Their article suggests that new rural destinations don’t raise an immigrant’s likelihood of securing full-time, year-round employment, but they do offer greater chances of home ownership. It’s a trade-off: Latino immigrants may be willing to accept lower earnings if they can still build home equity in lower-cost rural areas.

Such immigrant strategies are precariously situated within the restrictive policy environments of new rural destinations, some of which curtail immigrant integration, social mobility, and economic well-being. As immigration policies increasingly fall under the purview of state and/or local level governments, the new pattern of Latino immigration will demand responsible legislative action.

Anderson replicates his own research from ten years prior in conducting interviews with gay male high school athletes on their experiences coming out. In his first study, the only athletes willing to be interviewed had been boys in non-contact sports (running, swimming, and tennis) who were also the top athletes on their team. For this select group, their athleticism counter-balanced the negative stigma of being gay, though even these stars feared bullying, harassment, and violence.

The 2010 sample was composed of players of varying skill and from an array of sports (even contact sports like football). They told Anderson they faced little discrimination from their peers, and many—including a gay soccer player who said, “Gay doesn’t mean gay anymore” —felt even the derogatory terms have lost much of their homophobic sting.

While there are some limitations to the study (the boys are primarily white and middle-class) Anderson’s work clearly suggests that times are changing. For younger generations being athletic and being gay are no longer mutually exclusive. Perhaps most indicative of change is the confusion some study subjects expressed as to why teammates would care about sexuality. As a young, openly gay, high school runner expresses, “I knew it wouldn’t be a problem. Why would it be?”

A conversation starter

The solution? Settle in for some Sex and the City. In their June 2011 Journal of Communication article, Emily Moyer-Gusé, Adrienne Chung, and Parul Jain showed three groups of people different episodes of the HBO series: one in which the main characters discuss sexual history and STI testing, one in which there is an STI plotline but no discussion among characters, and an episode that didn’t address sexual health at all. Immediately after watching the episodes, the participants assessed their own sexual-talk activities. Two weeks later, when asked again, those participants who had watched the episode with sexual discussion were now more likely to have engaged in conversations about sexual health than the other groups.

The authors believe this isn’t only due to the social scripts TV shows offer, but also to viewers’ indentification with characters. When watching successful individuals openly discuss sexual health, research participants were motivated to begin their own discussions. This is to say, the messenger seems to matter as much as the message.

A man and his son wave the flag of El Salvador at an immigration rally in New York City.

Adolescents, Gonzales writes, first recognize their illegal status in their late teens, when their lack of a Social Security number prohibits such rites of passage as getting a part-time job or a driver’s license. Assimilation alongside their native-born peers led these kids to believe they would have more opportunities than their parents, but undocumented youth get a harsh reality check at graduation: no papers means no future. The young adults must “learn to be illegal,” which includes re-evaluating their future goals. And parents—who often believed that their children would have citizenship by the time they reached adulthood—don’t prepare them for this transition.

Despite speaking fluent English and earning high school (and sometimes college) degrees, undocumented young adults end up no better off in the labor market than their uneducated parents. Gonzales argues that the system has created a “new disenfranchised underclass”—2.1 million young adults who are stuck in what might be called “illegal limbo.”

For example, using participant observation in a California community, Hana E. Brown (Social Problems, February 2011) recently found that Liberian refugees hold very negative opinions about African Americans. Despite the fact that the refugees in her study live in the same impoverished communities and visit the same welfare offices as many African Americans, they see African Americans’ use of the welfare system as “lazy and selfish.” In contrast, the Liberians’ own use of the welfare system is justified because of their refugee status. After all, the thinking goes, the government brought them here and is responsible for their care.

Katja M. Guenther, Sadie Pendaz, and Fortunata Songora Makene (Sociological Forum, March 2011) cite another example of an attempt to distinguish among Eastern African immigrants in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. These new Americans use ethnic differences to disassociate themselves from African Americans in their community, believing that African Americans are morally and culturally inferior to them. Tellingly, they even use their Muslim religious identity as a differentiator between themselves and native-born blacks, despite the risk of additional social stigma that professing a Muslim faith might bring.

Only time will tell if these attempts to differentiate and distinguish hold for second generation African immigrants.

This vision not only includes emphasis on traditional gender roles, but also, surprisingly, critical thinking and creativity for the girls and discipline and obedience in the boys.

