AJS; American Journal Of Sociology[JOURNAL]
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200 papers
Conservatism, institutionalism, and the social control of intergroup conflict.
King RD
AJS · 2008 Mar · PMID 18831129 · Publisher ↗
This research investigates the state social control of intergroup conflict by assessing the sociopolitical determinants of hate crime prosecutions. Consistent with insights from the political sociology of punishment, gro...
This research investigates the state social control of intergroup conflict by assessing the sociopolitical determinants of hate crime prosecutions. Consistent with insights from the political sociology of punishment, group-threat accounts of intergroup relations and the state, and neoinstitutional theory, the findings suggest that hate crime prosecutions are fewer where political conservatism, Christian fundamentalism, and black population size are higher, although this last effect is nonlinear. Linkages between district attorneys' offices and communities, on the other hand, increase hate crime prosecutions and the likelihood of offices' creating hate crime policies. Yet these policies are sometimes decoupled from actual enforcement, and such decoupling is more likely in politically conservative districts. The results indicate that common correlates of criminal punishment have very different effects on types of state social control that are protective of minority groups, and also suggest conditions under which policy and practice become decoupled in organizational settings.
MOVING TO INEQUALITY: NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECTS AND EXPERIMENTS MEET STRUCTURE.
Sampson RJ
AJS · 2008 Jul · PMID 25360053 · Full text
The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing experiment has proven to be an important intervention not just in the lives of the poor, but in social science theories of neighborhood effects. Competing causal claims have been t...
The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing experiment has proven to be an important intervention not just in the lives of the poor, but in social science theories of neighborhood effects. Competing causal claims have been the subject of considerable disagreement, culminating in the debate between Clampet-Lundquist and Massey (2008) and Ludwig et al. (2008). This paper assesses the debate by clarifying analytically distinct questions posed by neighborhood-level theories, reconceptualizing selection bias as a fundamental social process worthy of study in its own right rather than as a statistical nuisance, and reconsidering the scientific method of experimentation, and hence causality, in the social world of the city. I also analyze MTO and independent survey data from Chicago to examine trajectories of residential attainment. Although MTO provides crucial leverage for estimating neighborhood effects on individuals, as proponents rightly claim, I demonstrate the implications imposed by a stratified urban structure and how MTO simultaneously provides a new window on the social reproduction of concentrated inequality.
School Segregation in Metropolitan Regions, 1970-2000: The Impacts of Policy Choices on Public Education.
Logan JR, Oakley D, Stowell J
AJS · 2008 May · PMID 23814279 · Full text
It has been argued that the effects of the desegregation of public schools from the late 1960s onward were limited and short-lived, in part because of white flight from desegregating districts and in part because legal d...
It has been argued that the effects of the desegregation of public schools from the late 1960s onward were limited and short-lived, in part because of white flight from desegregating districts and in part because legal decisions in the 1990s released many districts from court orders. Data presented here for 1970-2000 show that small increases in segregation districts were outweighed by larger declines districts. Progress was interrupted but not reversed after 1990. Desegregation was not limited to districts and metropolitan regions where enforcement actions required it, and factors such as private schooling, district size, and inclusion of both city and suburban areas within district boundaries had stronger effects than individual court mandates.
The Social Dynamics of Mathematics Coursetaking in High School.
Frank KA, Muller C, Schiller KS … +4 more , Riegle-Crumb C, Mueller AS, Crosnoe R, Pearson J
AJS · 2008 May · PMID 21031147 · Full text
This study examines how high school boys' and girls' academic effort, in the form of math coursetaking, is influenced by members of their social contexts. The authors argue that adolescents' social contexts are defined,...
This study examines how high school boys' and girls' academic effort, in the form of math coursetaking, is influenced by members of their social contexts. The authors argue that adolescents' social contexts are defined, in part, by clusters of students (termed "local positions") who take courses that differentiate them from others. Using course transcript data from the recent Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study, the authors employ a new network algorithm to identify local positions in 78 high schools in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Incorporating the local positions into multilevel models of math coursetaking, the authors find that girls are highly responsive to the social norms in their local positions, which contributes to homogeneity within and heterogeneity between local positions.
