American Sociological Research Articles

Queer Economics: Same-Sex Marriage Rate vs. Economics Crisis Expectation

Marriage is not just a promise between two individuals; it serves as a bridge between two families and provides the nurturing ground for many new lives. Research studies have indicated that marriage can enhance the subjective well-being of married individuals[i]. However, beneath the weighty commitments and responsibilities, the dissolution of marriage can increase illness rates and psychological distress among divorced women. [ii]While mainstream society still upholds the social stability brought by marriage and advocates it as an indispensable part of the human lifecycle, people are actively exploring alternative romantic relationships or family models, such as cohabitation. Many individuals engage in cohabitation as a prelude to formal marriage, viewing it as an experimental version of married life, enjoying the everyday romantic relationship without the legal costs and property entanglements. [iii]This article considers cohabitation as an alternative to marriage, which can also be understood as a substitution in consumption when people are deterred from marriage due to the high costs associated with divorce. Therefore, strategies people adopt towards marriage are often influenced by changes in societal patterns and the turbulence in politics and the economy. In comparison to heterosexual couples, the dynamics of marriage are more complex for same-sex couples. Apart from the ethical debates surrounding same-sex marriage, economic models have also demonstrated that same-sex marriage poses significant secular challenges. [iv]For instance, issues like post-marriage healthcare for same-sex couples and the impact of their married status on the labor market are still subjects of debate. However, these issues primarily target the challenges and research pertaining to the identity of being a same-sex individual. Nevertheless, as members of society, same-sex couples also experience the fluctuations brought about by broader social cycles, such as the impact of economic crises. There is relatively limited research in the field on how same-sex couples respond to widespread societal crises, and the strategies employed by same-sex couples during different economic crises can effectively reflect the natural state of this community within society.[v] [i] Janice K Kiecolt-Glaser and Tamara L Newton. (2001). Marriage and Health: His and Hers. American Psychological Association. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2001-01085-002. [ii] Frederick O Lorenz et al. (2006). The Short-Term and Decade-Long Effects of Divorce on Women’s Midlife Health. American Sociological Association. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002214650604700202. [iii] Brandon G Wagner, Kate H Choi, and Philip N Cohen. (2020). Decline in Marriage Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States. Sage Journals. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023120980328. [iv] DOUGLAS W ALLEN. (2006). An Economic Assessment of Same-Sex Marriage Laws. Semantic scholar. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/An-Economic-Assessment-of-Same-Sex-Marriage-Laws-Allen/513a92f3d397ae2b787094294aa465d48053ef53. [v] Malaczewska Paulina and Malaczewski Maciej. (1970, January 1). Marriage, Divorce and Coronavirus—Theoretical Analysis of the Influence of COVID-19 on Family Capital. Economics and Business Review. https://ideas.repec.org/a/vrs/ecobur/v8y2022i3p126-142n7.html.

As Transformações do Racismo Estrutural: entrevista com Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is internationally recognized as one of the leading proponents of the concept of "structural racism." Born in 1968 in Puerto Rico, he served as president of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2018. Currently a professor at Duke University, Bonilla-Silva has argued that the racialization of our social structures is more effective in reproducing inequalities than explicitly racist ideologies or political doctrines. In 2003, he published "Racism without Racists" (translated to Portuguese by Perspectiva in 2020), a book in which he suggests that the contemporary world experiences a "color-blind racism," wherein racial discrimination continues to operate despite widespread condemnation of racist values by various political movements. Despite the increasingly common use of the notion of structural racism, Bonilla-Silva's works remain relatively unknown in Brazil. For this reason, we conducted this interview with him in September 2023, addressing topics such as the structuring of racism in today's world, the impact of events like the brutal murder of George Floyd in the U.S., and the current challenges of anti-racism in Brazil and globally.

