Adriano S. Senkevics, Rogério J. Barbosa, Flavio Carvalhaes, Carlos A. Costa Ribeiro Sociological Science September 10, 2024 10.15195/v11.a31 Abstract Access to higher education depends on the interaction between social origins and academic performance: background resources boost academic skills; but even when controlling for performance, privileged students are more likely to make ambitious choices

Drawing on a unique survey of US workers with information about their employers’ policies on pay discussions and whether workers engage in such talk with their coworkers, we provide the most comprehensive investigation into pay talk in workplaces to date. Unlike existing treatments, we focus on core organizational and relational factors that influence whether workers talk about pay. We theorize pay

This address focuses on the importance of inclusivity and diversity to the future of the Rural Sociological Society. It begins by sharing the author's experiences within the society as a rural‐focused scholar trained in a Sociology department without strong ties to the RSS, and the challenges she faced in earning recognition in the RSS. It goes on to explore the development of the RSS and the ways

Delia Baldassarri, Johanna Gereke, Max Schaub Sociological Science September 6, 2024 10.15195/v11.a30 Abstract How does prosocial behavior extend beyond in-group boundaries in multiethnic societies? The differentiation of Western societies presents an opportunity to understand the tension between societal pressures that push people outside the comfort zones of their familiar networks to constructively

Few studies examine how high-achieving Black women navigate chronic reproductive health morbidities. Black women are disproportionately more likely to experience uterine fibroids, with earlier onset and more severe symptoms. This study leverages a national mixed-methods data set of Black women academics to examine how they describe symptomatic fibroids impacting their careers and lives. We find that

This research examines the potential of gender‐transformative approaches (GTAs) to improve gender equality in agricultural extension programs and food security through experiential learning and participatory methods. Scholars of gender and agriculture have long highlighted the gender gap in access to agricultural resources; to address this issue, development organizations have integrated GTAs into

Katrin Auspurg, Sabine Düval Sociological Science September 3, 2024 10.15195/v11.a29 Abstract We question the validity of standard measures of gender ideology. When asked about “men” and “women” in general, respondents may imagine women (men) with lower (higher) labor market resources. Therefore, standard measures may conflate gender ideologies (injunctive norms) with stereotypical beliefs (descriptive

The debt collection industry in the United States has grown in tandem with rising indebtedness. Prior research on debt and mental health mainly treats debt as a resource and liability rather than a power relationship between creditors and debtors. We study the mental health consequences of debt collection pressure using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1997 Cohort (N = 7,236). Drawing

Benefit cutbacks have been prominent after the Great Recession. The Family Economic Stress Model (FESM) theorizes how financial losses such as those spurred by cutbacks might adversely affect parental and child well-being. Yet, few links with policy have been established. We extend current knowledge by comprehensively assessing how benefits cutbacks may affect parents and their adolescent children

Many studies have compared individual measures of health expectancy across older populations by time-invariant characteristics. However, very few have included time-varying variables when calculating health expectancy. Even among older adults, socioeconomic and demographic characteristics are likely to change over the life course, and these changes may have substantial implications for health outcomes

In the United States, exclusionary public policies generate inequalities within and across labor, financial, and legal status hierarchies, which together undermine immigrant well-being. But can inclusive public policies improve immigrant health? We examine whether and how an immigrant-inclusive federal program, Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), shaped health care access and use among farmworkers

Yao Lu, Neeraj Kaushal, Xiaoning Huang, S. Michael Gaddis, Ariela Schachter Sociological Science August 30, 2024 10.15195/v11.a28 Abstract This study examines how COVID-induced and general attitudes toward Asians have changed over the course of the pandemic using nationally representative survey experiments in 2020 and 2022. First, we measured COVID-induced anti-Asian attitudes as the effect of a treatment

Carlos J. Gil-Hernández, Irene Pañeda-Fernández, Leire Salazar, Jonatan Castaño Muñoz Sociological Science August 27, 2024 10.15195/v11.a27 Abstract Teachers are the evaluators of academic merit. Identifying if their assessments are fair or biased by student-ascribed status is critical for equal opportunity but empirically challenging, with mixed previous findings. We test status characteristics beliefs

Despite their significance, life-course dynamics are rarely considered as consequences of social movements. We address this shortcoming by investigating the relationship between protest and marriage formation in Ethiopia. Building on scholarship in social movements and insights from family demography, we argue that exposure to protest delays marriage formation. To test our theoretical arguments, we

Job seeking is a crucial yet overlooked process through which people navigate the world of work. Yet there remains limited qualitative research examining the complex and nuanced experiences of job seekers in a contemporary labour market. This article explores 38 interviews with job-seeking women in England, all of whom were interviewed over a six-month period. Using a postfeminist sensibility, findings

