Ogden’s research has received significant media attention, including a recent piece from Inside Higher Education. Kwantlen Polytechnic University is trying to prevent Ogden from observing assisted suicides despite the approval he received from an ethics review board at the university. Currently, Ogden is barred from carrying out his research by the university, which has equated Ogden’s proposed observation of assisted suicides with participating in them himself.

Inside Higher Education reports:

The dispute has become public in the last week, with Canadian faculty groups charging that the university’s actions are a violation of academic freedom, and that the principles cited by the university endanger not only Ogden’s research, but the work of social scientists throughout the country who study illegal acts in part by observation. Sociologists in the United States say that the case is important for them as well — and illustrates how studying some of the cutting edge issues in bioethics can create challenging ethical and political issues for academics and universities.

Ogden is no stranger to controversy or to suicide, which he has been studying for 18 years. He first became interested in the subject when “as a teen, I had a couple of close friends who took their lives,” he said. “Those suicides had a profound impact on me.” Ogden doesn’t romanticize suicide. “I regret that they died. I wish that they were still here.”

But with legal and political debates growing about whether people with incurable diseases should be able to end their lives — and with some people not waiting for the law, and doing so — Ogden found the topic to be one in need of sociological inquiry.

Read the full story

The study focused on a number of different groups to examine the experiences of adult children of immigrants in the New York region including: Dominicans, Chinese, Russian Jews, South Americans (encompassing Colombians, Ecuadoreans and Peruvians) and West Indians. For the purposes of comparison, the investigators also studied U.S.-born whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans born on the mainland who live in the New York area.

The study pointed to signs of positive progress as many of these adult children achieve more than their parents in education as well as earnings, in some cases surpassing native-born Americans. But on a more cautionary note, the study highlighted how persistent poverty and low academic achievement among Dominicans and the prevalence of racial discrimination again Caribbean immigrants impede universal progress for all groups.

How did they do it?

“The study was based on 3,415 telephone interviews conducted between 1998 and 2000; 333 face-to-face follow-up interviews in 2000 and 2001; and a final round of 172 follow-up interviews in 2002 and 2003. The subjects of the study were 18 to 32 at the time of the initial interviews and were either born in the United States to at least one immigrant parent, or arrived in the United States by age 12. The study covered 10 counties: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Westchester and Nassau in New York and Essex, Hudson, Passaic and Union in New Jersey.”

Excerpts from the Times obituary:

“In an interview on Thursday, Adam Ashforth, a professor of anthropology, political science and sociology at Northwestern University, called Dr. Tilly ‘the founding father of 21st-century sociology.’ He particularly praised Dr. Tilly’s seamless synthesizing of his own work on witchcraft and politics in South Africa. Dr. Ashforth also mentioned Dr. Tilly’s dizzying output of books, which had been running at more than a book a year for more than two decades.”

“’It was exhausting keeping up with him,’ Dr. Ashforth said. ‘We’ll now have a chance to catch up with our reading.’”

“On April Fool’s Day in 1969, The New York Times asked leading intellectuals what they considered foolish. Dr. Tilly answered, ‘One way I’d like to improve social life is to get a guy to stop for five minutes or one minute or 10 seconds and listen to what the other guy says.’”

Professor Yang Yang comments:

“‘Understanding happiness is important to understanding quality of life. The happiness measure is a guide to how well society is meeting people’s needs,’ said Yang Yang, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago.”

Sugata Srinivasaraju reports:
“Wesley Longhofer, a PhD scholar from the department of sociology at the University of Minnesota, personifies the new kind of research scholar in Bangalore. He is studying how high-profile philanthropic foundations set up by the IT community in the areas of water, education and governance are aiming to transform Bangalore into a world-class city. His research even takes him to places like the city’s ISKCON temple, so that he can understand how corporates like Infosys are supporting the mid-day meal programme run by the temple.”

“Bangalore has many attractions from a social science perspective. From the archetypal sleepy town, it has undergone huge changes in a relatively short period. It is a laboratory in which the globalisation experiment is alive and under way, allowing scholars to examine many trends and their effects on society. Cities like Shanghai may offer similar insights, but the language barrier there puts off many Western scholars.”

Key findings from the report:

“Sleep Patterns 1965-1995: There was little change in sleep averages during this period, particularly in comparison to the far larger shifts in time spent on housework, child care and watching TV. ‘The proverbial figure of eight hours per day (56 hours per week) has remained close to the diary norm for those aged 18 to 64 in each national study between 1965 and 1995,’ the report says.”

“Sleep Patterns 2003-2005: The time diaries collected by the federal government on an annual basis between 2003 and 2005 showed rising sleep averages - 8.2 hours on weeknights, 8.9 on Saturday and 9.5 on Sunday, a total increase of about three hours per week.”

“‘While these recent increases are statistically significant, we’re approaching them with some caution,’ says Maryland sociologist Steven Martin, the co-author of Not So Deprived. ‘The numbers didn’t change for more than 30 years. We want to see if these increases hold up in the long-run.’”

The findings reveal that whites subconsciously associate blacks with apes and are more likely to condone violence against black criminal suspects as a result of their broader inability to accept blacks as ‘fully human.’…And, in what I can only call a genius research design, they combine the lab studies of implicit bias with archival content-analysis research of the language used in newspaper accounts from criminal cases

To read more about the study’s nice mixed method design, see Jessie’s post, the original article and the authors’ lab website. Personally, I’ve been interested in the potential of briding sociological research and cognitive psychology for some time, and a 2005 article by Jennifer Eberhardt, one of the authors of this current study, called “Imaging Race” was key in piquing my interest. It’s about using new tools from neuroscience like fMRI to gain insight into how people think & feel about race. A fascinating read.