Posts Tagged ‘sociology’
March 9, 2010
SOURCE: Wired Science
(h/t Brandon Keim) In the March 8th, 2010 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Christakis and Fowler perform a series of experiments to see if cooperative behavior will spread through a network. PNAS has posted the complete article online (for now). In the experiment “people were divided into groups of four, given 20 credits each, and asked to secretly decide what to keep for themselves and what to contribute to a common fund. That fund would be multiplied by two-fifths, then divided equally among the group. The best payoff would come if everyone gave all their money — but without knowing what others were doing, it always made sense to keep one’s money and skim from the generosity of others” (Wired Science).
However, Christakis and Fowler found that “focal individuals are influenced by fellow group members’ contribution behavior in future interactions with other individuals who were not a party to the initial interaction. Furthermore, this influence persists for multiple periods and spreads up to three degrees of separation (from person to person to person to person). The results suggest that each additional contribution a subject makes to the public good in the first period is tripled over the course of the experiment by other subjects who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more as a consequence.”
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Tags: christakis, fowler, happiness, social networks, sociology, wired science
February 24, 2010
In the March issue of the Atlantic, Don Peck interviews William Julius Wilson, Kathy Edin, Brad Wilcox, and Glen Elder about the different ways that the Great Recession has ripped holes in the social fabric. Here are a few of the high points:
- Like Elder’s children who grew up during the Great Depression, today’s young adults are likely to see their opportunities diminished by the recession. Citing the work of Lisa Kahn at Yale, Peck writes: “In one recent study, she followed the career paths of white men who graduated from college between 1979 and 1989. She found that, all else equal, for every one-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate, the starting income of new graduates fell by as much as 7 percent; the unluckiest graduates of the decade, who emerged into the teeth of the 1981–82 recession, made roughly 25 percent less in their first year than graduates who stepped into boom times.”
- Amazingly, that gap persists throughout life. According to Kahn, “ Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate. When you add up all the earnings losses over the years, Kahn says, it’s as if the lucky graduates had been given a gift of about $100,000, adjusted for inflation, immediately upon graduation—or, alternatively, as if the unlucky ones had been saddled with a debt of the same size.”
- Edin draws on her research in books such as Promises I can Keep to argue that among low-income couples “marriage has become an ‘increasingly fragile’ institution.” Peck writes that Edin “fears it is being supplanted as a social norm by single motherhood and revolving-door relationships. As a rule, fewer people marry during a recession, and this one has been no exception. But ‘the timing of this recession coincides with a pretty significant cultural change,’ Edin says: a fast-rising material threshold for marrying, but not for having children, in less affluent communities.”
- Peck cites Wilson’s When Work Disappears and interviews the sociologist about how the Great Recession might affect inner-city blacks. “Wilson believes that once we start getting detailed data on the conditions of inner-city life since the crash, “we’re going to see some horror stories”—and in many cases a relapse into the depths of decades past. “The point I want to emphasize,” Wilson said, “is that we should brace ourselves.”
Posted in sociology | 1 Comment »
Tags: atlantic, cities, economics, education, families, glen elder, kathryn edin, poverty, race, recession, sociology, wilcox, William Julius Wilson, work
February 19, 2010
SOURCE: NY Times
Great to see Matt Desmond’s research featured in the Times. I can’t remember the last time the unpublished research of a sociology grad student received that level of attention. Maybe Devah Pager?
Also available from the NY Times, a slide show, called Home No More.
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Tags: eviction, foreclosure, gender, inequality, matthew desmond, milwaukee, poverty, race, sociology
February 12, 2010
A friend forwarded an article on cognitive fluency called “Easy=True” by Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe. According to Bennett:
Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard.
The article outlines the many ways that fluency shapes our perceptions of everyday events ranging from analyzing threats to evaluating marital happiness. This observation leads some counterintuitive results, though. For instance, Bennett notes, “to get people to think through a question, it may be best to present it less clearly.”
A few studies suggest that disfluency works well as a prompt to get people to think carefully and catch mistakes. Alter and Oppenheimer found that using a more difficult font can get students to do better on the Cognitive Reaction Test, a three-question test that usually trips up people answering intuitively. In another study, they found that disfluency also led people to think more abstractly. Schwarz and Song found that a difficult font can dramatically increase the number of people who correctly respond to the question, “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?” (The answer is “none” – Moses wasn’t on the Ark.)
In other words, to get people to think carefully and to prevent them from making silly mistakes, make them work to process the question: make the font hard to read, the cadence awkward, and the wording unfamiliar.
That is why all my books going forward will be formatted like CAPTCHAs.
Posted in sociology | 1 Comment »
Tags: boston globe, cognition, education, social psychology, sociology, teaching
February 11, 2010
SOURCE: SchuhleLewis.com.
I came across this great infographic on Good and Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Neither actually credited the designer, though. After a little googling, I found them via Fast Company. The designers at Schühle Lewis in the UK created it. There are 59 skulls in the image. Cliff Kuang at Fast Company added a little background to their data:
The health-care study cited in the graphic is concerned mainly with people who die simply because they’re not regularly monitoring their health. But the numbers of people who don’t die because they lack health care–and who take care of their health only when it’s too late, in emergency rooms–is surely much larger. That’s wildly inefficient. Emergency care is extravagantly expensive–and that in turn feeds the spiraling cost of medical care in the U.S.
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Tags: data, health, inequality, infographics, sociology, terrorism
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
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