Denny compared the messages contained in the respective groups’ handbooks and the activities around badge collection. She found that the boys’ thick, squat handbook still reflects the Boy Scouts’ original emphasis, demanding individual tasks and memorized information. In contrast, the girls’ brightly illustrated handbook encourages working in groups, solving problems creatively, and doing one’s best. While the boys learn facts about why we have a government, girls are encouraged to design their own. Most interestingly, Girl Scouts are even taught to engage in protests and defend their beliefs. It seems that the Scouts’ version of the “modern woman” is smart, creative, and ready for marriage and motherhood (well, once she’s earned the “Looking your Best” and “Caring for Children” badges). 

Through Denny’s study we get a glimpse of how two popular organizations conceptualize, and help realize, their image of the ideal man and woman. It’s a good reminder that boys will be boys and girls will be girls—it just takes separate handbooks and years of training.

Laura McCloud and Rachel Dwyer (The Sociological Quarterly, Winter 2011) analyzed bankruptcy records and found that the middle class is 2.4 times more likely to file for bankruptcy compared to lower income groups. Even more surprisingly, the upper class is also more likely to declare bankruptcy.

The authors claim that poor families are much less likely to seek debt relief through bankruptcy because they often cannot afford to pay the necessary legal fees. In addition, since the middle- and upper-class families are typically extended more credit than low income families, they are also more likely to use debt (say, by using a credit card) when faced with exorbitant medical bills, loss of income through unemployment, or the loss of a spouse.

These findings illustrate how bankruptcy laws are yet another way class inequalities are reproduced in contemporary American society. Since most poor families are unable to afford bankruptcy, they are perpetually saddled with debt (plus accruing interest) that they have little hope of paying off.

In a timely article, published just a few days before the revolution in Egypt broke out, Hazem Kandil provides some important insights (Theory and Society, January 2011). Kandil differentiates between two strategies of revolutionary takeover: a violent confrontation with the state versus a culture-based strategy that aims to capture the intellectual and moral high-ground within the civil society. The latter strategy—what we might call the “battle for hearts and minds”—took center stage in Muslim Brotherhood’s post-1980 politics.

Kandil assesses the Brotherhood’s use of education facilities, distribution of welfare allowances, and penetration into professional syndicates and the media. He suggests that over a number of years, the group managed to undermine the state’s social legitimacy and replace it with their own. Still, successes in the cultural realm had not crystallized into a political force strong enough to topple the state. Kandil believes this is because the modern state holds the monopoly on coercion—it can retain power even without social and cultural leadership, and the avoidance of direct confrontation dampens movements’ political agility over time.

These days, as many wonder whether the Brotherhood will hijack revolutionary energy and eventually snatch power in Egypt, Kandil’s discussion provides much-needed perspective.

The authors point out several possible reasons for the disparity: for one, their survey is of Nebraska residents, and crime documentaries are often set in rural areas while crime dramas are played out in urban settings. But what they really think is driving differences in perceived crime rates and faith in the system is the pseudo-authenticity of crime documentaries. Dramatized programs disguised as in-depth reporting provide concrete information about criminal events. They contribute to the notion that crime in the U.S. is out of control. Moreover, non-fictional shows depict the challenges of dealing with crime, sometimes even leaving crimes unsolved while the detectives on CSI get their man. Set within a media format that amplifies fear for dramatic effect, these “reality” crime shows leave people more nervous than ever.

Essentially, Krätke thinks Florida lumps together apples and oranges when he pulls a broad array of professionals, from physicists to artists to finance brokers, into his “creative class.” Instead, Krätke believes there are separate “creative” and “dealer” classes, and it’s the latter that drives a city’s overall prosperity.

Insofar as the economy is knowledge-driven and innovation-based, scientific and technological creativity do indeed contribute to economic development. For Krätke, though, activities like mediation, brokerage work, and speculative finance do not create or apply knowledge, and therefore cannot be said to drive economic success. In a very real way, this new research reminds us that scientifically and technologically driven sectors employ both skilled blue collar and creative white collar workers. Policies implemented to craft solely creative cities not only draw from dubious research, but they change the ideological landscape by skewing how we value different occupations.

Heisig studied 33 countries and found that lower-income men and women spend more time on housework than their higher-income counterparts. These differences were even greater for women and were influenced by economic development and country-levels of inequality. Differences between rich and poor women were smaller in more economically developed countries, where even low-income households had access to domestic appliances. Differences were greater where overall economic inequality was high, which likely reflects that higher-income households outsourced larger portions of their domestic work. Unlike tradable goods like dishwashers and vacuums, the costs of employing paid help are strongly linked to the general wage structure.

According to Heisig, these “findings remind us that gender inequalities are often conditioned by economic ones.”

