Social Science Research Research Articles

Diversifying Gender Categories and the Sex/Gender System

The growing visibility of transgender and nonbinary people raises important sociological questions about how the structure of sex and gender is shifting and underscores necessary changes to research practice. We review what is known about emerging gender identities and their implications for sociological understandings of the relationship between sex and gender and the maintenance of the sex/gender system of inequality. Transgender and nonbinary identities are increasingly common among younger cohorts and improved survey measurements of sex and gender are expanding information about these changes. In the United States, an additional gender category seems to be solidifying in public usage even as the higher status of masculinity over femininity persists. The continuing power of the normative binary contributes to both violent backlash and characteristic patterns of discrimination against gender diverse people; yet, underlying support for nondiscrimination in the workplace is stronger than commonly recognized. New, more consistent efforts to account for gender diversity in social science research are needed to fully understand these changes.

Rights in China: Myths, Abuses, and Politics

This article presents a sociological perspective on understanding rights in China, examining the interplay between multiple myths of rights, rights abuses, and the politics of rights within various social and physical spaces. It highlights competing myths of rights held by the state, ordinary citizens, rights activists, and legal professionals. The article examines how rights abuses contribute to rights consciousness and mobilization across different human rights domains in a repressive political context. By analyzing the politics of rights in interconnected spaces, such as the street, the legal system, the global arena, and cyberspace, it emphasizes the importance of continuous engagement between domestic and overseas actors in shaping China's human rights future. The article encourages social science researchers to thoroughly examine the myths, abuses, and politics of rights before making normative judgments about China's human rights conditions.

Use & Abuse of Personal Information, Part II: Robust Generation of Fake IDs for Privacy Experimentation

When personal information is shared across the Internet, we have limited confidence that the designated second party will safeguard it as we would prefer. Privacy policies offer insight into the best practices and intent of the organization, yet most are written so loosely that sharing with undefined third parties is to be anticipated. Tracking these sharing behaviors and identifying the source of unwanted content is exceedingly difficult when personal information is shared with multiple such second parties. This paper formulates a model for realistic fake identities, constructs a robust fake identity generator, and outlines management methods targeted towards online transactions (email, phone, text) that pass both cursory machine and human examination for use in personal privacy experimentation. This fake ID generator, combined with a custom account signup engine, are the core front-end components of our larger Use and Abuse of Personal Information system that performs one-time transactions that, similar to a cryptographic one-time pad, ensure that we can attribute the sharing back to the single one-time transaction and/or specific second party. The flexibility and richness of the fake IDs also serve as a foundational set of control variables for a wide range of social science research questions revolving around personal information. Collectively, these fake identity models address multiple inter-disciplinary areas of common interest and serve as a foundation for eliciting and quantifying personal information-sharing behaviors.

Polio, public health memories and temporal dissonance of re-emerging infectious diseases in the global north

Social science research on polio has been centred in the global south, where countries that remain endemic or vulnerable to outbreaks are located. However, closely-related strains of poliovirus were detected in the sewage systems of several New York State counties and London boroughs in 2022. These detections constituted the first encounters with polio in the United States and United Kingdom for a generation – for both public health agencies and publics alike. This paper takes the transnational spread of poliovirus in 2022 as an opportunity to critique how public health memories of twentieth-century polio epidemics were mobilised to encourage vaccine uptake among groups considered vulnerable to transmission, notably Orthodox Jewish families. The study integrates data collected in London and New York as part of academic engagement with health protection responses to the spread of polio. Methods in both settings involved ethnographic research, and a total of 59 in-depth semi-structured interviews with public health professionals, healthcare providers, and Orthodox Jewish community partners and residents. Analysis of results demonstrate that narratives of epidemiological progress were deployed in public health responses in London and New York, often through references to sugar cubes, iron lungs, and timelines that narrate the impact of routine childhood immunisations. While memories of polio were deployed in both settings to provoke an urgency to vaccinate, vulnerable publics instead considered the more recent legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic when deciding whether to trust recommendations and responses. Critical attention to memory places analysis on the divergences between institutional (public health agencies) and peopled (publics) responses to disease events. Responses to re-emerging infectious disease outbreaks engender a temporal dissonance when historical narratives are evoked in ways that contrast with the contemporary dilemmas of people and parents.

