Members Of Different Social Groups Research Articles

The Social Management of Ambition

This study of “the social management of ambition” (Hopper 1968) analyzes the changes in occupational expectations that occur among a group of ambitious high school seniors during the seven years after graduation. The predictions of a socialization and of a social reproduction model of the process of expectations change are compared using data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972. Loglinear analysis is used to estimate a model, with a focus on the roles played by race, gender, social origins, and marriage. Less than one-fifth of the original sample remained “on track” toward achieving their original goals, most often members of already advantaged groups (whites and those from upper-middle-class homes). Married women were among the “cumulatively disadvantaged,” unlike their single peers. Marriage in particular had very different consequences for members of different social groups.

The rest room and equal opportunity

At the risk of appearing disrespectful, let me say that the best way to understand equal opportunity is to use the public toilet. Sometimes a gross approach can best clarify a subtle issue. Through the example of how society is organized to provide men and women with the capacity to relieve themselves, we can understand what it takes, as a more general matter, to provide members of different social groups with authentic equal opportunity. In many public buildings, the amount of floor area dedicated for the men's room and the women's room is the same. The prevailing public bathroom doctrine in the U.S. is one of segregation among the genders, but with equality the guiding ideology. In some jurisdictions, this square footage equality is enshrined in law. Such an arrangement follows the dictum that equality can be achieved only by policies that are gender-blind (or color-blind or ethnic-blind) in the allocation of a public resource. To give less to women (or blacks or Hispanics) would be discrimination; to give more would be reverse discrimination.' Women and men have the same proportion of a building to use as rest rooms. Presumably this should provide members of both genders with equal opportunity for dealing with their bodily needs in a timely and convenient way. The trouble with this sort of equality is that, being blind, it fails to recognize differences between men as a group and women as a group. These differences are not amenable to easy change. Part of women's demand for bathrooms can not exist for men because only women menstruate. Women make trips to the rest room to secure hygienic and socially appropriate adaptations to this physical fact. And because men's physiology suits them for the use of urinals, a large number of men can be serviced by a relatively small physical space. Women in our society use toilets to urinate, and toilets require a larger area than urinals. By creating men's and women's rooms of the same size, society guarantees that individual women will be worse off than individual men. By dis-

Types of Consensus in Public Evaluations of Crime: An Illustration of Strategies for Measuring "Consensus"

One of the most consistent findings of criminological research is that members of different social groups seem to agree on their ratings of the seriousness of crimes. This finding of also appears to be extremely robust, with alternative scaling techniques, cross-cultural comparisons, and measures of related concepts (e.g., disapproval) yielding similar results. ' Unfortunately, clear guidelines for establishing how much and what type of agreement qualifies as have not been established. Moreover, even if various types of exist in public evaluations of crime, an adequate explanation for these shared conceptions remains conspicuously absent. This paper focuses on strategies for measuring consensus in public evaluations of crime. It identifies four distinct types of on public ratings of crime in past research. To illustrate these types of and explore the differences between them, various statistical techniques are used on a previously drawn sample of Baltimore residents2 to measure the extent of each type of consensus. The types of required for various applications of these studies to theoretical and policy issues are also discussed. The paper concludes with a discussion of