The authors spent three years conducting interviews and participating in environmental protests in the heart of Central Appalachia’s coal-mining country—an area where economic and environmental interests often stand in direct opposition. Paradoxically, they found that the area’s normative ­gender expectations made these protests socially acceptable for women but not men.

Because the focus of their activism was on keeping the community’s children safe, it was seen by many locals as a natural result of a mother’s instincts—essentially, it was apolitical. In contrast, to be a man in Appalachia is to be a miner. And to be a miner is to work in dangerous conditions with nary a complaint. Now, as the mining industry mechanizes, there are fewer jobs, unions are weaker, pay is lower, and environmental damage is more severe. Yet rather than joining the protests, the men’s grip on their coal mining identity has become even tighter and more desperately silent. For these men, speaking out would mean working against the old boys club that once defined them.

The Appalachian tale provides an important lesson. To successfully mobilize the masses, even in an extreme case where the environment is destroyed and jobs are disappearing rapidly, a social movement must connect with preexisting identities. Gender roles, in particular, can be deeply entrenched and play out in unexpected, sometimes seemingly self-defeating ways. In this case, the masculine miners remain mute in a moment when their voices would be most important.

In an analysis of burglaries in one Los Angeles neighborhood during 2004 and 2005, Mohler and his colleagues observed that initial break-ins led to spikes in nearby burglaries (“aftershocks”) within a few hundred meters and a few days of the first event. In other words, areas around the first burglary are at heightened risk for further break-ins, but this risk fades over time and distance.

The researchers compared their predictive method against retrospective crime-mapping (the traditional method) to see which best anticipated future crime. The seismological models did a better job than “hot spots” maps in all cases. This enhanced ability to predict crime might not prevent the first “quake,” but it could help police departments better anticipate the tremors that follow.

Usually, network formation is studied using self-reported survey data, which often overreports interracial ties. To get beyond this weakness, Wimmer and Lewis tracked the Facebook profiles of freshman students at a large American university.

For authors like these, Facebook is a treasure trove of sociological data. Going beyond self-reporting, social scientists can actually observe how networks take shape over time. Wimmer and Lewis’s study tracked pictures students posted of themselves and others and found that geography of dorms influenced friendship formation. The social networking site also provided data on many other aspects that could influence friendships, like region of origin, high school, and interests.

Guess we can add sociological research to the list of things you can do on social media. There’s probably an app for that.

Photo by John Starnes

During two years of ethnographic research at a California genetics clinic, Timmermans and Buchbinder identified some significant social consequences of the broad-spectrum technology used to signal genetic red flags. False positives are common, but physicians and parents still feel compelled to act in response to equivocal results. Geneticists work to maintain mixed messages, balancing the seriousness of the potential condition with the likelihood of testing error, while parents prepare for the worst case scenario, implementing precautionary measures that restructure their daily routines—from altering the child’s diet and sleep patterns to foregoing career opportunities in order to care for their maybe-sick child. Even after geneticists conclude that a patient is likely fine, parents remain gripped by the fear that a common cough may signal a serious illness, making it difficult, if not impossible, for parents to relax vigilance. And doctors support this by urging routine check-ups… just in case.

So, while the medical upshot may be huge for the one percent of patients who are definitively diagnosed with a disorder, the technology is also a source of nebulous, but terrifying, anxiety for the vast majority of patients and families left in limbo.

Photo by Jesslee Cuizon

Lim and Putnam looked at responses from nearly 2,000 Americans in 2006 and 2007 to see how changes in religious attendance and number of congregational friends affect life satisfaction. They also analyzed whether involvement and friendships in non-religious contexts made a difference.

The results confirm that people who attend religious services more ­frequently—whether Protestant, Cath­o­lic, Mormon, or Jewish—feel more satisfied with life. But it’s not so much the religious experience itself that is key. The reason church-goers are so happy is that they build friendships with like-minded believers. What’s more, these friendships do more to enhance life satisfaction than friendships in other, non-religious contexts. As Lim and Putnam put it, “For life satisfaction, praying together seems to be better than either bowling together or praying alone.”

Pulling data from the largest, most geographically diverse website for gay male escorts in the U.S., Trevon D. Logan (American Sociological Review, October 2010) observes how escorts present themselves in online profiles, examining the men’s physical attributes, sexual behaviors, and advertised rates. Escorts’ online self-presentations suggest that gay men seeking sex prize traditionally masculine behaviors and sexual roles, so those escorts who conform to stereotypically macho behavior will end up with significantly higher incomes.

Logan’s findings strongly support traditional understandings of dominant masculinity and provide a provocative counterpoint to claims that gay men don’t value masculinity.