Partisans without Constraint: Political Polarization and Trends in American Public Opinion.
Baldassarri D, Gelman A
AJS · 2008 Jan · PMID 24932012 · Full text
Public opinion polarization is here conceived as a process of alignment along multiple lines of potential disagreement and measured as growing constraint in individuals' preferences. Using NES data from 1972 to 2004, the...
Public opinion polarization is here conceived as a process of alignment along multiple lines of potential disagreement and measured as growing constraint in individuals' preferences. Using NES data from 1972 to 2004, the authors model trends in issue partisanship-the correlation of issue attitudes with party identification-and issue alignment-the correlation between pairs of issues-and find a substantive increase in issue partisanship, but little evidence of issue alignment. The findings suggest that opinion changes correspond more to a resorting of party labels among voters than to greater constraint on issue attitudes: since parties are more polarized, they are now better at sorting individuals along ideological lines. Levels of constraint vary across population subgroups: strong partisans and wealthier and politically sophisticated voters have grown more coherent in their beliefs. The authors discuss the consequences of partisan realignment and group sorting on the political process and potential deviations from the classic pluralistic account of American politics.
Sequencing and its consequences: path dependence and the relationships between genetics and medicalization.
Shostak S, Conrad P, Horwitz AV
AJS · 2008 · PMID 19569408 · Publisher ↗
Both advocacy for and critiques of the Human Genome Project assume a self-sustaining relationship between genetics and medicalization. However, this assumption ignores the ways in which the meanings of genetic research a...
Both advocacy for and critiques of the Human Genome Project assume a self-sustaining relationship between genetics and medicalization. However, this assumption ignores the ways in which the meanings of genetic research are conditional on its position in sequences of events. Based on analyses of three conditions for which at least one putative gene or genetic marker has been identified, this article argues that critical junctures in the institutional stabilization of phenotypes and the mechanisms that sustain such classifications over time configure the practices and meanings of genetic research. Path dependence is critical to understanding the lack of consistent fit between genetics and medicalization.
Environmental contingencies and genetic propensities: social capital, educational continuation, and dopamine receptor gene DRD2.
Shanahan MJ, Vaisey S, Erickson LD … +1 more , Smolen A
AJS · 2008 · PMID 19569407 · Publisher ↗
Studies of gene-environment interplay typically focus on one environmental factor at a time, resulting in a constrained view of social context. The concept of environmental contingency is introduced as a corrective. Draw...
Studies of gene-environment interplay typically focus on one environmental factor at a time, resulting in a constrained view of social context. The concept of environmental contingency is introduced as a corrective. Drawing on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and qualitative comparative analysis, the authors focus on an example involving social capital, a gene associated with a dopamine receptor (DRD2), and educational continuation beyond secondary school. For boys, (1) DRD2 risk is associated with a decreased likelihood of school continuation; (2) one configuration of social capital -- high parental socioeconomic status, high parental involvement in school, and a high-quality school -- compensates for this negative relationship, consistent with environmental contingency; but (3) boys with DRD2 risk are less commonly observed in settings that are rich in social capital.
Happiness and success: genes, families, and the psychological effects of socioeconomic position and social support.
Schnittker J
AJS · 2008 · PMID 19569406 · Publisher ↗
Although there is considerable evidence linking success -- including wealth, marriage, and friendships -- to happiness, this relationship might not reflect, as is often assumed, the effects of the proximate environment o...
Although there is considerable evidence linking success -- including wealth, marriage, and friendships -- to happiness, this relationship might not reflect, as is often assumed, the effects of the proximate environment on well-being. Such an interpretation is contravened by evidence that both happiness and the environment are influenced by genetic factors and family upbringing. Using the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States, which includes a subsample of twins, this study evaluates the relationship between happiness and various features of success before and after eliminating the influence of endowments. The results suggest that many putative indicators of the environment are highly heritable and, indeed, that the same genes that affect the environment may affect happiness as well. Yet the results also suggest that the role of genetic endowments varies considerably across different features of success, suggesting complex patterns of selection, reinforcement, and causation among genes and the environment.
Education and cognitive ability as direct, mediating, or spurious influences on female age at first birth: behavior genetic models fit to Danish twin data.