Promoting equity in urban heat: a greening approach for HOLC's legacy in Houston, Texas

ABSTRACT The lingering influence of the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a programme established during the 1930s as part of the New Deal, persists in creating a barrier that prevents progress for marginalised communities [Faber, J. 2020. “We Built This: Consequences of New Deal Era Intervention in America’s Racial Geography.” American Sociological Review 85 (5): 739–775. https://doi.org/10.1177/000312242094846]. Particularly notable is the urban heat island phenomenon, currently evident in numerous metropolitan areas nationwide, which disproportionately impacts neighbourhoods that were redlined due to the historical HOLC rankings and subsequent lack of financial investments. This study undertakes a comparative and analytical examination of temperature variations within HOLC-designated zones in Houston, Texas. It employs basic social indicators and evaluates tree canopy density through analysis of variance. Furthermore, spatial regression modelling is employed to mitigate temperature differentials between neighbourhoods characterised by urban tree canopy, especially focusing on the contrast between “A” and “D” zones. In addition, drawing on the statistical parameters derived from estimation, the study's scenario analysis uncovers that a 54% augmentation in tree canopy density within “D” zones would effectively establish thermal equity. As a result, elevating tree canopy density emerges as a strategy to curtail temperature discrepancies while concurrently introducing cooling impacts on surrounding districts. The dataset utilised for the study encompasses satellite-derived urban temperature records, spatially extensive data on tree canopy density, vulnerability insights from the U.S. Census Bureau, and demographic data, including the proportion of African American residents primarily concentrated in “D” graded districts. Thus, this study not only holds potential for enhancing circumstances within marginalised communities but also introduces a pathway to cultivate an enabling environment for all residents.

Who Authors Social Science? Demographics and the Production of Knowledge

Author demographics are of key epistemic importance in science—shaping the approaches to and contents of research—especially in social scientific knowledge production, yet we know very little about who produces social scientific publications. We fielded an original demographic survey of nearly 20,000 sociology, economics, and communication authors in the Web of Science from 2016–2020. Our results include not only details about gender and race/ethnicity but also the first descriptive statistics on social science authors’ sexuality, disability, parental education, and employment characteristics. We find authorship in the social sciences looks very different from other measures of disciplinary membership like who holds PhDs or faculty positions. For example, half of the authors in each discipline’s journals say that they are not a member of the discipline in which they published. Moreover, social science authors are considerably less diverse than other measures of disciplinary membership. In sociology, women constitute a majority of PhDs, faculty, and American Sociological Association members; by contrast, men make up a majority of sociology’s authors. Additionally, we include a wide array of descriptive statistics across a range of demographic characteristics, which will be of interest to inequality scholars, science scholars, and social scientists engaged in diversifying their disciplines.

Writing like a Bourdieusian Scholar: From The Craft of Sociology to the Writing Patterns in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales

AbstractThis paper is a debate on why Bourdieusian scholars have never fully embraced the “Introduction/Literature review/Data & methods/Results/Discussion” (ILDRD) article format which is mainstream in North American Sociological publications. This paper attempts to argue that Pierre Bourdieu, Jean‐Claude Chamboredon, and Jean‐Claude Passeron developed a different writing format – inspired by Gaston Bachelard's “applied rationalism” ‐‐ and which became more influential among French scholars. The Bourdieu inspired different writing patterns and reasoning, I argue, can be traced in the flagship journal Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales. This paper invites further debate on the differences in approaching article formats in the social sciences.