Critically quantitative: measuring community cultural wealth on surveys

ABSTRACT This study explores the quantitative measurement of Community Cultural Wealth (CCW), an asset-based approach to understanding the experiences of students from systemically marginalized racial/ethnic groups. Grounded in critical race theory, CCW focuses on forms of capital utilized by marginalized populations that are often unrecognized/undervalued by traditional social science research. Most previous studies on CCW have relied on qualitative methods; we argue that quantitative critical race theory, or ‘QuantCrit’, can complement those studies by statistically specifying assets possessed by students from marginalized populations as a step toward reimagining institutions that elevate their importance. This paper aims to develop a CCW scale to quantitatively explore the concept, while acknowledging the overlaps among and the dynamic nature of the forms of capital emphasized in conceptualization. Findings from exploratory factor analysis are largely consistent with the original CCW framework but suggest some important ways in which the framework can be further developed.

Show and tell: scaffolding practices in lower secondary social science classrooms

ABSTRACT Inquiry and teaching with high levels of student activity are central to social science education, and research has shown the importance of scaffolding and other expressions of supportive structures in teaching (Christensen, 2021; Mathé, 2020). Nevertheless, there have been few studies documenting how actual teaching takes place and whether a teacher’s activities support the work of their students. This article, part of QUINT—Quality in Nordic Teaching, drew on video observations from 16 lower secondary social science classrooms in Denmark and Norway. We began by using the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation (PLATO; Grossman, 2019) to identify the extent of teacher scaffolding practices. From this, we analysed the scaffolding to understand what kinds can be observed in social science education, with a specific focus on inquiry-based teaching. Although we identified scaffolding in a minority of lesson segments, what we did observe was related to a number of skills and strategies, both generic and specific to social science education. We concluded by identifying the strong potential in developing scaffolding practices related to social science inquiry further, before discussing implications and opportunities based on our findings.

The effects of facial appearance on measures of generalized trust

Research suggests various associations between generalized trust and a wide range of economic, political, and social dimensions. Despite its importance, there is considerable debate about how best to measure generalized trust. One recent solution operationalizes generalized trust as the average of trust ratings across a small set of trust domains and human faces. Here, we investigate whether heterogeneity in facial appearance affects the psychometric properties of these new instruments. In a survey experiment conducted with a sample of U.S. adults (n = 5001), we randomly assigned respondents to one of five conditions that varied the features of human and AI-synthesized faces. Irrespective of the condition, respondents rated each face along four trust domains. We find that facial heterogeneity has negligible effects on the measurement validity and measurement equivalence of these new instruments. Small differences are observed on a subset of faces for some psychometric tests. These findings contribute to a growing body of work using faces to measure generalized trust, and demonstrate the utility of using AI-synthesized faces in social science research more broadly.

Can large language models estimate public opinion about global warming? An empirical assessment of algorithmic fidelity and bias

Large language models (LLMs) can be used to estimate human attitudes and behavior, including measures of public opinion, a concept referred to as algorithmic fidelity. This study assesses the algorithmic fidelity and bias of LLMs in estimating public opinion about global warming. LLMs were conditioned on demographics and/or psychological covariates to simulate survey responses. Findings indicate that LLMs can effectively reproduce presidential voting behaviors but not global warming opinions unless the issue relevant covariates are included. When conditioned on both demographic and covariates, GPT-4 demonstrates improved accuracy, ranging from 53% to 91%, in predicting beliefs and attitudes about global warming. Additionally, we find an algorithmic bias that underestimates the global warming opinions of Black Americans. While highlighting the potential of LLMs to aid social science research, these results underscore the importance of conditioning, model selection, survey question format, and bias assessment when employing LLMs for survey simulation.

“But Did You Die?”: Intimate Partner Violence as a Social Determinant of Health

Many Black women experience worsening abuse; however, there is a significant number of women experiencing non-physical forms of abuse, what I term hidden abuse. In one in five domestic violence cases, the fatal or life-threatening event was the first episode of physical violence the woman experienced from their partner, suggesting that some Black women die before they receive help. Violence against Black women requires a systems approach that redresses resource inequities. I attempt to expand upon fundamental cause theory, a systems theory used by social science researchers, to show that intimate partner violence is a social determinant of health. I apply this theory to an autoethnographic case study of hidden abuse. Implications for Social Work research, practice, and policy include developing, advocating for, and evaluating programs and policies that increase financial instability, affordable housing, and access to community networks and social support for victims of violence.