Rodgers JL, Kohler HP, McGue M … +4 more , Behrman JR, Petersen I, Bingley P, Christensen K
AJS · 2008 · PMID 19569405 · Full text
The authors study education and cognitive ability as predictors of female age at first birth (AFB), using monozygotic and dizygotic female twin pairs from the Middle-Aged Danish Twin survey. Using mediated regression, th...
The authors study education and cognitive ability as predictors of female age at first birth (AFB), using monozygotic and dizygotic female twin pairs from the Middle-Aged Danish Twin survey. Using mediated regression, they replicate findings linking education (and not cognitive ability) to AFB. But in a behavior genetic model, both relationships are absorbed within a latent variable measuring the shared family environment. Two interpretations are relevant. First, variance in AFB emerges from differences between families, not differences between sisters within the same family. Second, even in a natural laboratory sensitive to genetic variance in female fertility -- during demographic transition -- the variance in AFB was non-genetic, located instead within the shared environment.
Under the influence of genetics: how transdisciplinarity leads us to rethink social pathways to illness.
Pescosolido BA, Perry BL, Long JS … +3 more , Martin JK, Nurnberger JI, Hesselbrock V
AJS · 2008 · PMID 19569404 · Full text
This article describes both sociological and genetic theories of illness causation and derives propositions expected under each and under a transdisciplinary theoretical frame. The authors draw propositions from three th...
This article describes both sociological and genetic theories of illness causation and derives propositions expected under each and under a transdisciplinary theoretical frame. The authors draw propositions from three theories -- fundamental causes, social stress processes, and social safety net theories -- and tailor hypotheses to the case of alcohol dependence. Analyses of a later wave of the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism reveal a complex interplay of the GABRA2 gene with social structural factors to produce cases meeting DSM/ICD diagnoses. Only modest evidence suggests that genetic influence works through social conditions and experiences. Further, women are largely unaffected in their risk for alcohol dependence by allele status at this candidate gene; family support attenuates genetic influence; and childhood deprivation exacerbates genetic predispositions. These findings highlight the essential intradisciplinary tension in the role of proximal and distal influences in social processes and point to the promise of focusing directly on dynamic, networked sequences that produce different pathways to health and illness.
Gender differences in extreme mathematical achievement: an international perspective on biological and social factors.
Penner AM
AJS · 2008 · PMID 19569403 · Publisher ↗
Genetic and other biological explanations have reemerged in recent scholarship on the underrepresentation of women in mathematics and the sciences. This study engages this debate by using international data-including mat...
Genetic and other biological explanations have reemerged in recent scholarship on the underrepresentation of women in mathematics and the sciences. This study engages this debate by using international data-including math achievement scores from the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study and country-level data from the World Bank, the United Nations, the International Labour Organization, the World Values Survey, and the International Social Survey Programme-to demonstrate the importance of social factors and to estimate an upper bound for the impact of genetic factors. The author argues that international variation provides a valuable opportunity to present simple and powerful arguments for the continued importance of social factors. In addition, where previous research has, by and large, focused on differences in population means, this work examines gender differences throughout the distribution. The article shows that there is considerable variation in gender differences internationally, a finding not easily explained by strictly biological theories. Modeling the cross-national variation in gender differences with country-level predictors reveals that differences among high achievers are related to gender inequality in the labor market and differences in the overall status of men and women.
Reconstructing race in science and society: biology textbooks, 1952-2002.
Morning A
AJS · 2008 · PMID 19569402 · Publisher ↗
How has growing knowledge about human genetics affected how American textbooks present race? This article analyzes 80 biology textbooks published from 1952 to 2002 to reveal that U.S. biology texts have pursued the topic...
How has growing knowledge about human genetics affected how American textbooks present race? This article analyzes 80 biology textbooks published from 1952 to 2002 to reveal that U.S. biology texts have pursued the topic of race with renewed vigor in recent years. Moreover, textbooks have redefined race as genetic without furnishing empirical evidence for this framing. The textbooks' transformation sheds light on the broader relationship between race and science in the United States, where claims about racial difference have not only drawn instrumentally and selectively from empirical research, but at times forgo scientific grounding altogether. As the textbooks show, both the tight and the loose linkage of race to science can preserve the cultural authority of the race concept. The texts also make clear that race is not a one-time construct or a relic of centuries past. Instead, it is continually remade -- and is being reworked today -- suggesting its dynamic adaptation for ongoing use as a fundamental tool of social stratification.