After news of the Enron scandal broke, for example, photos of then-CEO Kenneth Lay were prominently displayed in virtually all media stories on the company. Benediktsson suggests that responses like these are intentional corporate decisions to put a face on the crime, diverting public attention from the corporation itself.

Leaving individuals to fend for themselves protects the company’s reputation and saves thousands, if not millions, of dollars in legal fees and other services. Another case in point: the 2001 Xerox scandal, which thrust six executives into the limelight and concluded with a $10 million settlement from the company and an astounding $22 million settlement from the six “fall guys.”

This practice is supported, too, by the media’s preference for a face and back-story to courtroom dramas. After all, legal proceedings are less exciting for newspaper editors (and their readers) when the plaintiff on the stand is some faceless corporation. So, though most companies—at least in the U.S.—emphasize the importance of being a team player, it’s every man for himself in a scandal.

Sobieraj’s interviews with activists and journalists reveled that media coverage of political outsiders is governed by a set of rules opposite those of routine news-making. Staged or controlled activism isn’t deemed interesting or “real” enough to make the five o’clock highlights. One reporter said, “So, I suppose one option, although I’m not saying this is a good way to do things, is to just go break stuff. You know, go riot. If people riot, we’ll pay attention.” An activist pointed out, “It’s very sad really, that in order for the disenfranchised to get press they have to break the law.”

In the end, if activists and their work don’t make the news cut, it may not be because they can’t conform to the rules, but because they are following the wrong rules.

Photo by Kristin Hillery, That Other Paper

According to Paul Ingram and his coauthors (American Journal of Sociology, July 2010), Wal-Mart filed about 1,600 proposals for new stores between 1998 and 2005. Some 563 of these proposals were met by protests, and 65 percent of those stores never opened. This suggests protests are highly effective, and by extension, detrimental to Wal-Mart’s profit margins.

But why does Wal-Mart file proposals when they have sufficient resources to simply build their stores without the hassle? The authors conclude that proposals give Wal-Mart an inexpensive way to predict the profitability of future stores. A proposal that’s met by protests indicates a lukewarm local reception. By not opening that store, Wal-Mart saves money it can invest in opening outlets in friendlier neighborhoods. Or, if they push ahead with the proposed-but-protested store, they’re able to make targeted concessions that’ll help appease each local community’s concerns.

Some tips for anti-Wal-Mart activists: protests are more likely to succeed in communities that are pro-Democrat, have strong “buy local” values, and are located near other communities that’ve successfully faced down Wal-Mart before. Or so says Wal-Mart’s marketing research.

Kristen W. Springer (Sociological Forum, September 2010) looked at New York Times articles spanning more than 15 years to explore how media portrayals of crack cocaine use during pregnancy compared with those of alcohol and tobacco use. She also examined how portrayals of poor and minority pregnant women compared with others.

Springer has found that crack-using pregnant women are significantly more likely to be presented as “bad mothers” than those using alcohol or tobacco during pregnancy, and that racial minority and poor women are portrayed negatively more often than others. What makes these media representations problematic is that medical research suggests alcohol and tobacco use are more harmful to fetal development that cocaine use and that far more babies are born to white drug users than to any other race.

Springer’s study suggests that framing and frequency of news stories about pregnant drug users has little to do with protecting the health of children. Instead, she argues, poor and minority mothers are portrayed as unfit moms—easy targets and scapegoats who can shoulder the blame for changes and problems in the family today.

Researcher Milda R. Saunders and colleagues (American Journal of Transplantation, 2010) analyzed Census data against statistics on blacks and whites who initiated dialysis over a six-year span in order to determine patients’ neighborhood characteristics.

Not surprisingly they found a consistent black-white gap. Additionally, they discovered that neighborhood poverty disproportionately affected black residents’ transplant chances. Whites from wealthier neighborhoods had a better chance of getting onto a transplant waitlist than their black neighbors and anyone from poorer neighborhoods. Altogether, when neighborhood wealth decreased, the disparity between blacks and whites on the transplant waitlist increased. This results in blacks from primarily black, poor neighborhoods having the lowest likelihood of appearing on transplant waitlist.

So while your neighbors may help you out with a cup of sugar, they may be hindering your chances of getting a kidney.

Consistent with previous research, young adults in this study were less likely to be employed for years after being released, even if their incarceration was short (four months or less). But upon closer scrutiny, Apel and Sweeten found that non-employed ex-inmates hadn’t necessarily experienced difficulty in finding work. Rather, they just hadn’t looked (or gave up quickly). When compared to others who were convicted but not incarcerated for their crimes, the effect weakened; being locked up affected future employment far more than just the label “convicted criminal.”

