Why do people engage with similar others despite ample opportunities to interact with dissimilar others? We argue that adversity or setbacks may have a stronger deteriorative effect on ties made up of dissimilar individuals, prompting people to give up on such ties more easily, which, over the long run, results in people forming ties with similar others. We examine this argument in the context of Association

Since Norman Ryder's (1965) classic essay on cohort analysis was published more than a half century ago, scores of researchers have attempted to uncover the separate effects of age, period, and cohort (APC) on a wide range of outcomes. However, rather than disentangling period effects from those attributable to age or cohort, Ryder's approach is based on distinguishing intra-cohort trends (or life-cycle

Since Norman Ryder's (1965) classic essay on cohort analysis was published more than a half century ago, scores of researchers have attempted to uncover the separate effects of age, period, and cohort (APC) on a wide range of outcomes. However, rather than disentangling period effects from those attributable to age or cohort, Ryder's approach is based on distinguishing intra-cohort trends (or life-cycle

Dual-process perspectives have made substantial contributions to our understanding of behavior, but fundamental questions about how and when deliberate and automatic cognition shape action continue to be debated. Among these are whether automatic or deliberate cognition is ultimately in control of behavior, how often each type of cognition controls behavior in practice, and how the answers to each

Social scientists have long been interested in understanding the extent to which the typicalities of an object in concepts relate to its valuations by social actors. Answering this question has proven to be challenging because precise measurement requires a feature-based description of objects. Yet, such descriptions are frequently unavailable. In this article, we introduce a method to measure typicality

Scholars have long proposed that gender inequalities in wages are narrowed by organizational policies to advance gender equality. Using cross-sectional data, scarce previous research has found an association between gender wage inequalities and these organizational policies, but it remains unclear whether this correlation represents a causal effect. We provide first evidence on this topic by using

This article introduces the concept of multiple, layered, and interacting histories, which opens four new avenues of research. We can ask which types of institutions or events, such as states, religions, or war, are more likely to leave a historical legacy. We can also explore why only certain states, religions, or wars leave legacies. We can compare the consequences of older and newer layers of history

Which individuals and corporate actors belong in a collective, and who decides? Sociology has not had good analytical tools for addressing these questions. Recent work that adapts probabilistic representations of concepts and probabilistic categorization to sociological research opens opportunities for making progress on the measurement of memberships. It turns out that the probabilistic cognitive-based

Researchers studying discrimination and bias frequently conduct experiments that use racially distinctive names to signal race or ethnicity. The evidence that these studies provide about racial discrimination depends on the assumption that the names researchers use differ only based on perceived race and not some other factor. In this article, we assess this common assumption using data from five different

Perceived social exclusion refers to the subjective feeling of not being part of the macrolevel society. Loneliness arises if existing social relationships at the micro level are either quantitatively or qualitatively perceived as deficient. Here, we conceptualize and empirically demonstrate that both experiences are distinct but related constructs and investigate how they interact over time. The data

A growing literature examines the impact of immigration and law enforcement on undocumented immigrants and their communities, but these studies are limited by the lack of reliable data on documentation status and their focus on federal immigration enforcement. Leveraging administrative student data from the City University of New York (CUNY) that reliably identify about 13,000 undocumented students

Monica Prasad Sociological Science September 12, 2022 10.15195/v9.a15 Abstract The emergence of bureaucracy is often described as occurring at a particular historical period in a society, as a result of the pressures of war, the improvement of communication and transportation technologies, or societywide cultural changes. But recently many scholars have drawn attention to examples of meritocratic bureaucracies

linking skin color with life chances. Skin color stratification should be conceptualized in historical, structural terms: as the result of unequal treatment and inherited (dis)advantage, that is, unequal resources transmitted by families with different skin tones. We assess the role of two pathways— discrimination and inherited (dis)advantage—for Blacks’ and Latinos’ employment, earnings, and occupational

This article elaborates and tests the hypothesis that the sociopolitical segregation of interpersonal networks (i.e., social sorting) is at the root of recent polarization trends in the United States. After reviewing recent trends, the article outlines the micro-level pathways through which social sorting along sociopolitical lines leads individuals to become more ideological in their identities and

Using novel data, we provide the first panoramic view of U.S. Black movement protest events as reported in U.S. newswires between 1994 and 2010 and put our quantitative data into dialogue with qualitative accounts. Struggles during these years presaged the Black Lives protest waves of 2014 to 2016 and 2020. Protests increased after the 1995 Million Man March into 2001 but dropped abruptly after the