The intergenerational correlation in weight: how genetic resemblance reveals the social role of families.
Martin MA
AJS · 2008 · PMID 19569401 · Full text
According to behavioral genetics research, the intergenerational correlation in weight derives solely from shared genetic predispositions, but complete genetic determinism contradicts the scientific consensus that social...
According to behavioral genetics research, the intergenerational correlation in weight derives solely from shared genetic predispositions, but complete genetic determinism contradicts the scientific consensus that social and behavioral change underlies the modern obesity epidemic. To address this conundrum, this article utilizes sibling data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and extends structural equation sibling models to incorporate siblings' genetic relationships in order to explore the role of families' social characteristics for adolescent weight. The article is the first to demonstrate that the association between parents' obesity and adolescent weight is both social and genetic. Furthermore, by incorporating genetic information, the shared and social origins of the correlation between inactivity and weight are better revealed.
Gene by social context interactions for number of sexual partners among white male youths: genetics-informed sociology.
Guo G, Tong Y, Cai T
AJS · 2008 · PMID 19569400 · Full text
This study sets out to investigate whether introducing molecular genetic measures into an analysis of sexual partner variety will yield novel sociological insights. The data source is the white male DNA sample in the Nat...
This study sets out to investigate whether introducing molecular genetic measures into an analysis of sexual partner variety will yield novel sociological insights. The data source is the white male DNA sample in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The authors' empirical gene-environment interaction analysis produces a robust protective effect of the 9R/9R genotype relative to the Any10R genotype in the dopamine transporter gene (DAT1). This protective effect tends to be lost in schools in which higher proportions of students start having sex early, as well as in individuals with relatively low cognitive ability. The genetics-informed socio logical analysis here suggests that explaining a human trait or behavior may require a theory that accommodates the complex interplay between social contextual and individual influences and genetic predispositions.
Genetics and the social science explanation of individual outcomes.
Freese J
AJS · 2008 · PMID 19569399 · Publisher ↗
Accumulating evidence from behavioral genetics suggests that the vast majority of individual-level outcomes of abiding sociological interest are genetically influenced to a substantial degree. This raises the question of...
Accumulating evidence from behavioral genetics suggests that the vast majority of individual-level outcomes of abiding sociological interest are genetically influenced to a substantial degree. This raises the question of the place of genetics in social science explanations. Genomic causation is described from a counterfactualist perspective, which makes its complexity plain and highlights the distinction between identifying causes and substantiating explanations. For explanation, genomic causes must be understood as strictly mediated by the body. One implication is that the challenge of behavioral genetics for sociology is much more a challenge from psychology than biology, and a main role for genetics is as a placeholder for ignorance of more proximate influences of psychological and other embodied variation. Social scientists should not take this challenge from psychology as suggesting any especially fundamental explanatory place for either it or genetics, but the contingent importance of genetic and psychological characteristics is itself available for sociological investigation.
Trajectories of Failure: The Educational Careers of Children with Mental Health Problems.
McLeod JD, Fettes DL
AJS · 2007 Nov · PMID 19855855 · Full text
The authors draw on developmental psychopathology, life course sociology, and scholarship on educational processes to develop a conceptual framework for understanding the association of children's mental health problems...
The authors draw on developmental psychopathology, life course sociology, and scholarship on educational processes to develop a conceptual framework for understanding the association of children's mental health problems with educational attainment. They use this framework to address two empirical gaps in prior research: lack of attention to mental health trajectories and the failure to consider diverse explanations. Using data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth data set, the authors identify latent classes that characterize trajectories of internalizing and externalizing problems from childhood through adolescence. Youths in the classes vary significantly in their likelihoods of high school completion and college entry. The authors evaluate the ability of three sets of mediators to explain these patterns: academic aptitude, disruptive behaviors, and educational expectations. Educational expectations are important mediators independent of academic aptitude and disruptive behaviors. Social responses to youths' mental health problems contribute importantly to their disrupted educational trajectories.