Removal from society (and the resulting disruption of work history and education), as well as limited job options and better earnings in illegal markets, produce discouraged workers who don’t seek employment after prison. The authors are careful not to dismiss the stigma of incarceration on employment outcomes, but their analysis shows how employer willingness to hire is useless if ex-inmates aren’t applying.

Photo by Sherry's Rose Cottage

Jennifer March Augustine and Robert Crosnoe tackle this question in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior (October 2010). They compared maternal depression with children’s academic achievement, testing math and verbal skills in the first, third, and fifth grades and found that a mother’s depression only negatively affected her child’s development when she had a high school education or less. Augustine and Crosnoe speculate that the experience of higher education, valuable in many ways, may also equip mothers with knowledge about and a belief in the value of the educational system that helps buffer their children from some harmful effects of their mother’s depression.

Photo by David Freeman

Crabb argues that from early 1980s onwards, China’s market rationality gradually infiltrated its education system. This is reflected, Crabb writes, not only in the diversification and privatization of schools, but also in the proliferation of private tutoring, weekend language clubs, and extracurriculars.

Based on her work as an English teacher in a Beijing middle school, the author describes moments in which anxious parents struggle to manage their child’s well-rounded development. One parent explains, “I want my son to have a quality education… We only have one child, so we pin all our hopes on him.” Another laments, “I knew I had to make the right choice… for his future success, and I was very afraid of making the wrong decision.”

Despite anxieties over education’s move to the market, Crabb believes the Chinese state remains schools’ central actor by defining education as the motor of its ever-growing economy. Privatization of education, then, may deliver both an urban, consumer middle class and quality human capital.

Many sociologists have speculated that this might be due to union activity, but they lacked the data to demonstrate it empirically. Now Tali Kristal (American Sociological Review, October 2010) has filled this gap. Using data from 16 democratic capitalist countries, Kristal constructed models to measure the change of labor’s share of national income, finding that the working class’s prosperity corresponds directly to their levels of union activity.

Surprisingly, while labor activity is initially beneficial to the working class, it appears to contain the seeds of its own destruction, since it can adversely affect overall corporate earnings. But that’s true only to a certain point, after which union activity has a positive effect on capitalist profits. That profit is then invested in labor-saving initiatives to reduce the high labor costs imposed by the unions. It might be time, again, for nations to carefully rethink labor relations.

Photo by Linda MacPhee-Cobb

Grant and his team examine new Environmental Protection Agency data in order to see the combined effects of facility and community characteristics. Using complex statistical analyses, they find four “recipes” for how community and facility factors intersect to produce high risks. These include: 1. large African American population and low income; 2. large African American population and large Latino population; 3. large African American population, large plant size, and a plant that’s part of a branch; and 4. large Latino population, low income, and a plant that’s part of a branch.

These “recipe” formulations help remind researchers to stop debating which individual community characteristics matter most. Instead, researchers and policy makers should focus on how various factors combine in a variety of ways to produce health-threatening emissions, and maybe even how to put a stop to the danger.

Photo by Jennifer Dyck

Aseygul Aydin (Journal of Peace Research, September 2010) examined data from the Correlates of War project and confirmed past findings that trade can deter interstate conflict. That much we knew. However, while past studies have found the volume of trade is key, Aydin found trade also matters because it fosters connectivity.

As Aydin explains, states are likely to intervene in conflicts that threaten economic interests, *especially* if those interests are linked through regional trade organizations. Those groups form dense ties and are directly affected when one of their members falls into conflict. For these reasons, other states might view membership in a regional organization (rather than in a more diffuse international group, like the World Trade Organization) as a signal of long-term economic interest by member states.

Apparently, your mango or banana is more valuable than you realize.

The authors studied how just the inclusion of a photograph invokes different emotions and opinions about the government and Hurricane Katrina. Many believe the government was to blame for mismanagement after the disaster, so the authors thought simply adding photos to news stories wouldn’t have much of an effect. But after manipulating a news story to include or exclude victim photos, they asked respondents to rate the government’s crisis response. African American respondents overwhelmingly held the federal government more responsible than did white respondents, regardless of photographs. White respondents who were exposed to articles with photographs, however, were less likely to hold the government responsible than those who didn’t see photos.

Ben-Porath and Shaker believe the inclusion of a victim photo is a classic example of priming. The photos made white respondents sort of “forget” structural forces and think more abstractly about the person in the picture. Although this loss of critical analysis didn’t hold for all groups, this research reminds us that presentation can change interpretations.