Sejarah Sosiologi Pendidikan

One of the goals of education is to develop each person to reach their highest potential and provide opportunities to achieve everything in life according to their natural abilities. However, there are still many people who doubt that any education system can achieve these goals perfectly. Several cases in schools that occur include inequality in school welfare with imperfect coordination of learning progress. The introduction of sociology in schools is rarely well received by students. In fact, people must be able to apply it in their daily social life. The method used is the qualitative research method Library Research using information collection such as books, journals, documents, magazines, stories and history from the library. The aim of this article is to understand how the history of the sociology of education developed in line with the development of social science. The result is that the birth of Sociology of Education was influenced by three factors, firstly the very rapid development of society, secondly by teacher factors, thirdly by motivational factors in education. Sociology became a separate science in the 19th century. In 1916, New York and Columbia universities established departments of educational sociology. In 1917, the first Sociology textbook was published, compiled by Walter R. Smith. In 1923, the Sociology of Education Association was formed by the Congress of the American Sociological Association. In Indonesia, the Sociology of Education course only appeared in 1967 and was included in the curriculum of the Didactic and Curriculum Department at the Faculty of Education, IKIP Yogyakarta. Figures in Sociology of Education include (a) Lester Frank Word (b) John Dewey (c) Emile Durkheim (d) Karl Mannheim (e) Talcott Parson (f) E George Payne.

Of the Meaning of Pedagogy: W. E. B. Du Bois, Racial Progress, and Positive Propaganda

A silence in the resurgence of scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois has been his work as an instructor. This article uses Du Bois’s early teaching experiences and reflections on the “ugly” progress of schooling to ask: What should guide the pedagogy of sociology instructors when racial progress is so ugly? I sketch here a pedagogy inspired by Du Bois—who was the teacher denied—which is motivated by a positive notion of propaganda. Du Bois was a radical pedagogue whose mixed-methods instructional agenda informed a critical Black Sociology and bridges recent calls by American Sociological Association leadership for a discipline that is more emancipatory and educative. Embracing the right to propaganda gives pedagogical teeth to honest appraisals on racial progress. Triangulating art, science, and agitation in our pedagogy offers a general compass, and my article concludes with one direction that compass might lead: a classroom assignment where my undergraduate students became “print propagandists.”

Program Review with the Curriculum Mapping Toolkit for Sociology: Assessment of a Publicly Available Resource for Sociology Departments

The American Sociological Association identified 12 major recommendations for the undergraduate major, which include 11 learning goals articulated in the sociological literacy framework. In total, these recommendations identified upward of 70 different curricular elements that optimal sociology programs should consider satisfying. This article shows how curriculum mapping combined with an organized set of resources (the Curriculum Mapping Toolkit for Sociology [CMTS]) facilitates productive discussions that identify program goals, program strengths, program weaknesses, and pathways for program improvement. Data rely on the CMTS itself, which tracked department engagement with different elements of program review, and appraisals of department representatives who committed to presenting the opportunity for curriculum review to their colleagues. Although the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many departments’ capacities to work fully with the CMTS, data demonstrate that the CMTS was met with strong interest by department leaders and their department colleagues. Its application positively impacted program quality and collegial relationships. Department leaders evaluated the CMTS as being “useful” or “very useful” and considered the collective work involved as being both manageable and productive.

Contributors to the American Sociological Review, 2010

Contributors to the American Sociological Review, 2010

Contesting Power From the Periphery: The Latin American Sociological Imagination and the Media

Although today media and communication studies across Latin America are closely linked to critical sociology, this was not always the case. In this article, we explore how the interaction between social communication (which includes communication and media studies) and critical sociology, in the Latin American context, evolved over time. In so doing, we examine how, and in which directions, media theory has developed and how it relates profoundly with critical sociology. This piece is an attempt to summarize this process and look at current contributions that propose more inclusive and participatory media. The key argument that it took a long time for Latin America’s media studies to link itself with critical sociology but once that happened, it produced a distinctive school of thought that is counter-hegemonic and directs itself towards the contestation of power and oppression by linking itself with the popular.

Passages

Donald A. MacKenzie's Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust is a highly readable and generally insightful history of, primarily, the effort to prove computer programs safe and correct. It won the Robert K. Merton (see the Passages column for October 2020) award from the Science, Knowledge, and Technology section of the American Sociological Association in 2003. It is a book of history and sociology, but is likely to also introduce some technical content that will be new to, yet of interest to, many software engineers.