When do scientists become entrepreneurs? The social structural antecedents of commercial activity in the academic life sciences.
Stuart TE, Ding WW
AJS · 2006 Jul · PMID 17526160 · Publisher ↗
The authors examine the conditions prompting university-employed life scientists to become entrepreneurs, defined to occur when a scientist (1) founds a biotechnology company, or (2) joins the scientific advisory board o...
The authors examine the conditions prompting university-employed life scientists to become entrepreneurs, defined to occur when a scientist (1) founds a biotechnology company, or (2) joins the scientific advisory board of a new biotechnology firm. This study draws on theories of social influence, socialization, and status dynamics to examine how proximity to colleagues in commercial science influences individuals' propensity to transition to entrepreneurship. To expose the mechanisms at work, this study also assesses how proximity effects change over time as for-profit science diffuses through the academy. Using adjusted proportional hazards models to analyze case-cohort data, the authors find evidence that the orientation toward commercial science of individuals' colleagues and coauthors, as well as a number of other workplace attributes, significantly influences scientists' hazards of transitioning to for-profit science.
Using Geographic Information Systems to Reconceptualize Spatial Relationships and Ecological Context.
Downey L
AJS · 2006 Sep · PMID 22021932 · Full text
In this article, the author demonstrates how geographic information system (GIS) software can be used to reconceptualize spatial relationships and ecological context and address the modifiable areal unit problem. In orde...
In this article, the author demonstrates how geographic information system (GIS) software can be used to reconceptualize spatial relationships and ecological context and address the modifiable areal unit problem. In order to do this, the author uses GIS to (1) test an important category of spatial hypotheses (spatial proximity hypotheses), (2) overcome methodological problems that arise when data sets are not spatially comparable, and (3) measure ecological context. The author introduces a set of GIS variable construction techniques that are designed to accomplish these tasks, illustrates these techniques empirically by using them to test spatial proximity hypotheses drawn from the literature on environmental inequality, and demonstrates that results obtained using these techniques are methodologically superior to and substantively different from results obtained using traditional techniques. Finally, the author demonstrates that these techniques are the product of an alternative conceptualization of physical space that allows sociologists to develop new ways to think about and measure spatial relationships, ecological context, and place-based social inequality and that gives them the ability to reconceptualize spatially based methodological problems that have confronted them for years.
A theory of scandal: Victorians, homosexuality, and the fall of Oscar Wilde.
Adut A
AJS · 2005 Jul · PMID 16240549 · Publisher ↗
Oscar Wilde is considered to be the iconic victim of 19th-century English puritanism. Yet the Victorian authorities rarely and only reluctantly enforced homosexuality laws. Moreover, Wilde's sexual predilections had long...
Oscar Wilde is considered to be the iconic victim of 19th-century English puritanism. Yet the Victorian authorities rarely and only reluctantly enforced homosexuality laws. Moreover, Wilde's sexual predilections had long been common knowledge in London before his trial without affecting the dramatist's wide popularity. Focusing on the seemingly inconsistent Victorian attitudes toward homosexuality and the dynamics of the Oscar Wilde affair, this article develops a general theory of scandal as the disruptive publicity of transgression. The study of scandal reveals the effects of publicity on norm enforcement and throws into full relief the dramaturgical nature of the public sphere and norm work in society.
World War II Mobilization in Men's Work Lives: Continuity or Disruption for the Middle Class?
Dechter AR, Elder GH
AJS · 2004 Nov · PMID 27656001 · Full text
The labor needs of World War II fueled a growing demand for both military and war industry personnel. This longitudinal study investigates mobilization into these competing activities and their work life effects among me...
The labor needs of World War II fueled a growing demand for both military and war industry personnel. This longitudinal study investigates mobilization into these competing activities and their work life effects among men from the middle class. Hazard estimates show significant differences in wartime activities across occupations, apart from other deferment criteria. By war's end, critical employment, in contrast to military service, is positively associated with supervisory responsibility for younger men and with occupation change. This empoloyment does not predict postwar career advancement up to the 1970s. By comparison, men who were officers had a "pipeline" to advancement after the war, whereas other service men fared worse than nonveterans.
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