by meg on
Jan 17, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Article: Coverage Bias in Traditional Telephone Surveys of Low-Income and Young Adults Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 5
Summary: This article finds that surveys that rely on traditional random-digit-dials of landlines have a significant bias in their information about low-income young people. Because 32% of low-income young adults live in households with only a wireless phone, telephone surveys that do not include cell phones will understimate the prevalence of binge drinking and smoking, but will overestimate obesity. These surveys will also underestimate physical activity and the prevalence of HIV testing. This article is part of a special issue on telephone surveys and cell phones in the United States.
by meg on
Jan 17, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Article: Diary of a working boy: Creative resistance among anonymous workbloggers Ethnography, Vol. 8, no. 4
Summary: This study of workbloggers in Manchester asserts that contrary to common perceptions that white collar workers are disinterested in social change, workers who blog about their jobs have subversive political potential even while participating in the corporate capitalist system.
Abstract:
Anonymous workbloggers – employees who write online
diaries about their work – are often simultaneously productive workers and savage critics of the organizational cultures in which they toil. This research focuses on a small group of white-collar workers from the Greater Manchester and Lancashire area, who risk their jobs by writing publicly about their office experiences under assumed identities. Countering the notion that resistance to corporate culture leads to ‘confusion and emptiness’ (Willmott, 1993: 538), this study contributes to the recent revival of interest in worker misbehavior and recalcitrance. By focusing on workers as authors, it addresses a shortcoming in the existing critical literature, which treats informal employee resistance as an intellectually and artistically unsophisticated phenomenon. Drawing parallels with the lives and work of authors such as Franz Kafka and T.S. Eliot, it evaluates whether embedded writers, in spite of their ambivalence about the alternative, can constitute an effective counter-hegemonic force.
by meg on
Jan 17, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Article: “Spoiled Sons” and “Sincere Daughters”: Schooling, Security, and Empowerment in Rural West Bengal, India Signs, 2008, vol. 33, no. 2
Summary: This article is an ethnographic study of the effects of schooling in rural West Bengal, India. Beginning with Amartya Sen’s claim that access to schooling, particularly for girl children, will unproblematically increase women’s empowerment and improve gender equality, Dia Da Costa examines how schooling is actually changing gender relations on the ground, including how the effect of schooling is shaped by the expectations of other social institutions like marriage and the family. Da Costa elaborates:
Apart from grounding analyses of schooling enrollment initiatives within familial trajectories and relations, we must also situate them in employment rates for men and women, average marriage ages, divorce rates, trends in violence against women, and displacement from agricultural work. These rates and trends must be viewed as educational issues since the ability to provide for parents, children, and wives is a concrete expected outcome of schooling.
The author concludes that while neither she nor her informants question that schooling and literacy provide benefits, there may also be significant costs in the form of conflicting institutional expectations:
In West Bengal, where concerted efforts in economic redistribution and political decentralization have been made, the alienation, insecurity, and marginalization represented in words of parents and young men and women are haunting. Acquiring schooling is significant for girls, but its associations with empowerment and security must be measured in context. Where there has been little direct redistributive benefit to women and increasing violence against them, for the intervener asking why she cannot be someone’s future, schooling is but one fraction of a necessary institutional response. Lack of redistributive equality, the threat of violence, and marital desertion also mark the ways women construct the meaning and value of their schooling. However, how should young men with their school certificates in hand belong to their families and communities as notional bearers of future security? Young men in rural Bengal have had patriarchal protections of all sorts and live in a state with a pro‐poor government that has been working for the benefit of historically disadvantaged people. Undoubtedly, alienation marks these men’s present experience since for the young man asking why he cannot be someone’s future there is no available institutional response.
by meg on
Jan 17, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Article: Social Desirability Effects and Support for a Female American President Public Opinion Quarterly, Advance Access, published Sept. 21, 2007
Summary:
The authors of this article find that contrary to more conventional public opinion polls, “Roughly 26 percent of the public is ‘angry or upset’ about the prospect of a female president. Moreover, this level of dissatisfaction is constant across several demographic groups.”
Surveyers have worried for decades about the effect of social desirability on survey responses. Previous research has shown that those responding to surveys are likely to be influenced by the desire to conform to social norms, especially in the presence of a researcher. For example, when asked about views on racial integration, a respondent is likely to answer that they are in favor of racial integration regardless of their personal views because it is considered socially unacceptable to espouse segregationist views in modern American society.
In this study, the researchers assessed respondents anger at the thought of a female president while allowing responses to be totally anonymous using something called a “list experiment.” The list experiment divides respondents into two randomly distributed groups; the first is given a list of four items, while the second group is given a list of five items. Since the fifth item on the list is the only significant difference between the two groups, the difference in the means between the two groups is attributed to the fifth item. In this experiment, respondents were asked how many items on the list made them “angry or upset.” The fifth item was “A woman serving as president.”
The results suggest that the 2005 Gallup poll showing that 92 percent of the American public would vote for a woman of their party could be exaggerating American readiness for a First Gentleman.