“He Said, She Said: Comparing Mother and Father Reports of Father Involvement”
Kelly Mikelson
The Journal of Marriage & Family, 70, p613-624

Link to Article

“Immigrants, English Ability and the Digital Divide”
Hiroshi Ono and Madeline Zavodny
Social Forces, 86(4), p1455-1476

Link to Article

“The Integrity of Corrupt States: Graft as an Informal State Institution.”
Kenneth Darden
Politics and Society, 36(1): 35-59.

Link to Article

“Capital ventures into biology: biosocial dynamics in the industry and science of gambling.”
Scott Vrecko
Economy and Society, 37(1): 50-67

Link to Article

“Global Norms, Local Activism, and Social Movement Outcomes: Global Human Rights and Resident Koreans in Japan”
Kiyoteru Tsutsui
Social Problems, August 2008, p. 391-418

Link to Article

(We’ve also made the Discoveries from our Winter 2008 issue and our Spring 2008 issue available as well.)

Summary: In an age of mass media and giant corporate news agencies, many optimistically look to the internet as a new venue for non-elites to make their voices heard and push issues into the public discourse.

Ray Maratea analyzes the role blogs play in the competition for public attention and finds that blogs do, in fact, offer many advantages. Thanks to the speed at which blogs can be updated and the ability of blog posts to quickly spread through the internet via hyperlinking, blogs can be an effective means of drawing public attention to issues.

However, in other respects blogs aren’t as revolutionary as they may seem. For example, the blogosophere is very hierarchical, with a small number of blogs drawing most of the traffic. Additionally, blogs tend to use the same criteria as traditional media when deciding what is deserving of attention, such as drama and novelty.

Summary: On the one hand, the internet provides people with access to an extraordinarily diverse range of information and opinions. On the other hand, the internet can also bring like-minded people together into isolated, homogeneous communities devoid of dissent and diversity. Which side wins out?

Eszter Hargittai, Jason Gallo and Matthew Kane look at political blogs and examine how frequently conservative bloggers link to liberal bloggers and vice versa. They followed 40 of the top political blogs (20 conservative, 20 liberal) for three week-long periods over the course of ten months. They have several interesting findings:

• In terms of blogroll links, conservatives are more likely to link to liberal blogs than liberal bloggers are to link to conservative blogs.
• Within blog posts, about 12% of outgoing links from conservative blogs went to liberal blogs, and about 16% of outgoing links from liberal blogs went to conservative blogs.
• Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most common format of these cross-ideological links follow a “straw-man” format, simply dismissing the other sides’ views
• However, when blog posts actually engage the substance of the linked article, conservative bloggers were actually more likely to agree (14%) than disagree (12%), while liberal bloggers only expressed substantive agreement 5% of the time.

In short, they found some support for both faces of the internet, and also found some interesting differences between conservative and liberal bloggers.

If this is interesting to you, this article is part of a special issue on blogs and politics.

Summary: During early adulthood, it’s pretty common for Americans to become less religious. Many blame the college experience: viewing Universities as a hotbed of liberal, secular ideas. However, Uecker, Regnerus and Vaaler find this stereotype doesn’t hold — it’s not the students who go to college that experience the greatest decline in religiosity:

Contrary to expectations, emerging adults that avoid college exhibit the most extensive patterns of religious decline, undermining conventional wisdom about the secularizing effect of higher education.

The authors admit that this may not have always been the case: changes in both the student population as well as college campuses may be responsible for today’s situation:

America’s institutions of higher learning - even secular state universities - instead have an (over)abundant supply of religious and para-church organizations to meet the demands of students, and they often teach tolerance and respect for religion in the classroom.