This article proposes a fully nonparametric model to investigate the dynamics of intergenerational income mobility for discrete outcomes. In our model, an individual’s income class probabilities depend on parental income in a manner that accommodates nonlinearities and interactions among various individual and parental characteristics, including race, education, and parental age at childbearing, and

Randomized audits and correspondence studies are widely regarded as a “gold standard” for capturing discrimination and bias. However, gatekeepers (e.g., employers) are the analytic unit even though stated implications often center on group-level inequalities. Employing simple rules, we show that audits have the potential to uncover applicant-side inequalities and burdens beyond the gatekeeper biases

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize social science research. However, researchers face the difficult challenge of choosing a specific AI model, often without social science-specific guidance. To demonstrate the importance of this choice, we present an evaluation of the effect of alignment, or human-driven modification, on the ability of large language models (LLMs)

Over the past decade, social scientists have adapted computational methods for qualitative text analysis, with the hope that they can match the accuracy and reliability of hand coding. The emergence of GPT and open-source generative large language models (LLMs) has transformed this process by shifting from programming to engaging with models using natural language, potentially mimicking the in-depth

This article explores how young people reimagine social relations and negotiate difference within a deeply divided context in a period of increasing national contention. It explores if and how they combine an ethno-national situatedness and wider shared horizons. It uses a ‘situated cosmopolitan’ frame as a heuristic and shows how the case illustrates the difficulty of this stance. The article reports

As institutions increasingly use predictive algorithms to allocate scarce resources, scholars have warned that these algorithms may legitimize inequality. Although research has examined how elite discourses position algorithms as fair, we know less about how the public perceives them compared to traditional allocation methods. We implement a vignette-based survey experiment to measure perceptions of

We advance health lifestyle research by developing the concept of agentic recombination to capture how individuals uniquely combine health behaviors to form adult health lifestyles. Using data from the 2005 to 2019 Transition to Adulthood Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we examine intergenerational transmission of health behaviors, directionality of health behaviors, and health lifestyles

What is the relationship between inequality and social ties? Do personal networks, group memberships, and connections to social resources help level the playing field, or do they reinforce economic disparities? We examine two core empirical issues: the degree of inequality in social ties and their consolidation with income. Using 142,000 person-wave observations from 15 high-quality U.S. data sets

Food and eating are critical sites for analysing everyday life and social change. Amid growing concerns about health, sustainability and neoliberal pressures for individual responsibility, there is increasing pressure to reshape how individuals relate to food. This study addresses the evolution of food practices across the life course, examining how social class and trajectories shape food-related

The article delves into the governance of urban marginality, focusing on the interplay of the Wacquantian distinction between the left and right hands of the state in governing urban marginality and the gender dimension of this governance. Studies of state involvement in managing urban marginality have concentrated on the content of policies and services, neglecting their modes and forms. Our research

In this article, I examine the strategies of resistance deployed by people who have experienced street harassment. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 47 heterosexual women and LGBTQ+ people, I document how participants skillfully and contextually deployed resistance strategies to disrupt harassment. Notably, participants often represented resistance practices as moments of affective, subconscious

Drawing on research mapping the commodity chains associated with beauty salon consumption, this article examines the subtle yet pervasive ways in which oil works to make and maintain hairless ‘feminine’ bodies. Developing a methodological approach focused on the liveliness of depilatory wax, which included fostering a close attention to how wax behaves and asking Beauty Therapists to narrate what they

Strategies for including noncisgender responses in demographic analyses remain subjects of ongoing debate and refinement. The Household Pulse Survey is one of the first data products by the U.S. Census Bureau to incorporate a two-step gender identity measure. This is significant because the survey, although experimental, is one of the largest federal nationally representative samples (n = 668,273)

The growing popularity of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools presents new challenges for data quality in online surveys and experiments. This study examines participants’ use of large language models to answer open-ended survey questions and describes empirical tendencies in human versus large language model (LLM)-generated text responses. In an original survey of research participants recruited

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) offers new capabilities for analyzing data, creating synthetic media, and simulating realistic social interactions. This essay introduces a special issue that examines how these and other affordances of generative AI can advance social science research. We discuss three core themes that appear across the contributed articles: rigorous measurement and validation

Social science surveys regularly ask respondents to generate opinions or positions on issues deemed to be of political and social importance, such as confidence in government officials or federal spending priorities. Many theories assume that interpersonal deliberation is a primary mechanism through which people develop positions on such issues, but it is unclear how often the issues captured by such