Strangely Hesitant about Anti-Blackness: A Comment on Quadlin and Montgomery

We raise concerns about Quadlin and Montgomery’s Social Psychology Quarterly article, “When a Name Gives You Pause,” a study of whether racialized names affect the time to dog adoption in a county shelter. Our comment is guided by the recent insistence of American Sociological Association leadership for greater critical introspection in sociological research. First, the study is ahistorical by overlooking histories of human-animal relations and naming in the construction of anti-Blackness. Second, the study is acontextual by contorting labor market research and color-blind perspectives in a manner that directs undue attention to the treatment of dogs without specifying the concrete disadvantages for Black people. The study’s narrow focus on adopters misrepresents organizational factors within animal shelters. These various oversights invest Quadlin and Montgomery’s article in a whiteness-centered sociological tradition. We urge divesting from this tradition and conclude with a call for sociology to be more educative and reflexive.

Interview With Adrian Raftery

SummaryProfessor Adrian E. Raftery is the Boeing International Professor of Statistics and Sociology and an adjunct professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and obtained a BA in Mathematics (1976) and an MSc in Statistics and Operations Research (1977) at Trinity College Dublin. He obtained a doctorate in mathematical statistics in 1980 from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France, under the supervision of Paul Deheuvels. He was a lecturer in statistics at Trinity College Dublin from 1980 to 1986, and then an associate (1986–1990) and full (1990‐present) professor of statistics and sociology at the University of Washington. He was the founding Director of the Center for Statistics and Social Sciences (1999–2009). Professor Raftery has published over 200 articles in peer‐reviewed statistical, sociological and other journals. His research focuses on Bayesian model selection and Bayesian model averaging, model‐based clustering, inference for deterministic simulation models, and the development of new statistical methods for demography, sociology, and the environmental and health sciences. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and an elected Member of the Sociological Research Association. He has won the Population Association of America's Clifford C. Clogg Award, the American Sociological Association's Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for Distinguished Contribution to Knowledge, the Jerome Sacks Award for Outstanding Cross‐Disciplinary Research from the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, the Parzen Prize for Statistical Innovation, and the Science Foundation Ireland St. Patrick's Day Medal. He is also a former Coordinating and Applications Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association and a former Editor of Sociological Methodology. He was identified as the world's most cited researcher in mathematics for the decade 1995–2005 by Thomson‐ISI. Thirty‐three students have obtained PhD's working under Raftery's supervision, of whom 21 hold or have held tenure‐track university faculty positions. He has over 150 academic descendants. This interview took place over two sessions in March 2023.

Assessment of emotional stress among patients suffering from obstructive sleep apnea: A cross-sectional study

ABSTRACT Background: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a sleep disorder in which the upper airway is partially or completely blocked during sleep. As a result, sleep arousal and arterial oxygen saturation are reduced. According to the epidemiological survey, OAS is relatively common among people that may be associated with psychiatric illnesses. Objectives: The primary objective was to evaluate the stress level among patients suffering from OSA. The secondary objective was to compare the gender preference for stress among patients suffering from OSA. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study, approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee, was performed to assess emotional stress among patients suffering from OSA. The study involved 20 participants diagnosed with OSA and reported to the Respiratory Department. The stress levels of the study participants were evaluated with a validated, Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) questionnaire given by the American Sociological Association (ASA). Result: The stress levels presented by the study participants showed that 40% (n = 8) subjects had moderate stress and 60% (n = 12) had severe stress and 30.3% of females depicted emotional stress and 26.2% of males for the same. Conclusion: There is a high psychological stress level among patients suffering from OSA. The females had higher predictions when compared to males. Such patients should be offered an intervention program aimed at stress management to enhance their quality of life.