Theories in sociology argue that family background and individual experiences shape cultural tastes and participation. Yet, we do not know the relative importance of each explanation or the extent to which family background operates via shared genes or shared environments. In this article, we use new data on same-sex monozygotic and dizygotic twins from Denmark to estimate the total impact of family

This study examines the distributional consequences of U.S. employers' efforts to devolve responsibility for managing their employees' medical insurance risk. The logic of consumer choice has increasingly come to dominate insurance benefit design, requiring that employees learn to be their own actuaries. We ask, to what extent does the individuation of choice (between insurance plans with disparate

In many Western societies, the current 'native' majority will become a numerical minority sometime within the next century. How does prospective demographic change affect existing group boundaries? An influential recent article by Abascal (2020) showed that white Americans under demographic threat reacted with boundary contraction—that is, they were less likely to classify ambiguously white people

Many aspects of behavior are guided by dispositions that are relatively durable once formed. Political opinions and phonology, for instance, change largely through cohort succession. But evidence for cohort effects has been scarce in artistic and intellectual history; researchers in those fields more commonly explain change as an immediate response to recent innovations and events. We test these conflicting

Evidence on how parenthood affects household wealth in the United States has been inconclusive, partially because previous studies have decontextualized parenthood from gender, marital, and relationship status. Yet, insights from economic sociology suggest that wealth-related behaviors are shaped by the intersection of identities, not by a binary classification of parental status. We examine net worth

The steep rise of top wages is acknowledged as one of the main drivers of the rise in earnings inequality between workers in most postindustrial labor markets. Yet its relation to gender stratification, in particular to the stagnation in the gender pay gap, has received very little scholarly attention. Using data from the U.S. Current Population Survey, conducted between 1980 and 2017, we provide evidence

High-cost financial services allow economically insecure families to make ends meet but often contribute to additional financial strain in the long run. This study uses novel data from the Shift Project to describe the link between schedule unpredictability and high-cost debt (i.e., payday loans, pawnshop loans, auto-title loans, overdrafts, and problematic credit card debt) among service workers.

Societal beliefs about women's work have long been a metric for gender equality, with recent scholarship focusing on trends in these attitudes to assess the progress (or stalling) of the gender revolution. Moving beyond widely critiqued gender attitude questions thought to be the only available items for measuring change over time, this article considers women's and men's views toward their own work

Many commentators have suggested that Donald Trump's 2016 election emboldened discrimination against racial minorities. We focus on changes in weekly work hours among hourly paid employees during the five months following the 2016 election (relative to 12 months prior). Using two-wave panel data from the Current Population Survey, we find that black workers suffered temporary work hours and earnings

Although sociologists have devoted considerable attention to studying the role of education in intergenerational social class mobility using log-linear models for contingency tables, indings in this literature are not free from rescaling or non-collapsibility bias caused by adjusting for education in these models. Drawing on the methodological literature on inverse probability reweighting, I present

The General Social Survey (GSS) shows that many self-identified white adults continue to hold racial attitudes that can be regarded, collectively, as a persistent social problem. Similar to findings from the analysis of electoral surveys, the GSS also shows that these racial attitudes have more strongly predicted political behavior since 2012. However, and in contrast to group-identity interpretations

During the early twentieth century, industrial-era European immigrants entered the United States with lower levels of education than the U.S. average. However, empirical research has yielded unclear and inconsistent evidence about the extent and pace of their integration, leaving openings for arguments that contest the narrative that these groups experienced rapid integration and instead assert that

Crises present the scientific community with unusual demands, including the need for rapid solutions. This can translate into a greatly compressed time frame that curtails data collection and analysis procedures used in 'normal' science. Researchers cope with these demands, while maintaining professional standards and a personal commitment to producing reliable work, by engaging in what we call performed

Although there has been a fast rise in the share of Americans reporting no religion, it is unclear whether this trend has affected different parts of the country equally. Against this backdrop, we apply dynamic multilevel regression and poststratification (Dynamic MRP) to General Social Survey data over the period 1973 to 2018 to estimate state-level religious trends. We validate our estimates against

With deepening cleavages on several social dimensions, social fragmentation has become a major concern across the social sciences. This article proposes a spatial approach to study the segregation pattern of acquaintanceship ties across multiple social dimensions simultaneously. A Bayesian unfolding model is developed and fitted to the 2006 General Social Survey. Results suggests that the segregation

