Contexts Crawler

Reuters UK reports on new research out of the University of Chicago, which concluded that getting old does not mean an end to sex. Survey data from elderly Americans indicates that more than 60% of the men and nearly 50% of the women have been sexually active in the past year.

Reuters reports:

More than three-quarters of American men aged 75 to 85 and half of women that age are still interested in sex, a survey of the elderly by University of Chicago researchers found.

“It’s not age per se; that when you get to 80 it’s all over with,” said sociologist Edward Laumann, who led the study of 3,000 American men and women aged 57 to 85 who lived at home, not in nursing homes.

“It’s driven by more proximate factors such as if you become obese, or you’re smoking too much, or you contract diabetes. Medications can depress sexual interest. The aging process itself is not a major factor driving these results,” he said in a telephone interview.

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Tara Parker-Hope of the New York Times recently posted a piece on her blog discussing new sociological research that has identified a surprising new risk factor for bad behavior — college. 

Parker-Hope writes: 

Men who attend college are more likely to commit property crimes during their college years than their non-college-attending peers… Sociologists at Bowling Green State University in Ohio examined data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which tracks education, crime levels, substance abuse and socializing among adolescents and young adults. Beginning with 9,246 students who were seventh through twelfth graders in the 1994-1995 academic year, the survey followed the students again in 1996 and 2001. 

The researchers found that college-bound youth were less likely to be involved in criminal activity and substance use during adolescence than kids who weren’t headed for college. But college attendance appears to trigger some surprising changes. When male students enrolled in four-year universities, levels of drinking, property theft and unstructured socializing with friends increased and surpassed rates for their less-educated male peers.

But why?

The reason appears to be that kids who don’t go to college simply have to grow up more quickly. College enrollment allows for a lifestyle that essentially extends the adolescent period, said Patrick M. Seffrin, the study’s primary investigator and a graduate student and research assistant in the department of sociology and the Center for Family and Demographic Research at Bowling Green State University.

College delays entry into adult roles like marriage, parenting and full-time work. Instead, college students have lots of unstructured social time. Other studies have linked unstructured socializing or “hanging out” with higher levels of delinquency and risk taking.

“College attendance is commonly associated with self-improvement and upward mobility,” Mr. Seffrin said. “Yet this research suggests that college may actually encourage, rather than deter, social deviance and risk-taking.’’

A posting from Judith Warner on the New York Times blog ‘Domestic Disturbances‘ titled, ‘The Other Home Equity Crisis,’ takes a look at how women are increasingly affected by job loss in times of economic downturn. As further evidence that the opt-out revolution is a myth, beyond Warner’s book, the article cites a report from Congress that was just recently released.

This week, Congress issued a report, titled “Equality in Job Loss: Women are Increasingly Vulnerable to Layoffs During Recessions,” that may — if read in its entirety — finally, officially and definitively sound a death knell for the story of the Opt-Out Revolution. The report, commissioned by Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, states categorically that mothers are not leaving the workforce to stay home with their kids. They’re being forced out.

Women — all women, mothers or not — were hit “especially hard” hard by the recession of 2001 and the recovery-that-never-really-was, the report states. “Unlike in the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, during the 2001 recession, the percent of jobs lost by women often exceeded that of men in the industries hardest hit by the downturn. The lackluster recovery of the 2000s made it difficult for women to regain their jobs — women’s employment rates never returned to their pre-recession peak.”

While prior recessions tended to spare women’s jobs relative to men’s, that trend has been reversed in the current downturn, thanks in part to women’s progress in entering formerly male industries and occupations, and in part to the fact that job sectors like service and retail, which still employ disproportionate numbers of women, have suffered disproportionate losses. And this — not a calling to motherhood — accounts for the fall, starting in 2000, of women’s labor force participation rates.

Read the full post. 

A new study from the American Sociological Association (ASA) finds that women in sociology are achieving substantial success as professional sociologists and enjoying high productivity in their research. But the study finds that nearly a decade after earning their Ph.D.’s, there are significant differences between men’s and women’s career trajectories.

Inside Higher Ed reports some of the key findings from this research…

• Male sociologists in the cohort [received their Ph.D. in 1996-1997] were more likely than female sociologists to be married or living with a partner (83 percent vs. 68 percent), or to have children living with them (62 percent to 50 percent).
• Among sociologists who are parents, women are much more likely to be divorced (21 percent vs. 1.4 percent).
• Many sociologists who do have children do so before their tenure reviews, with the largest group having a first child 3-4 years after earning a doctorate.
• Parenthood does not appear to limit research productivity, at least as measured by the number of articles published in refereed journals — a key measure for the discipline. Mothers and fathers reported an average of 10.0 refereed journal articles since they earned their doctorates, while childless men and women reported an average of 9.5.
• Mothers appeared, on average, to earn less than others in the cohort. The income question was asked with categories, not exact amounts. The median income for sociologists who are fathers, and for sociologists who don’t have children, was between $70,000 and $99,000. The median income for sociologists who are mothers was between $50,000 and $59,000.
• On many issues, mothers and fathers both reported high levels of stress related to advancing their careers while also caring for their families. Child care, the tenure process, and teaching loads were key issues for parents.

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A new study from Northwestern University scholars Eszter Hargittai and Gina Walejko suggests that “men are more likely to share their creative work online than women despite the fact that women and men engage in creative activities at essentially equal rates.”

This new research found that nearly two-thirds of men reported posting their work online, while only about half of the women in the study reported doing so.

“Because sharing information on the Internet today is a form of participating in public culture and contributing to public discourse, that tells us men’s voices are being disproportionately heard,” says Eszter Hargittai, assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University.

When co-authors Hargittai and Walejko controlled for ’self-reported digital literacy’ and ‘Web know-how,’ they found that men and women were posting their material at equal rates.

“This suggests that the Internet is not an equal playing field for men and women since those with more online abilities — whether perceived or actual — are more likely to contribute online content,” says Hargittai.

Read more.