An ‘all-world ageing’ perspective and its wider ethics of care: An empirical illustration

Recent commentaries have proposed ‘all-world ageing’ as a new perspective for social scientific ageing research. It is based on the theoretical observation that the ageing process involves all forms of entities co-ageing relationally with each other, and with their surrounds. Its disciplinary implications hence being that what we categorize as ageing in social scientific ageing research should not be limited to human bodies, and that ageing non-humans should be brought under its purview. To empirically illustrate these theoretical and disciplinary assertions, and explore their implications, the current paper reports a study of how people co-age with non-humans they interact with in their daily lives. Sixteen people aged 66–90 were interviewed, ten of them also being observed at those times. The findings show some intricate and diverse relations that involve their co-ageing with varied biological entities and nature surrounds (such as plants, domestic animals and green spaces) and varied non-biological entities and non-nature surrounds (such as materials, technologies, accommodations, organizations and infrastructures). Meanwhile, important crosscutting themes – including lifespan, function and aesthetics – emerge as objectives of care, valued and exercised in broad terms. This empirical reconnaissance shows the potential for an all-world ageing perspective to engage diverse societal challenges and inform diverse areas of practice as part of a wider ethics of care. From it, a number of important considerations and undertakings arise for future scholarship.

A tutorial for integrating generative AI in mixed methods data analysis

The current article used real data to demonstrate the analysis and synthesis of Mixed Methods Research (MMR) data with generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI). I explore how reliable and valid Gen AI data outputs are and how to improve their use. The current content is geared towards enhancing methodological application regardless of field or discipline and includes access to a prompt library and examples of using outputs. The demonstration data used emanated from a study done in South Africa, with a quantitative sample size of 969 first-year engineering students and, for the qualitative part, 14 first-year students. In the current article, I compare my original analysis to ChatGPT results. Generative AI as a mind tool is best used with human insight, and I found this to be especially true when coding qualitative data. ChatGPT produced generic codes if asked to do inductive coding, and the results improved when training the Gen AI on human examples, which led to moderate and significant correlations between human and machine coding. The quantitative analysis was accurate for the descriptive statistics, but the researcher had to use best judgment to select the correct inferential analysis. Quantitative and qualitative analysis should be conducted separately in generative AI before asking the Chatbot for help with mixed methods results. In the current paper, I give guidelines and a tutorial on how to use chatbots in an ethically responsible and scientifically sound manner for research in social and human sciences.

The Consequences of Peirce's Theory of Agential Ideas for Qualitative Research

AbstractThe recent shift in social science research toward philosophies of the more‐than‐human has pushed many scholars to question their understanding of units of analysis and agency. While many engage with agencies of the material, few have attempted to address what might be called the agency of ideas. Here, Alexander Pratt argues that engaging with the agency of ideas is particularly important when dealing with issues like racism, which is the focus of this article. He believes that one reason for the lack of such engagement is the seemingly undefined nature of what we might think of as ideas. In this article, Pratt offers a conception of agential ideas developed through his reading of the metaphysics of Charles S. Peirce and those who have utilized Peirce's theories. This conception will provide an entry point for posthuman researchers to incorporate the protean nature of ideas into their own research methodologies.

Mortality due to falls by county, age group, race, and ethnicity in the USA, 2000–19: a systematic analysis of health disparities

