Sociology

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Cycles Within the System: Metropolitanization and Internal Migration in the U.S., 1965-1990
(1995) Elliott, James R.; Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This paper uses a typology of local metropolitan development to examine population redistribution trends in the U.S. over the past three decades. Theories of systemic maturation and urban life-cycles are discussed. Subsequent analysis of population and inter-county migration data reveals that Deconcentration has become an increasingly common subprocess of local metropolitanization but that this subprocess cannot be adequately explained by a “life-cycle” model of metropolitan development. More importantly, results indicate that metro-based migration varies significantly with local patterns of metropolitanization. The nature of this variation implies that declining metro areas tend to redistribute migrants to relatively distant, nonmetro territory in a manner consistent with extended processes of decentralization.
Post-War Immigration to the Deep South Triad: What Can a Peripheral Region Tell Us about Immigrant Settlement and Employment?
(Taylor & Francis, 2003) Elliott, James R.
Contemporary research on immigrant settlement and adaptation emphasizes the interactions of ethnic-immigrant resources and local economic contexts. Yet, understandably, most research in this field continues to focus on major urban centers, truncating our view of the range of these interactions and the extent to which theories and concepts emerging from immigrant "magnets" generalize to more peripheral regions of the country. To address this shortcoming, we use census data from the postwar period to examine immigrant settlement trends in the Deep South Triad of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Findings indicate that this peripheral region of an otherwise booming South is extremely diverse in terms of its foreign-born population and that the largest groups (British, Vietnamese, Indians, and Hondurans) exhibit strong yet distinct patterns of concentration in the regional economy. These findings suggest that many of the same immigrant-adjustment processes documented in core immigrant cities generalize reasonably well to very different regional contexts withsubstantially lower rates of immigration and employment growth.
Framing the Urban: Struggles Over HOPE VI and New Urbanism in a Historic City
(Wiley, 2004) Elliott, James R.; Gotham, Kevin Fox; Milligan, Melinda J.
Recent debate over the federal HOPE VI program has focused primarily on whether local applications have met administrative pledges to provide adequate affordable housing to displaced residents of newly demolished public‐housing developments. In this research we take a different direction, examining local processes of political mobilization and strategic framing around a specific type of HOPE VI redevelopment—one that includes construction of a big‐box superstore as part of proposed urban renewal. We argue that the HOPE VI program's formal alignment with New Urbanism created a political opportunity for competing actors to adopt and espouse selective new urbanist themes and imagery to construct and advance divergent visions of what urban space ought to be. Through these framing strategies and struggles, the developer, displaced residents, and opposition groups produced “the City” as a rhetorical object that each then used to advocate specific redevelopment proposals while de‐legitimating competing claims. In this way, the HOPE VI program constitutes more than a new federal housing policy; it offers a new vocabulary for framing and mobilizing collective action in contemporary urban centers.
The Work of Cities: Underemployment and Urban Change in Late-20th-Century America
(US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2004) Elliott, James R.
This research moves beyond preoccupations with deindustrialization, joblessness, and the urban “underclass” to examine the role that cities and urbanization in general have played in the reorganization of production and local labor markets. After reviewing recent work on global cities, new industrial districts, and the “new” social division of labor, the author used Census data to examine the extent and relative causes of rising underemployment in U.S. metropolitan areas during 1950–90. Several key findings emerge. First, underemployment increased 35 percent between 1970 and 1990, largely due to shifts in structural rather than personal factors. Second, most of this structural shift occurred within industries, not across them. Third, the consequences of these shifts have been most dramatic at the bottom rather than the top of the urban hierarchy, despite recent claims regarding global cities. Fourth, factors associated with the new social division of labor characterized by growing numbers of smaller workplaces and “routine” business service firms offer the strongest empirical explanation for rising underemployment in local metropolitan areas. Implications are discussed.
How Academic Biologists and Physicists View Science Outreach
(Public Library of Science, 2012) Ecklund, Elaine Howard; James, Sarah A.; Lincoln, Anne E.
Scholars and pundits alike argue that U.S. scientists could do more to reach out to the general public. Yet, to date, there have been few systematic studies that examine how scientists understand the barriers that impede such outreach. Through analysis of 97 semi-structured interviews with academic biologists and physicists at top research universities in the United States, we classify the type and target audiences of scientists' outreach activities. Finally, we explore the narratives academic scientists have about outreach and its reception in the academy, in particular what they perceive as impediments to these activities. We find that scientistsﾒ outreach activities are stratified by gender and that university and disciplinary rewards as well as scientistsﾒ perceptions of their own skills have an impact on science outreach. Research contributions and recommendations for university policy follow.