Drawing on 65 in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews with community members and local leaders, this research examines and categorizes social distance between local leaders and low‐income community members in “Green Glen,” a rural Indiana community. We operationalize this distance as high, medium, and low based on leaders' connection to low‐income residents, knowledge of their livelihood strategies, and

Research in previous decades found that employers imposed penalties on job applicants with a past history of frequent moves across employers, and yet mobility across employers is more common in today’s economy and perhaps even a valuable career strategy. While popular discourse and some academic literature has portrayed highly mobile careers as widespread and broadly accepted, other studies have suggested

Childhood maltreatment is a serious stressor affecting mental health directly and indirectly through relationships, creating social chains of risk. Adolescent peers are one key relationship in the early life course, but whether peer networks mediate associations between maltreatment and mental health or if such pathways differ by gender remains unclear. We conduct path analysis on survey data from

Studies have long documented a persistent link between sectarian Protestantism and authoritarian parenting ideologies and disciplinary practices. The current study proposes “Christian nationalism” as a schema that demands civic and social life be ordered according to sectarian Protestant norms, and consequently, a key dynamic in shaping how Americans think about parenting and punishment. Given that

Social stressors proliferate to impair the health of those connected to the person enduring the stressor, but they can simultaneously offer relief from other stressors. Using in-depth interviews with 69 mothers of incarcerated men, we investigate mothers’ descriptions of how the stressor of their adult son’s incarceration impairs their health. First, mothers overwhelmingly describe how the increased

Relationships with children are often highly salient to older adults and can be characterized by both social support and strain. Although research suggests that social support and strain are linked to older adults’ cognitive functioning, few studies have considered reciprocal effects or examined potential explanatory mechanisms. This study uses data from the Health and Retirement Study (N = 7,639)

It has long been known that marriage is a critical correlate of mental health, primarily through relationship quality and support from partner. However, in contexts where couples struggle to maintain a healthy relationship and marriage is an increasingly protracted process, the benefits of marriage for women’s mental health are far from assured. In this analysis, we draw on survey and qualitative data

Eviction cases are concentrated among renter households with children, yet we know little about the repercussions of evictions for children’s educational trajectories. In this study, we link eviction records in Harris County, Texas, to educational records of students enrolled in the Houston Independent School District between 2002 and 2016. At least 13,000 public school students in Houston lived in

Sociological literature increasingly turns its eye towards the colonial entanglements of British welfare state institutions. Nevertheless, mass higher education in the 1960s and 1970s tends to be considered as a universal service, unconnected to processes of racialisation and bordering. Sociologists discussing the neoliberal marketisation of higher education tend also not to draw connections between

This article contributes to a sociology of time and rhythm as well as a sociology of human–plant relations. It argues that sociology should take an interest in houseplants because studying human-plant relations in the domestic sphere offers novel possibilities for exploring wider sociological themes such as multispecies interactions, intimacy and identity as well as time and everyday life. The article

This article explores how Uber drivers in Dhaka exercise agency to earn and sustain their livelihoods. Uber drivers not only experience extortion by Uber, but also face various challenges, such as precarious working conditions and algorithmic control of their activities. In most Global South countries, the regulatory practices are not in favour of Uber drivers either. Within this context, drawing on

While literature on mass incarceration has focused primarily on incarcerated men, their children, and their romantic partners, this article builds on a smaller body of work that highlights the harms to mothers under the constraints of the neoliberal carceral state. In this study, I examine how mothers with incarcerated adult children have been conscripted to perform extractive caring labor. Drawing

We examine variations in pay gap estimates and inferences associated with distinct conceptualizations of jobs and employment contexts under legal and comparable worth theories of pay bias. We find that job titles produce smaller estimates of within job pay gaps than job groups, but the inferential importance of job concepts differs across organizational, workplace, and job groups within workplace units

Large language models (LLMs) have tremendous potential for social science research as they are trained on vast amounts of text and can generalize to many tasks. We explore the use of LLMs for supervised text classification, specifically the application to stance detection, which involves detecting attitudes and opinions in texts. We examine the performance of these models across different architectures

This review explores Anna Gjika’s When Rape Goes Viral (2023), a sociological study of how digital technologies transform the dynamics of sexual violence among youth. Through detailed analysis of high-profile cases like Steubenville and Maryville, Gjika argues that social media not only amplifies rape culture but also shifts how consent, victimhood, and justice are perceived. The book examines the