Research has shown that socioeconomic and psychological resources may influence educational trajectories. There are still unanswered questions, however, about the unique roles of these resources and the interplay between them. We consider two such questions: First, how do major psychological resources—a sense of school belonging and optimistic future expectations—predict educational trajectories when

Sociologists are discussing the need for more formal ways to extract meaning from digital text archives. We focus attention on the seeded topic model, a semi-supervised extension to the standard topic model that allows sociological knowledge to be infused into the computational learning of meaning structures. Seed words help crystallize topics around known concepts, while utilizing topic models’ functionality

Peter McMahan, Eran Shor Sociological Science August 20, 2024 10.15195/v11.a25 Abstract Sociologists of culture have long noted that contrasting cultural frames can lead to status ambiguity and status multiplicity. We explore these phenomena in the domain of professional sports by first replicating and then extending and challenging recently published findings on selections for the National Basketball

Digital initiatives may have helped to maintain active social networks during restrictive, social distancing measures of the COVID‐19 pandemic. To examine how and under which circumstances digital initiatives can contribute to social cohesion, semistructured interviews with 35 stakeholders of local communities and clubs were conducted. The thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews identified

Ursina Kuhn, Debra Hevenstone, Leen Vandecasteele, Samin Sepahniya, Dorian Kessler Sociological Science August 16, 2024 10.15195/v11.a24 Abstract We investigate how unemployment insurance generosity impacts reemployment and economic precarity by family type. With Swiss longitudinal administrative data and a regression discontinuity design using potential benefit duration, we examine differences between

This primer systematizes the emerging literature on causal inference using deep neural networks under the potential outcomes framework. It provides an intuitive introduction to building and optimizing custom deep learning models and shows how to adapt them to estimate/predict heterogeneous treatment effects. It also discusses ongoing work to extend causal inference to settings where confounding is

This article explores the formation of migrant agency by scrutinizing the decision-making processes of owner-operator truckers. Drawing on qualitative data collected among male migrants from Turkey in the US, the main finding is that migrant truckers, by making various decisions at the turning points of their career, choose one of three trucking segments and decide the number of trucks that they own

In the context of the rising power of capital over labour, research on labour mobilization is important. From the research literature, we know that labour mobilizations might be initiated by trade unions or via workers’ self-organization. Yet, we know little about the cultural and social processes through which individual workers come to self-organize in the first place. To address this gap, we present

Lauren A. Rivera, Katherine Weisshaar, András Tilcsik Sociological Science August 13, 2024 10.15195/v11.a23 Abstract Extensive research reveals employer biases against workers with career disruptions, particularly those related to caregiving. However, the effectiveness of organizational practices intended to mitigate such biases is less well understood. This study examines the use of COVID-19 impact

Rural education researchers have long been interested in the impact of increasing urbanization, with its attendant shifts in policy, culture, and capital mobility, on rural people and communities, but their findings have existed largely to the side of “mainstream” research examining urban and suburban populations. With the publication in 2011 of Critical Rural Theory: Structure, Space, Culture, scholars

Won-tak Joo, Felix Elwert, Martin D. Munk Sociological Science August 9, 2024 10.15195/v11.a22 Abstract Little is known about the labor market consequences of becoming a grandparent. We estimate grandparenthood effects on labor supply and earnings using detailed multigenerational data from Danish population registers. Results show that the consequences of grandparenthood are unequally distributed and

We argue youth-led social justice movements are key sites for building collective hope in the face of the existential threats of colonisation, climate change and sexual violence. Building on the concepts of projective agency and affective scaffolding, we create an analytical framework to understand how collective hope was created and challenged in the work of six activist groups in Aotearoa New Zealand

Researchers have developed many uses for digital trace data, yet most online survey experiments continue to rely on attitudinal rather than behavioral measures. We argue that researchers can collect digital trace data during online survey experiments with relative ease, at modest costs, and to substantial benefit. Because digital trace data unobtrusively measure survey participants’ behaviors, they

Instrumental variables (IV) analysis is a powerful, but fragile, tool for drawing causal inferences from observational data. Sociologists increasingly turn to this strategy in settings where unmeasured confounding between the treatment and outcome is likely. This paper reviews the assumptions required for IV and the consequences of violating them, focusing on sociological applications. We highlight

