates reframed the policy as a tool to promote the benefits of diversity. During that same period, critics advanced a reverse discrimination frame. As the reverse discrimination and diversity frames took hold in court, it became impossible for advocates to successfully excavate the earlier equity framing. As such, defenders were left with the diversity frame, a weak defense of a critical policy that eventually fell.

This review article examines how politics shape healthcare. In addition to formal law and policy, the politics of healthcare include the larger cultural frameworks that politicize health and illness, rendering some bodies visible while ignoring or erasing others, and the institutions that offer or deny healthcare services. This article highlights both the definitional politics, that is, the contests of power that set the frames of healthcare, and also the politics of implementation and practice that powerfully shape healthcare institutions and experiences. In doing so, this article considers how politics structure the interactions within healthcare systems and around health and illness, and how those engaged in these care relationships must navigate power and politics within these broader organizational and cultural structures.

Because all human activity occurs at least partially in physical space, explaining sociological outcomes often benefits from modeling spatial patterns of social activity. This article reviews methods that sociologists may wish to use to analyze sociological phenomena based on three different types of data indexed to space in three ways: areal data indexed to polygons on the Earth's surface, point data indexed to latitudes and longitudes, and spatial ties data that measure relationships between people and place. Issues common to all three types of data, including privacy, changing between types of data, and model assumptions, deserve careful consideration, particularly to understand how those issues introduce systematic biases into analyses of spatially indexed data. The plethora of existing methods offer the chance to improve sociological explanations of spatial patterns of social life. The thoughtful collection of spatially indexed data and the construction of innovative variables that test ideas about how space influences social outcomes offer the best opportunity to improve sociological explanations for the influence of spatial processes in social life.

US immigration policies have profound impacts on immigrant families. In a robust field of study across disciplines, scholars have documented how the multi-layered, complex immigration regime opens and closes doors to opportunity, health, education, safety, and peace. With a rise in harsh and unpredictable enforcement practices, immigrant families—including undocumented, liminally legal, and US citizen members—navigate the contradictory laws at the federal, state, and local levels to thrive as best as they can. In our review, we encourage scholars to extend their analysis to what happens during the migrant journey and at the border, as these experiences are also impacted by US immigration policies and potentially impact families long after they settle in the United States. The ever-changing labyrinthine legal landscape and its expansive reach provide fertile ground for further research, and we urge scholars to center ethics in their work with immigrant families made vulnerable through immigration laws.

Social capital is among the most broadly used concepts in social science. Despite its shared understanding as beneficial resources available from the connections between people, authors vary widely in their conceptualizations of social capital. To extract clarity from these disparate perspectives, we offer a systematic framework for conceptualizing social capital, which identifies three primary theoretical dimensions of scholars’ conceptualizations of social capital: ( a ) where beneficial resources reside, ranging from within individuals to the relationships between individuals; ( b ) beneficial network structure, differentiating closure from brokerage arrangements; and ( c ) the level to which rewards accrue, distinguishing individual from collective benefits. We illustrate how combining these dimensions produces a unifying perspective that fosters reintegrating social capital's disconnected conceptualizations. Finally, we draw on this framework to both reconcile seeming contradictions and gaps in social capital scholarship, and provide a principled means for prioritizing questions for future developments of social capital.

An unprecedented recent wave of sport-based activism has brought renewed attention to sport as a force for racial progress and change. Researchers have investigated factors that facilitate protest, analyzed media coverage of and polarized reactions to such activism, and begun to document institutional and societal impacts. In contrast to long-standing sociological critiques, this work suggests that sport can make contributions to racial justice and change. However, these contributions necessitate deliberate contestation and are mainly symbolic and communicative; more concrete, institutional change requires other, nonsport movements and organizations. Also, athletic activism can be co-opted by the sport industry's complicity with profit and its fraught relationship with politics, and it often provokes backlash that can have unintended, countervailing effects. Ultimately, sport's multifaceted, mostly cultural contributions are best analyzed when situated in a broad sociopolitical field and theorized via a critical-dramaturgical framework where sport serves as a platform for the public display of social struggle.

Unauthorized immigration status profoundly shapes the social and economic outcomes of migrants in the United States, with wide reaching impacts on wages, work life, physical and mental health, and integration into schools, neighborhoods, and local communities. These effects accumulate across the life course, reverberate across generations, and systematically undermine the social mobility of immigrants and their families, limiting their incorporation into mainstream institutions. While research on these associations is vast, knowledge gaps persist due to enduring methodological and data limitations, as well as an unauthorized population that is growing more diverse in its origins and its range of status protections. We review research on the impacts of immigrant legal status, describe persistent methodological obstacles, and explore new approaches and directions for advancing sociological research.

Online nonprobability samples provide social scientists with opportunities to conduct surveys and experiments on large, diverse samples at modest prices. Researchers may find bewildering the options offered by the many commercial entities that provide research participants, and our review seeks to orient researchers to key issues about their use. We discuss principles and evidence regarding estimates from nonprobability samples versus those from probability samples. We also describe methods for addressing certain types of problem participants that one encounters in these samples: professional respondents, participants who are inattentive or have low linguistic competence, and bogus participants (increasingly in the form of bots). We urge researchers not to take data quality for granted, not to rely on indirect information to vouch for data quality, and to proactively build methods that allow for the evaluation of data quality into their instruments.

This review provides 10 actionable recommendations for advancing the scientific study of structural racism through theoretically grounded and empirically robust measures and methods. By offering conceptual and analytical clarity, these recommendations aim to enhance research rigor on the structure and function of racism. For each recommendation, we (a) delineate key theoretical principles tied to specific features of structural racism, (b) evaluate the strengths and limitations of existing measures and methods, and (c) propose best practices for measurement and modeling that align with theory and rigorous methodologies. Given the complex, multifaceted, and dynamic nature of structural racism, we emphasize the necessity of embracing epistemological and methodological pluralism. Scholars are encouraged to integrate insights through triangulation by leveraging diverse theoretical frameworks, varied data sources, and a wide array of methods. The review concludes by addressing pressing challenges and identifying opportunities for innovative research to deepen our understanding of structural racism and its enduring impacts in racialized societies.