by heather on
Jan 17, 2008 at 11:22 pm
Article: Joining up: Did military service in the early all volunteer era affect subsequent civilian income? Social Science Research, December 2007
Summary: “The military has historically been the single largest employer of young men and the largest vocational training institution in the nation.” So how are the benefits? Jay Teachman and Lucky Tedrow examine the long-term impact of military service on men’s income and find that military service gives young men from disadvantaged backgrounds an income boost while they’re active, but things tend to even out for enlistees once discharged. Furthermore, white veterans with at least a high school degree suffer an income deficit when compared to their civilian counterparts.
“Nearly two decades following discharge from the military (and net of many important controls, including several attempts to adjust for selectivity), better educated White veterans earn about 87% of the income enjoyed by their nonveteran counterparts. Thus, on the face of the matter, military service does not appear to be a wise economic choice for many men who could otherwise do better by remaining in the civilian labor market. They lose critical labor market experience and likely lose important information about job networks.”
The noteworthy exception to this trend is that Blacks with less than a high school education receive an income premium from their service. These results have important implications for military recruitment efforts.
by heather on
Jan 17, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Article: The Association of Couples’ Relationship Status and Quality with Breastfeeding Initiation Journal of Marriage and Family, December 2007
Summary: In a recent study, Christina M. Gibson-Davis and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn weigh in on the growing debate over whether diverse family forms influence child well-being. Looking at data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey, the authors examine the links between relationship status, relationship quality, and race and ethnicity in breastfeeding initiation. In line with previous findings, the authors conclude that married women are more likely to breastfeed than mothers in other family forms. At the same time, however, the variability between cohabiting, non-cohabiting partners, and non-romantically involved parents should not be downplayed. Another noteworthy finding is that non-married mothers who received paternal financial support during pregnancy were half as likely to breastfeed. Among non-married African American mothers, paternal emotional support also decreased the likelihood of breastfeeding by 28%.
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 heather on
Jan 17, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Article: Support Between Siblings and Between Friends: Two Worlds Apart? Journal of Marriage and Family, December 2007
Summary: Using data from a Dutch survey study, Marieke Voorpostel and Tanja Van Der Lippe examine how the type of support received differs between friends and siblings. The authors find that, on average, siblings exchange more practical support - such as housework or transportation - while friends exchange more emotional support. An intriguing finding is that geographical distance has a negative effect on the exchange of practical support, but was positively related with the exchange of emotional support. In other words, the authors explain:
The further siblings and friends lived apart, the more likely emotional support was received.
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.
by ryan on
Jan 17, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Article: Negotiating Borders with Valores del Rancho. Latin American Perspectives, January 2008
Summary: Based on an ethnographic study of second generation Mexican immigrants in the U.S. and who have returned to Mexico, Mary A. Petron argues the immigration experience forces the participants to negotiate class status. Interviewees who returned to Mexico found they did not fit in with the lower class or the middle class. As children of the lower class, immigrants felt that they had learned the culture or values of that class such as hard work, saving money, and a commitment to family. Once they moved back to Mexico, with a middle-class lifestyle and speaking English, they felt disconnected from their poorer compatriots financially as well as disconnected from the middle class in terms of values. They therefore found a “third space” from which to mediate their new status.
by ryan on
Jan 17, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Article: Schwartzman, Luisa Farah. “Does Money Whiten?” American Sociological Review. , December 2007.
Summary: So does money whiten in Brazil? In a word, Schwartzman argues yes. This is for two reasons. First, more educated nonwhite parents are more likely to marry white and less likely to marry nonwhites. Second, more-educated interracial couples label their children white more often than do less-educated interracial couples.
The most interesting aspect of this article in my opinion is the structural buffer the upper-class, and especially the white upper-class, has erected. As the author notes, “By maintaining rigid class boundaries with poor nonwhites (by both marrying within their social class and imposing restraints on upward mobility of nonwhites…), the white elite isolates itself from nonwhites and imposes its standards (and incorporates into its families) the few nonwhites who share their elite status. For the same reason, nonwhites who move up are not able to break the system of racial hierarchy in the long run, because their children are often incorporated into the white group.” 958-9
***It is important to note that, in Brazil, educational attainment is a proxy for socio-economic status as we understand it in the U.S. Therefore, the dependent variable used by Schwartzman is parent education.
by ryan on
Jan 17, 2008 at 11:58 am
Article: Structural Influences on Energy Production in South and East Asia, 1971-2002. Sociological Forum, December 2007
Summary:
A number of competing theories on the environmental consequences of globalization and modernization and environmental degradation have been proposed over the last several decades.
These debates include:
- Neoliberal theories [“economic production is not necessarily as connected to natural resource exploitation as many believe” 534];
- Economic theories i.e. environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis [negative environmental impacts follow an inverted U curve during the modernization process];
- Ecological modernization [less negative environmental impact as modernization ideas are diffused through the institutions of developing countries];
- Neo-Marxist and [modernization drives environmental degradation];
- world-systems theory [wealthy core dominate global economy and utilize a disproportionate share of the world’s natural resources];
- Metabolic rift thesis [urbanization will consistently lead to the expansion of energy production and environmental degradation].
To assess these theories, York utilizes fourteen economies in Asia over twenty years as data in a magical multivariate cross-sectional time-series analysis. He concludes: 1. population growth is a key force driving the expansin of energy production; 2. modernization generally leads to an escalation in energy production; 3. In terms of globalization, the data supports world-systems theories as export intensity and debt service payments lead to higher rates of energy production.; and 4.“Modernization and globalization are key forces driving natural resource exploitation and the environmental problems stemming from them” 551.