Using data from a series of semi-structured interviews with gender-diverse participants, we propose reframing the phenomenon of gender dysphoria as part of a larger social process rooted in the pursuit of gender euphoria. Our findings suggest that gender dysphoria is the result of a social process of negotiating access to gender-euphoric desires across the macro, interactional, and individual levels

We present a conceptual model to measure disparity—the target study—where social groups may be similarly situated (i.e., balanced) on allowable covariates. Our model, based on a sampling design, does not intervene to assign social group membership or alter allowable covariates. To address nonrandom sample selection, we extend our model to generalize or transport disparity or to assess disparity after

Social networks literature has explored homophily, the tendency to associate with similar others, as a critical boundary-making process contributing to segregated networks along the lines of identities. Yet, social network research generally conceptualizes identities as sociodemographic categories and seldom considers the inherently continuous and heterogeneous nature of differences. Drawing upon the

Large language models (LLMs) provide cost-effective but possibly inaccurate predictions of human behavior. Despite growing evidence that predicted and observed behavior are often not interchangeable , there is limited guidance on using LLMs to obtain valid estimates of causal effects and other parameters. We argue that LLM predictions should be treated as potentially informative observations, while

Is the state monopoly on the use of legitimate violence a modern invention that refers exclusively to a particular provincial sociohistorical phenomenon that emerged in seventeenth-century Europe? The answer this paper presents is no. Instead, I argue that the canonical Eurocentric epistemic communities have sought to displace other systems of governance and administration and replace them with European

Discussions about educational content on race and racism have captured widespread public and political attention, with much of this debate falling under the umbrella of critical race theory (CRT). Despite this attention, we currently do not know whether it is the content in these lessons or the CRT label that is influencing opinion on this issue. Are critics of CRT reacting to the content that CRT

In this article, we offer one example of what attending to race can bring to sociological analyses of parenting. We draw on literature from two fields, Parenting Culture Studies and Black Feminist scholarship, to bring their insights to bear on a project that examines black mothers’ engagements with attachment parenting. In addressing an analytical lacuna in the work on Parenting Culture Studies, we

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has shown incredible leaps in performance across data of a variety of modalities including texts, images, audio, and videos. This affords social scientists the ability to annotate variables of interest from unstructured media. While rapidly improving, these methods are far from perfect and, as we show, even ignoring the small amounts of error in high accuracy

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly presented as a potential substitute for humans, including as research subjects. However, there is no scientific consensus on how closely these in silico clones can emulate survey respondents. While some defend the use of these “synthetic users,” others point toward social biases in the responses provided by large language models (LLMs). In this

The study of mobility effects is an important subject of study in sociology. Empirical investigations of individual mobility effects, however, have been hindered by one fundamental limitation, the unidentifiability of mobility effects when origin and destination are held constant. Given this fundamental limitation, we propose to reconceptualize mobility effects from the micro- to macro-level. Instead

Visual politics is a thriving subfield of international relations (IR) that traces its origin to the “visual turn” at the turn of the century. However, visual politics hardly engages with the central visuality of modernity: race. This article argues that visual politics has a longer history than the current disciplinary history suggests, and it deploys a sociographical analysis to explore the central

This article explores the affirmative dimension of necropolitics by looking at the articulation of the dead as an aesthetic and political subject in the work of the art-activist collective “the party of the dead.” Since 2017, their performances have exposed and challenged an aesthetic order based on the erasure of mortality in Russia. I draw on Rancière’s distinction between “politics” and “the police”

Modern computational text classification methods have brought social scientists tantalizingly close to the goal of unlocking vast insights buried in text data—from centuries of historical documents to streams of social media posts. Yet three barriers still stand in the way: the tedious labor of manual text annotation, the technical complexity that keeps these tools out of reach for many researchers

Israel’s deadly 2023 military assault on Gaza – recognised as genocide by humanitarian organisations – is at the heart of this article. We now know much more about the political economy of Israel’s settler colonialism, in which leading institutions in North America and Europe, including universities, are embedded. And yet our anticolonial solidarity remains at best glitchy and unreliable. Rather than

Critical security studies and emotion research in international relations have highlighted that the emotion of fear is a pivotal driver of material and psychological securitization processes and that political actors may attempt to instrumentalize fear to obtain their political objectives. This article suggests that complementing this focus on fear with closer attention to the emotion of hate provides