February 9, 2010
Scott Jaschik wrote an excellent piece in Inside Higher Ed about the sociology of religion. He captures the discomfort many social scientists feel with studying the topic, and in an interview with Darren Sherkat at SIU highlights the concern about religious organization using funding to direct research in the directions that support their ideological agenda. Jaschik also profiles an interesting new report from David Smilde and Matthew May for the SSRC about the emerging strong program in the sociology of religion. Here’s a link to read Smilde’s and May’s working paper. Interestingly, one of Smilde’s findings contradicts the concern raised by Sherkat about funding. According to the working paper, there is no relationship between religious funding and socio-evaluative findings. According to Smilde:
It suggests that rather than supporting pro-religiousness, it seems to focus its support on classic “religious sociology,” in which religious scholars use sociology to engage religion, warts and all, in order to improve religious institutions and practices.
Anecdotally, I had noticed an up-tick in the number of sociologists studying religion. I had attributed it to a cultural shift in the wake of 9/11 and a curiosity about religion as fundamentalism became an increasingly powerful political force around the world. However, Smilde finds:
Despite the growing importance of globalization, immigration, the growth of non-Christian religions in Western countries, and the considerable spread of Christianity in the global South, there is no evidence of any diversification of the traditional subject matter of the sociology of religion: the United States, Christianity and, more specifically, Protestantism. If there is any trend at all, it is towards a slight accentuation of thematic concentration. By the end of the sample, three quarters of all articles looked at religion in the United States and over half at Christianity.
The neglect of globalization surprises me. Seems like a good opportunity for an ambitious grad student . . .
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Tags: academia, culture, inside higher ed, journals, religion, sociology
February 8, 2010
According to AdWeek, about 45% of the viewers of last year’s Super Bowl were women. Unless something strange happens, I imagine that percentage will probably be about the same for 2010. However, you wouldn’t know it from watching the ads. Maybe it’s the “man-cession.” Or maybe American masculine identity is in crisis. Whatever it was, the marketing message last night seemed to be all about men. Here are a few samples:
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Tags: gender, masculinity, super bowl
January 26, 2010
Teach for America is celebrating its twentieth anniversary and there are a number of articles floating around about what works in the program and what doesn’t. One TFA alum and UVA PhD student just wrote an interesting post on Good arguing that weak literacy is the primary reason students struggle in school.
Amanda Ripley also wrote an excellent profile in The Atlantic on Steven Farr and the methods TFA use to evaluate teachers and judge what is effective and what isn’t in the classroom.
Farr and the TFA have just published a book called Teaching as Leadership that goes into more detail about the tools they use for measuring what makes a good teacher.
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Tags: atlantic, education, sociology, teach for america, teaching
January 25, 2010
Building off the coverage of the Pew Study and a number of articles in the NY Times and elsewhere, the Times hosted a debate yesterday called “Alpha Wives: The Trend and the Truth“ that featured a terrific group of social scientists that included Stephanie Coontz, Kathleen Gerson, Andrew Cherlin, and Claudia Goldin.
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Tags: data, families, gender, inequality, pew research center, social change, sociology, work
January 12, 2010
I must have missed this post on Graphic Sociology over the holidays. Linking to a post by Philip Cohen on the Family Inequality blog, Graphic Sociology highlights why infographics can be misleading when we don’t give more data. Cohen does an excellent job challenging Wilcox’s assertion that the recession has been good for marriage rates by pulling back and showing the divorce rate over the last few decades. In that light, divorces have been trending downward for awhile and have nothing to do with the Great Recession.
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Tags: data, divorce, economics, families, infographics, philip cohen, sociology
January 11, 2010
Nikhil Swaminathan writes in his blog on Good about what might happen if parents stopped putting their children in private school and enrolled them in public schools instead. Citing the work of Steve Barr, he links to a USA Today article about the recession “forcing many private school-favoring parents to send their kids to public school for financial reasons.”
Attracting (and keeping) the children of middle class and upper class families who would have attended private schools in the past could lead to major improvements in public school systems. Of course, the same budget problems driving this shift also mean that states and cities have gutted public education budgets, so I’m not optimistic about public schools really being able to keep students without major reforms. As NYU sociologist Pedro Noguera says in the USA Today article, “Public schools play such an important role for our democracy as the only institution that serves all children,” he says. “If you lose the people who have the power of choice because they have the resources and the information and the time to make a difference, it becomes a system that only serves people who have no other option. And that’s a problem.”