Fall-related mortality has increased rapidly over the past two decades in the USA, but the extent to which mortality varies across racial and ethnic populations, counties, and age groups is not well understood. The aim of this study was to estimate age-standardised mortality rates due to falls by racial and ethnic population, county, and age group over a 20-year period. Redistribution methods for insufficient cause of death codes and validated small-area estimation methods were applied to death registration data from the US National Vital Statistics System and population data from the US National Center for Health Statistics to estimate annual fall-related mortality. Estimates from 2000 to 2019 were stratified by county (n=3110) and five mutually exclusive racial and ethnic populations: American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN), Asian or Pacific Islander (Asian), Black, Latino or Hispanic (Latino), and White. Estimates were corrected for misreporting of race and ethnicity on death certificates using published misclassification ratios. We masked (ie, did not display) estimates for county and racial and ethnic population combinations with a mean annual population of less than 1000. Age-standardised mortality is presented for all ages combined and for age groups 20-64 years (younger adults) and 65 years and older (older adults). Nationally, in 2019, the overall age-standardised fall-related mortality rate for the total population was 13·4 deaths per 100 000 population (95% uncertainty interval 13·3-13·6), an increase of 65·3% (61·9-68·8) from 8·1 deaths per 100 000 (8·0-8·3) in 2000, with the largest increases observed in older adults. Fall-related mortality at the national level was highest across all years in the AIAN population (in 2019, 15·9 deaths per 100 000 population [95% uncertainty interval 14·0-18·2]) and White population (14·8 deaths per 100 000 [14·6-15·0]), and was about half as high among the Latino (8·7 deaths per 100 000 [8·3-9·0]), Black (8·1 deaths per 100 000 [7·9-8·4]), and Asian (7·5 deaths per 100 000 [7·1-7·9]) populations. The disparities between racial and ethnic populations varied widely by age group, with mortality among younger adults highest for the AIAN population and mortality among older adults highest for the White population. The national-level patterns were observed broadly at the county level, although there was considerable spatial variation across ages and racial and ethnic populations. For younger adults, among almost all counties with unmasked estimates, there was higher mortality in the AIAN population than in all other racial and ethnic populations, while there were pockets of high mortality in the Latino population, particularly in the Mountain West region. For older adults, mortality was particularly high in the White population within clusters of counties across states including Florida, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Age-standardised mortality due to falls increased over the study period for each racial and ethnic population and almost every county. Wide variation in mortality across geography, age, and race and ethnicity highlights areas and populations that might benefit most from efficacious fall prevention interventions as well as additional prevention research. US National Institutes of Health (Intramural Research Program, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities; National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; Intramural Research Program, National Cancer Institute; National Institute on Aging; National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases; Office of Disease Prevention; and Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research).

Using public perceptions to inform urban protected area buffer zone planning.

The buffer zones between urban protected areas (UPAs) and their cities play a significant role in managing and protecting UPAs. However, they are also the frontier of conflicts due to complex functionality and a large number of stakeholders. Besides ensuring the buffer zone's function of protecting the UPA, it is also vital to understand how it can fulfill the diverse needs of multiple interest groups residing in or utilizing this area. To address the significant social science research gap in UPA buffer zone management, we establish a conceptual framework and explore how the public's overall satisfaction with the buffer depends on five essential buffer zone qualities, namely environmental quality, connectivity, infrastructure, cultural, and visual quality. We focus on China's Urban Scenic and Historic Areas (USHA), a major type of UPA with high cultural, social, and esthetic values. Using the buffer of Shugang-Slender West Lake Scenic and Historic Area in Yangzhou City as the case study, we conducted intercept and online surveys (n = 499), investigating the perceptions of three user groups-residents, businesses, and tourists. The results indicate high overall satisfaction for all three groups. Environmental, visual, and cultural qualities were rated higher than connectivity and infrastructure quality. Residents generally showed the highest satisfaction and tourists the lowest. For all three groups, environmental quality, connectivity, and infrastructure quality significantly influenced overall satisfaction, while cultural and visual quality did not. This suggests that the public expects the buffer zone to serve as high-quality multi-functional open spaces that enhance the quality of life while providing recreation, service, and transportation functions. Besides direct planning and management advice to China's UPAs and other countries with similar contexts, our study offers a transferable framework for incorporating social perceptions and highlights their significance in informing the functional planning of UPA buffer zones for public welfare.

Acquihiring for Monopsony Power

It is often argued that startups are acquired for the sole purpose of hiring specialized talent. We show that the goal of such acquihires might be to shut down the most relevant labor market competitor. This grants the acquirer monopsony power over specialized talent. As a consequence, acquihiring may harm employees and be socially inefficient. We explore the robustness of these effects, allowing for private benefits associated with working at a startup, varying bargaining protocols, multiple employees with and without complementarities, and private information. This paper was accepted by Maria Guadalupe, strategy. Funding: H. Bar-Isaac thanks the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support. V. Nocke gratefully acknowledges support from the German Research Foundation (DFG) through CRC TR 224 [Project B03].

Utilizing Local Economic Development As a Technique for Development to Combat Poverty and Unemployment: A Case Study of Polokwane Municipality, South Africa

For many countries throughout the world, unemployment, poverty, and inequality are the biggest problems. These also apply to South Africa. In essence, local economic development (LED) is an ongoing procedure that is spearheaded by local stakeholders, particularly the local government, and built upon local efforts to stimulate the local economy and provide employment in a given area. Using the Polokwane municipality as a case study, the study aims to examine the contribution of local economic development in the reduction of unemployment in South Africa. The research also aims to ascertain how much Polokwane Municipality's local economic development organizations aid to the reduction of poverty. To obtain a thorough understanding of the subject matter, the study will employ a qualitative research approach and involve participants from various municipal levels who are involved in local economic development, such as agencies, municipal officials, and beneficiaries. The study followed a qualitative research methodology, which is a type of social science research that collects and works with non-numerical data and that seeks to interpret meaning from these data that help us understand social life through the study of targeted populations or places, and it employed theme analysis to find, arrange, and present themes and their sub-themes surfaced from study interviews. The research produced suggestions for using local economic development to reduce poverty and provide jobs.