Individual, Family, and Neighborhood Characteristics and Children's Food Insecurity
(CHILDREN AT RISK Institute, 2012) Kimbro, Rachel T.; Denney, Justin T.; Panchang, Sarita
Great Problems of Grand Challenges: Problematizing Engineering's Understandings of Its Role in Society
(Queen’s University Library, 2012) Cech, Erin
The U.S. National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges for Engineering report has received a great deal of attention from legislators, policymakers, and educators, but what does it entail for social justice considerations in engineering? This article situates the Grand Challenges report as a cultural artifact of the engineering profession--an artifact that works to reinforce engineering's professional culture, recruit new members, and reassert engineering's legitimacy in the 21st century. As such, the Grand Challenges report provides a unique opportunity to understand and critique the role engineering envisions for itself in society. The articles in this special issue of IJESJP identify four central critiques of Grand Challenges: authorial particularism, double standards in engineering's contributions to these challenges, bracketing of the “social” from “technical” realms, and deterministic definitions of progress. These critiques call for increased reflexivity and broadened participation in how engineers define problems and attempt to solve them.
Multigenerational Households and the School Readiness of Children Born to Unmarried Mothers
(Sage, 2012) Augustine, Jennifer March; Raley, R. Kelly
Does the concentration of recent Latino immigrants into occupational linguistic niches--occupations with large numbers of other Spanish speakers—restrict their wage growth? On the one hand, it is possible that Latino immigrants who are concentrated in jobs with large numbers of Spanish speakers may have less on-the-job exposure to English, which may isolate them socially and linguistically and limit their subsequent economic mobility. On the other hand, working in linguistic niches can also be beneficial for upwardly mobile immigrants if it allows them to gain a foothold in the United States while they improve their English skills and develop labor market experience. Using data from the 1996, 2001 and 2004 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we test for the effect of working in occupational linguistic niches on wages and wage growth. The results show that while workers in linguistic niche occupations earn lower wages on average, they do not experience lower rates of wage growth over time. Moreover, we find that about 20 percent of workers who start the 4-year SIPP panel in linguistic niches experience occupational mobility that reduces the percentage of workers speaking Spanish in their occupation by over 10 percent over the course of the study, and these ﾓmoversﾔ have higher levels of wage growth than other workers in the sample.
Acculturation and Self-Rated Health among Latino and Asian Immigrants to the United States
(University of California Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, 2012-08) Kimbro, Rachel Tolbert; Gorman, Bridget K.; Schachter, Ariela
The ways in which immigrant health profiles change with shifts in acculturation is of increasing interest to scholars and policy makers in the United States, but little is known about the mechanisms that may link acculturation and self-rated health, particularly for Asians. Utilizing the National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS) and its data on foreign-born Latinos (N = 1,199) and Asians( N = 1,323) (Pennelletal.2004), we investigate and compare the associations between acculturation and self-rated health for immigrants to the United States from six major ethnic subgroups (Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican). Using comprehensive measures of acculturation, we demonstrate that across ethnic groups, and despite the widely varying contexts of the sending countries and receiving communities, native-language dominance is associated with worse self-rated health relative to bilingualism, and measures of lower acculturation--coethnic ties and remittances—are associated with better self-rated health; and moreover, these associations are only partially mediated by socioeconomic status, and not mediated by acculturative stress, discrimination, social support, or health behaviors. We speculate that immigrants who maintain a native language while also acquiring English, as has been shown for other immigrant outcomes, attain a bicultural fluency, which also enables good health. Surprisingly, we do not find strong associations between duration of time in the United States or age at migrationﾗ measures frequently used to proxy acculturationﾗwith self-rated health. Our findings illustrate the complexity of measuring acculturation and its influence on health for immigrants.
Occupational Linguistic Niches and the Wage Growth of Latino Immigrants
(Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012-12) Mouw, Ted; Chavez, Sergio
The Sociological Determination: A Reflexive Look at Conducting Local Disaster Research after Hurricane Katrina
(Scientific Research, 2013) Haney, Timothy J.; Elliott, James R.
This paper examines the process of collecting data on New Orleanians affected by Hurricane Katrina. It does so by focusing upon the experiences of local researchers who were simultaneously conducting research on and within the disaster. It also documents one research team’s attempt to generate a random sample of residents from several New Orleans neighborhoods, stratified both by racial composition and level of damage. Further, it describes the challenges associated with navigating complex bureaucracies that are themselves affected by the disaster. Results demonstrate that our methods for drawing samples from six New Orleans neighborhoods yielded highly representative samples, even in heavily damaged neighborhoods where the long-term displacement required a multi-pronged strategy that involved contact by mail, telephone, and visits to local churches. The paper concludes by making recommendations for facilitating future research by locally affected researchers.
Families, Resources, and Adult Health: Where Do Sexual Minorities Fit?
(Sage, 2013) Denney, Justin T.; Gorman, Bridget K.; Barrera, Cristina B.