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Tags: education, good, inequality, nyc, pedro noguera, sociology, teaching, usa today
January 4, 2010
In the New York Times, Amanda Fairbanks wrote an interesting profile of some new research by Doug McAdam on Teach for America. Inspired by his research on Freedom Summer, McAdam wanted to see if the TFA volunteers shared the same long term commitment to civic engagement that the activists who participated in the 60s civil rights movement possessed. He found that the TFA alums lag behind their non-TFA peers in current service activity, tend to vote at lower rates than non-TFA participants, and tend to not work in “pro-social” jobs after finishing up their time w/ TFA. The research was published in the December issue of Social Forces.
One of McAdam’s colleagues, Rob Reich, offered a few explanations on his blog for why TFA alumni might participate at lower levels after volunteering for two years:
- TFA volunteers “were already off the charts on civic engagement when they applied to TFA,” so it would be unusual for them to score even higher after the teaching experience.
- The TFA corps members probably took a “service break.” Kind of like the “donor fatigue” that fundraisers encounter.
- Finally, McAdam’s study didn’t measure specific forms of “education engagement, which is an area that TFA experience might plausibly effect.”
While the average TFA alum may be burnt out on civic engagement, there are a few notable exceptions. In particular, I’m impressed with the work of Nick Ehrmann. A recent Princeton sociology PhD, who has started a new non-profit called the Blue Engine. Nick draws on his experiences with TFA to put together a corps of tutors, who help high school students to acquire the advanced academic skills that they will need to succeed in college.
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Tags: education, ehrmann, mcadam, social movements, sociology, teach for america, teaching
December 17, 2009
Lloyd Armstrong offers a detailed analysis of the rising costs of college on his blog, Changing Higher Education. There’s a lot to chew on in Armstrong’s post. The data that caught my attention, though, was his comparison of the growth of household income and tuition prices over twenty years. I was surprised to see tuition out-pacing even the highest quintile of earners in the U.S. Unfortunately, we don’t have data for 2009 yet. I have to think this picture will get even uglier, once he factors in the recent tuition and fee increases.
SOURCE: Lloyd Armstrong
Armstong doesn’t stop w/ this analysis of college costs. He also examines it from the students’ perspective and the colleges’.
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Tags: data, economics, education, inequality, sociology
December 16, 2009
Drawing on the evidence that our social relationships can help us be healthier by encouraging good habits and behaviors, Deborah Carr and Kristen Springer (both at Rutgers) suggest 10 tips for a better holiday season. I’ve pasted a few highlights below. You can read the complete set of tips in the Council on Contemporary Families press release here.
1. Exercise Together. It’s hard enough to exercise regularly during the year, never mind during the hectic holiday season. Families can pre-schedule a 30 minute exercise time for each day of the holiday break. Taking an early morning jog or a leisurely walk after dinner is more fun when you do it together.
4. Keep a Regular Bed Time. Irregular sleep is one of the biggest taxes on good health over the holidays. Partners can decide before the party the best time to leave and “precommit” to it -including appointing one of you to keep track of time and make sure you leave the holiday party at a set hour. It’s easier to say “sorry, we have to leave,” or “I know she’d love to stay, but she has a meeting in the morning” if you’ve made a plan ahead of time and one person is appointed to keep track.
8. Share The Burden. Women often shoulder the burden of the holidays, doing everything from shopping, wrapping gifts, cooking, sending holiday cards, and organizing travel. This stress can be overwhelming. Make a list of tasks, and then divide it up among family members, including children. If everyone chooses some tasks, this takes the load off of Mom and makes the holiday a true family affair. And if the wrapping isn’t as perfect as Mom’s, who really cares?
10. Put Your Health First. Martyrs seldom live long lives. Take care of your own health first: Take time to sleep, wash your hands, go for a walk. If one household member gets sick, the others are sure to follow. Keeping yourself healthy keeps your entire family healthy.
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Tags: carr, ccf, families, health, sociology, springer