Assimilation theories argue that social ties with majority-group members enhance the structural integration of ethnic minority members, whereas under certain conditions, coethnic social ties can also benefit minority members' socioeconomic outcomes. We examine these propositions through a social network perspective, focusing on friendship networks and educational expectations in adolescence, during

I evaluate Andrade and Thomsen (A&T)'s (2018) study, which concludes that Denmark is significantly more educationally mobile than the United States. I make three observations. First, A&T overstate the difference in educational mobility between Denmark and the United States. Both in international comparison and compared with differences in intergenerational income mobility, A&T's reported country differences

In this rejoinder to Kristian Bernt Karlson (KBK), we maintain that there are substantial differences in intergenerational educational mobility between Denmark and the United States. In fact, when we include additional parental information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) for the United States, as suggested by KBK, the gap between Denmark and the United States increases

Lindsay Paterson Sociological Science October 20, 2021 10.15195/v8.a16 Abstract Intelligence, or cognitive ability, is a key variable in reproducing social inequality. On the one hand, it is associated with the social class in which a child grows up. On the other, it is a predictor of educational attainment, labor-market experiences, social mobility, health and well-being, and length of life. Therefore

The demographic composition of the U.S. professoriate affects student composition and, thus, the pipeline for professional and managerial jobs. Amid concern about the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on the labor market, much remains unknown about how economic downturns affect faculty hiring and the demographic makeup of hires. We examine the effects of the Great Recession on faculty hiring. That crisis

Are contemporary higher-status tastes inclusive, exclusive, or both? Recent work suggests that the answer likely is both. And yet, little is known concerning how configurations of such tastes are learned, upheld, and expressed without contradiction. We resolve this puzzle by showing the affordances of different levels of culture (i.e., genres and objects) in the expression of tastes. We rely on original

The social stratification literature is inconclusive about whether there is a direct effect of grandparent resources on grandchildren's educational outcomes net of parental characteristics. Some of this heterogeneity may be due to differences in omitted variable bias at the parental level. Our article accounts for a more extensive set of parent characteristics and explores the mediating role of parental

Predictions of node categories are commonly used to estimate homophily and other relational properties in networks. However, little is known about the validity of using predictions for this task. We show that estimating homophily in a network is a problem of predicting categories of dyads (edges) in the graph. Homophily estimates are unbiased when predictions of dyad categories are unbiased. Node-level

Why are organizations sometimes so similar, and in other cases so different? For decades this question has been central to research on organizations, and two leading theories have answered the question very differently. Neo-institutional theory points to the importance of mimetic isomorphism, where organizations imitate one another as they navigate decisions in the context of uncertainty over what

We propose an abductive logic of scientific inference for quantitative research. The advent of computational sociology has exposed the limitations of a deductive logic of inquiry for quantitative researchers due to a lack of traditional sociological variables and an abundance of unfamiliar variables and data formats, complicating hypothesis testing. In response, some researchers have embraced inductive

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted Americans’ daily mobility, which could contribute to greater social stratification. Relying on SafeGraph cell phone movement data from 2019 and 2020, we use two indices proposed by Phillips and colleagues (2019) to measure mobility inequality between census tracts in the 25 largest U.S. cities. These measures capture the importance of hubs and neighborhood isolation

Role-taking is the process of mentally and affectively placing the self in the position of another, understanding the world from the other’s perspective. Role-taking serves an expressive function within interpersonal interaction, supporting others to pursue instrumental tasks that are recognized, valued, and rewarded. In the present work, we compare role-taking accuracy between white women and black

Combining media coverage data from approximately 17,000 unique media outlets with the full population of CEO appointments for U.S. publicly traded firms between 2000 and 2016, we investigate whether female CEO appointments garner more public attention compared with male appointments, and if so, whether this increased attention can help make sense of the previously reported negative market reaction

Sociologists increasingly use insights from dual-process models to explain how people think and act. These discussions generally emphasize the influence of cultural knowledge mobilized through automatic cognition, or else show how the use of automatic and deliberate processes vary according to the task at hand or the context. Drawing on insights from sociological theory and suggestive research from

Recent work argues that changes in people's responses to the same question over time should be thought of as reflecting a fixed baseline subject to temporary local influences, rather than durable changes in response to new information. Distinguishing between these two individual-level process—a settled dispositions model and an active updating model—is important because these individual-level processes