Beauty and status: Matching and exchange within Chinese marriages

Status exchange in marriage refers to a marriage pattern in which one spouse compensates for his or her disadvantage in one status area relative to the other spouse with an advantage in another. Two prominent examples of marriage exchange discussed in the existing literature are race–status exchange and beauty–status exchange. Although the marriage exchange theory is well supported by early studies, in recent years, its applicability has been questioned by some scholars. Protracted debates on the topic in question were launched in two top sociological journals, the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology. This study reviews these debates and offers an in-depth theoretical investigation into the relationship between matching and exchange, and the premise of marriage exchange theory. In addition, we collect and analyze the data from the five waves of the China Family Panel Studies (2010–2018) on beauty–status exchanges and other forms of marriage exchanges in China. We found little evidence of beauty–status exchanges in Chinese marriages and even the well-assumed exchange of “woman's beauty for man's talent” lacks sound empirical support. However, there are ample evidences of exchanges among the four status factors of education, occupation, income, and family background. As indicators of socioeconomic status, these four variables are homogeneous in nature, and therefore can more easily substitute for one another. We argue that the validity of marriage exchange theory depends on the similarity or substitutability between the elements in exchange. Thus, we can neither completely accept nor reject the marriage exchange theory.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Advancing Publicly Engaged Sociology

Publicly engaged sociology seeks to use our research and work to engage stakeholders within and beyond the university to analyze and fight inequality or injustice, and to address other issues society faces. Sociologists who do such work help universities (and other institutions) keep their social contract to use our work to make society better. This Special Issue continues the Eastern Sociological Society's work on publicly engaged sociology, including the 2022 creation of Public Sociology Awards for Early Career and Post‐Tenure scholars, and my Presidential Address. Contributors to this volume can hopefully serve as examples to younger sociologists, because these articles describe how the authors have done excellent basic research and used it to address societal problems, and have navigated hazards of such work, including the MeSearch gaze. Contributors do publicly engaged sociological work from the most macro‐level, such as analyzing how algorithms promote division and undermine democracy or how to better disseminate sociological work to wider audiences, to work on national policies to create more equitable universities, to the local contexts, including working to promote play for elementary school students, or oust sheriffs responsible for family separation, or restore citizenship stripped from naturalized immigrants. Authors range across the spectrum of sociological careers, from current doctoral students, to postdocs, to tenured professors, to the American Sociological Association's 2024 President.

Gratitude to Ken Plummer

The author weaves her favorite quotes from Ken Plummer’s celebrated book, Telling Sexual Stories with her own voice to offer a modest tribute and express her gratitude to him. In this exercise of creative writing, she celebrates his contributions to her intellectual and professional growth as a feminist ethnographer, a witness to endless sexual stories with populations of Mexican origin in both countries, the United States and Mexico. The author reflects on the priceless lessons she learned from him, since that day she listened to him from a corner at the American Sociological Association conference, when she was a shy graduate student.

Beyond myopia in communications and the sociology of media

ABSTRACT This special issue of Information, Communication, and Society (ICS) is edited by the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology (CITAMS) section of the American Sociological Association and includes papers that were first presented at either the 2021 or 2022 ASA meetings or Media Sociology Symposia. For this special issue, an innovative editorial approach was taken that brought the editing process into a graduate classroom. That process is described below along with a brief introduction to themes of the selected articles. Key themes for this special issue include content analysis, ethics, privacy, new economy, and digital inequality.

Sociological Imaginations for Anti-Racist Futures: An Interview with Dr Prudence Carter

In this interview, Dr Prudence Carter, 2021–2022 President-Elect of the American Sociological Association, discusses how sociology can contribute to anti-racist futures across national contexts. Her insights point to the need for greater self-awareness in sociology regarding race and racism, for clarification of our aims and for better articulation and translation of popularized theoretical concepts, such as structural racism, to the general public. To achieve radical inclusion in the future, she highlights the importance of engaging in public and policy sociology, by explaining and substantiating policies and practices derived from our research. She also underscores the significance and value of comparative cross-national and multidisciplinary collaborative research. Most importantly, she brings to the fore the necessity of imagining new epistemological and methodological approaches to study the conditions that will enable our societies to attain equitable and anti-racist futures. Fundamentally, this involves extending our sociological imaginations.

Spitting at Jim Crow

Spitting at Jim Crow