Christof Nägel, Mathijs Kros, Ryan Davenport Sociological Science August 6, 2024 10.15195/v11.a21 Abstract Does (under-)performance of athletes from stigmatized racial groups influence the incidence of racial hate crimes? We consider the case of the English national football team during the 2020 European Football Championship and analyze whether the performance of black players during the final at

Patient-centered care is widely cited as a component of quality contraceptive health care, but its operationalization in clinical interaction is contested. This article examines patient-centered care as an interactional phenomenon using the case of patient dissatisfaction with side effects of hormonal contraceptive medications. Drawing on transcript data from 109 tape-recorded reproductive health visits

This paper connects insights from the literature on cosmopolitan worldviews and the effects of perspective-taking in political science, (intergroup) anxiety in social psychology, and identity economics in a vignette-style experiment. In particular, we asked German respondents about their attitudes towards a Syrian refugee, randomizing components of his description (N = 662). The main treatment describes

Receiving assistance can be stigmatizing. As the cash welfare rolls have fallen to near-historic lows, the privatization of the social safety net in many states has brought up new questions about how recipients of assistance meet their material needs without sacrificing their sense of dignity. I draw on 15 months of ethnographic observation and 44 interviews with social service recipients in two majority

Patrick Sharkey Sociological Science August 2, 2024 10.15195/v11.a20 Abstract The changes in daily life induced by the COVID-19 pandemic brought renewed attention to longstanding concerns about social isolation in the United States. Despite the links between the physical setting for individuals’ daily lives and their connections with family, friends, and the various institutions of collective life

This article uses the example of voter turnout in US presidential elections to compare two new methods for age, period, and cohort (APC) analysis: the APC interaction model and the APC bounding analysis. While discussing the formal, conceptual, and interpretive differences between the two methods, the analysis demonstrates how both methods can be used to generate distinct but complementary findings

This article advances literature on reflexive habitus in relation to LGB people by demonstrating empirically that habitus and reflexivity can coexist, albeit in very complex ways. The analysis offered relies on interview data with self-identified lesbian women, gay men and bisexual people in Cyprus – a context that is undergoing social change while however preserving its core heteronormative and conservative

Work within the sociology of the family and personal life has tended to proceed with little or no recognition of non-human members of the household. In the sociology of human–animal relations, however, ideas of multispecies families, multispecies households and animal companions (pets) as kin have been proposed in attempting to capture the close bonds between people and the animals they share their

Online and offline spaces where victims shared their experiences with street harassment were instrumental in putting this issue on the political agenda around the world. However, one question in particular sparked uneasiness among French activists: how to deal with stories that, in their view, reproduced stigmas about racialized men or disadvantaged areas? Existing scholarship addresses how people

Can utopian realism constitute an antidote to today’s ‘pervasive atmosphere of capitalist realism’, as defined by the late critical theorist Mark Fisher? Through this article, a collaboration between a sociologist and a literary scholar, we argue that the answer to this question is a resounding yes. To substantiate our thesis, we conduct a ‘sociological exegesis’ of the best-selling science fiction

Cannabis can provide patients benefits for pain and symptom management, improve their functionality, and enhance their well-being. Yet restrictive medical cannabis programs can limit these potential benefits. This article draws on four years of research into Minnesota’s medical cannabis program—one of the most restrictive in the United States—including in-depth interviews with patients and a survey

This article returns to the existentialist roots of ontological security theory (OST) and proposes a phenomenological re-reading of ontological security through the theoretical language of spherology and immunology in order to bring OST into a more substantive engagement with the spatial and immunological realities and practices of the globalizing world. Departing from the work of Peter Sloterdijk

This article examines how Indigenous, Black, and people of colour (IBPOC) music industry workers navigate moments of racism and microaggressions. Through interviews with musical artists and industry workers ( N = 55), the article identifies two strategies for navigating situational acts of racism: alleviation and confrontation. Those choosing to alleviate reactions to racism express a psychic weight

With most scholarly attention directed toward understanding the stigma experiences of individuals with mental illness, less attention has been given to associative stigma: an understudied form of social exclusion and devaluation experienced by the social ties of stigmatized individuals. This study advances scholarly understanding of associative stigma by drawing on social network methods to better

There are competing perspectives on the impact of Hispanic immigrants’ social networks on health; the Hispanic health paradox views networks as sources of resilience, whereas the tenuous ties perspective views networks as sources of risk. In this study, I explore the effect of networks on health by examining three network pathways: social capital, social bonding, and network stress. Using egocentric

This study employs multichannel sequence analysis of data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe to explore variations in the association between work–family life trajectories and women’s mental health across European cohorts born between 1924 and 1965 within different policy contexts. It finds that trajectories characterized by prolonged employment and delayed familial commitments