Intelligence, or cognitive ability, is a key variable in reproducing social inequality. On the one hand, it is associated with the social class in which a child grows up. On the other, it is a predictor of educational attainment, labor-market experiences, social mobility, health and well-being, and length of life. Therefore measured intelligence is important to our understanding of how inequality operates

Dyadic or, more generally, polyadic life course sequences can be more associated within dyads or polyads than between randomly assigned dyadic/polyadic member sequences, a phenomenon reflecting the life course principle of linked lives. In this article, I propose a method of U and V measures for quantifying and assessing linked life course trajectories in sequence data. Specifically, I compare the

Corporations increasingly use personal data to offer individuals different products and prices. I present first-of-its-kind evidence about how U.S. consumers assess the fairness of companies using personal information in this way. Drawing on a nationally representative survey that asks respondents to rate how fair or unfair it is for car insurers and lenders to use various sorts of information—from

Economic sociologists agree that monetary transactions are not necessarily antithetical to meaningful social relationships. However, they also accept that creating 'good matches' between the two requires hard work. In this article, I contribute to the relational program in economic sociology by examining a common but understudied type of work in which one party to a relationship stands to benefit from

In normal times, the network ties that connect students on a college campus are an asset;during a pandemic, they can become a liability Using prepandemic data from Cornell University, Weeden and Cornwell (2020) showed how co-enrollment in classes creates a “small world” network with high clustering, short path lengths, and multiple independent pathways connecting students Using data from the fall of

This article examines whether network instability—namely, the extent of turnover in a person’s social network over time—is a distinct social process that affects individual well-being. Using a unique two-wave network data set collected in a field experiment that involved more than 21,100 students across 56 middle schools, we find a strong negative association between network instability and well-being

Drawing on millions of court records of eviction cases filed between 2012 and 2016 in 39 states, this study documents the racial and gender demographics of America's evicted population. Black renters received a disproportionate share of eviction filings and experienced the highest rates of eviction filing and eviction judgment. Black and Latinx female renters faced higher eviction rates than their

Vast racial inequalities continue to prevail across the United States and are closely linked to economic resources. One particularly prominent argument contends that childhood wealth accounts for black–white (BW) disadvantages in life chances. This article analyzes how much childhood wealth and childhood income mediate BW disadvantages in adult life chances with Panel Study of Income Dynamics and Cross-National

'Microaggressions' is the term scholars and cultural commentators use to describe the ways that racism and other systems of oppression are upheld in everyday interactions. Although prior research has documented the types of microaggressions that individuals experience, we have lacked representative data on the prevalence of microaggressions in the general population. We introduce and evaluate five

Throughout the twentieth century, the world has seen a rapid increase in global social, economic, and political integration. According to many studies, attitudes toward international organizations and international cooperation have also grown more positive, particularly among elites and in the affluent, densely connected countries of the global core. Using survey responses on 18 different questions

Collective behavior can be notoriously hard to predict. We revisited a possible explanation suggested by Granovetter’s classic threshold model: collective behavior can unexpectedly fail, despite a group’s strong interest in the outcome, because of the sensitivity of cascades to small random perturbations in group composition and the distribution of thresholds. Paradoxically, we found that a small amount

Recent methodological work at the intersection of culture, cognition, and computational methods has drawn attention to how cultural schemas can be 'recovered' from social survey data. Defining cultural schemas as slowly learned, implicit, and unevenly distributed relational memory structures, researchers show how schemas—or rather, the downstream consequences of people drawing upon them—can be operationalized

Most research on sexual prejudice explicitly or implicitly assumes that an individual’s sexual orientation identity is known to observers. However, there has been little large-scale survey evidence examining differential rates of disclosure among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals, and there remains much to be studied as to why and when LGB individuals choose to disclose their sexual identity

Using a corpus of millions of digitized books, we document the presence and trajectory over time of stereotypical gender associations in the written English language from 1800 to 2000. We employ the novel methodology of word embeddings to quantify male gender bias: the tendency to associate a domain with the male gender. We measure male gender bias in four stereotypically gendered domains: career,

In science, self-citation is often interpreted as an act of self-promotion that (artificially) boosts the visibility of one’s prior work in the short term, which could then inflate professional authority in the long term. Recently, in light of research on the gender gap in self-promotion, two large-scale studies of publications examine if women self-cite less than men. But they arrive at conflicting