Mooting the Concept of “Hierarchical Analysis” in the Context of a Cultural Taxonomy: A Concept with Widespread Implications for Social Sciences Research

We begin this paper by attempting to define what the oft-used term “culture” means and probing its various elements, dimensions, and attributes as well. We also then describe what is meant by cultural change, and investigate the various types of commonly and less commonly observed types of cultural change along with the schools canonically associated with the study of culture and cultural change in social and cultural anthropology. We also then proceed to review the core concepts associated and allied with our symbiotic approach to sociocultural change along with the related concepts of mind-orientations, cultural orientations, mindspace, thought worlds, and world views. The core theme and central component of this paper if of course the concept of a cultural taxonomy, the essentials of which we reproduce here, by referencing both our earlier work, and other pre-existing concepts in the field. We of course, then present our proposals namely “Hierarchical analysis” in the context of a cultural taxonomy which is the objective of this paper, and differentiate with from the differentials other ‘Modes of Internal Spread’ of Cultural Elements, a concept that we had mooted earlier. The core downstream uses and objectives of this approach are also discussed in such a way that readers will be able to note the merits of this approach.

Bricolage for Innovative Qualitative Social Science Research: A Perspective on Its Conceptual Hallmarks

Bricolage for Innovative Qualitative Social Science Research: A Perspective on Its Conceptual Hallmarks

The HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study (HBCD) experience: Recruiting and retaining diverse families in a longitudinal, multi-method early childhood study

The HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study, a multi-site prospective longitudinal cohort study, will examine human brain, cognitive, behavioral, social, and emotional development beginning prenatally and planned through early childhood. Given its aim to examine the impact of adversity and protective factors on children’s outcomes, the recruitment and retention of families who have a wide diversity in experiences are essential. However, the unfortunate history of inequitable treatment of underrepresented families in research and the risks with which some participants will contend (e.g., substance use) makes their recruitment and retention in social science and neuroscience research particularly challenging.This article explores strategies that the HBCD Study has developed to recruit and retain participants, including marginalized, underserved, and hard-to-reach populations, capitalizing on the extant literature and the researchers’ own experiences. In this paper, we address strategies to recruit and retain families within HBCD, including: 1) creating experiences that engender trust and promote relationships; 2) maintaining connections with participants over time; 3) ensuring appropriate compensation and supports; 4) considerations for study materials and procedures; and 5) community engagement. The implementation of these strategies may increase representation and inclusiveness, as well as improve the quality of the resulting data.

Representation of Social Determinants of Health terminology in medical subject headings: impact of added terms.

To enhance and evaluate the quality of PubMed search results for Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) through the addition of new SDoH terms to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). High priority SDoH terms and definitions were collated from authoritative sources, curated based on publication frequencies, and refined by subject matter experts. Descriptive analyses were used to investigate how PubMed search details and best match results were affected by the addition of SDoH concepts to MeSH. Three information retrieval metrics (Precision, Recall, and F measure) were used to quantitatively assess the accuracy of PubMed search results. Pre- and post-update documents were clustered into topic areas using a Natural Language Processing pipeline, and SDoH relevancy assessed. Addition of 35 SDoH terms to MeSH resulted in more accurate algorithmic translations of search terms and more reliable best match results. The Precision, Recall, and F measures of post-update results were significantly higher than those of pre-update results. The percentage of retrieved publications belonging to SDoH clusters was significantly greater in the post- than pre-update searches. This evaluation confirms that inclusion of new SDoH terms in MeSH can lead to qualitative and quantitative enhancements in PubMed search retrievals. It demonstrates the methodology for and impact of suggesting new terms for MeSH indexing. It provides a foundation for future efforts across behavioral and social science research (BSSR) domains. Improving the representation of BSSR terminology in MeSH can improve PubMed search results, thereby enhancing the ability of investigators and clinicians to build and utilize a cumulative BSSR knowledge base.