Extensive research documents the relevance of families and socioeconomic resources to health. This paper extends that research to sexual minorities, using twelve years of the National Health Interview Survey (N = 460,459) to examine self-evaluations of health among male and female adults living in same sex and opposite sex relationships. Adjusting for SES eliminates differences between same and opposite sex cohabiters so that they have similarly higher odds of poor health relative to married persons. Results by gender reveal that the cohabitation disadvantage for health is more pronounced for opposite sex cohabiting women than for men but little difference exists between same sex cohabiting men and women. Finally, the presence of children in the home is more protective for women's than men's health, but those protections are specific to married women. In all, the results elucidate the importance of relationship type, gender, and the presence of children when evaluating health.
Family Structure and Obesity Among U.S. Children
(Journal of Applied Research on Children, 2013) Augustine, Jennifer M.; Kimbro, Rachel T.
Child overweight and obesity in the U.S. is a significant public health issue. In 2008 nearly one-third of all U.S. children ages two to seventeen were obese or overweight [11]. For young children ages two to five, fully 21.2% were overweight (at or above the 85th%ile based on the CDCﾒs sex-specific BMI-for-age growth charts), while 10.4% of preschoolers were obese (at or above the 95th%ile) [11]. The prevalence of overweight and obesity among U.S. children has implications for children's future health and the health trajectory of the nation. For example, children who are overweight are more likely to grow up to be overweight or obese [1-3], to suffer health consequences both as children and later in life [4-6], and to experience social and behavioral difficulties [7,8]. Moreover, in 2009 the estimated annual healthcare costs in the U.S. related to obesity topped $145 billion [9], a figure which is expected to increase as obese children age and develop other health problems [10]. Thus, while recent data show that trends in childrenﾒs overweight and obesity rates are stabilizing, obesity continues to be a substantial problem, including among younger preschool-aged children, and identifying the contributing factors to it an important goal. By and large, scientists have identified nutrition and physical activity as the primary determinants of weight status for children [12]. Yet social factors have been shown to play an important role too. In examining this side of childrenﾒs weight development, parentsﾒ socioeconomic status has emerged as a primary social predictor. In particular, obesity in the U.S. is more prevalent among children who are racial or ethnic minorities [11,13], and whose parents have less income and lower levels of education [13]. Differences in parenting styles [14], culture [15], exposure to stressors [16,17], and neighborhood context [18] have been presented as some of the main mechanisms connecting parentsﾒ socioeconomic status with childrenﾒs risk of obesity. Going beyond this well-developed area of research, however, another social factor and indicator of family socioeconomic background that may be associated with childrenﾒs risk of obesity is family structure. Increasing family complexity over the past three decades in the United States means that more children are growing up in homes without two biological parents. Yet few studies have considered the role of different family structures in childrenﾒs weight status, and among those that have, even fewer have constructed and assessed categories for family structure that represent the diversity among U.S. families today.
The Social Side of Accidental Death
(Elsevier, 2013) Denney, Justin T.; He, Monica
Mortality from unintentional injuries, or accidents, represents major and understudied causes of death in the United States. Epidemiological studies show social factors, such as socioeconomic and marital status, relate with accidental death. But social theories posit a central role for social statuses on mortality risk, stipulating greater relevance for causes of death that have been medically determined to be more preventable than others. These bodies of work are merged to examine deaths from unintentional injuries using 20 years of nationally representative survey data, linked to prospective mortality. Results indicate that socially disadvantaged persons were significantly more likely to die from the most preventable and equally likely to die from the least preventable accidental deaths over the follow-up, compared to their more advantaged counterparts. This study extends our knowledge of the social contributors to a leading cause of death that may have substantial implications on overall disparities in length of life.
Consequences of Flexibility Stigma Among Academic Scientists and Engineers
(Sage, 2014) Cech, Erin A.; Blair-Loy, Mary
Flexibility stigma, the devaluation of workers who seek or are presumed to need flexible work arrangements, fosters a mismatch between workplace demands and the needs of professionals. The authors survey ﾓideal workersﾔﾗscience, technology, engineering, and math faculty at a top research universityﾗto determine the consequences of working in an environment with flexibility stigma. Those who report this stigma have lower intentions to persist, worse workﾖlife balance, and lower job satisfaction. These consequences are net of gender and parenthood, suggesting that flexibility stigma fosters a problematic environment for many faculty, even those not personally at risk of stigmatization.
The Regional Journal in Sociology: Recent Trends and Observations
(Springer, 2014) Schultz, Jessica; Elliott, James R.; O’Brien, Robert M.
We investigate the historical trajectories of several sociological journals published by regional associations, focusing our attention on one of the first regional journals published by the Pacific Sociological Association, Sociological Perspectives. We begin with a discussion of the journal’s origins and look at its professional and geographical development over time. Through a comparative-historical analysis of author affiliations of articles published in regional journals, we find geographic ties are important in shaping the early content of regional journals. However, as time passes, regional ties are stretched to include work from a broadening spectrum of regions and nations. So, while regional sociological journals do appear to maintain their original geographical connections, they also tend to expand their relative geographical influence over time.
Binational Social Networks and Assimilation: A Test of the Importance of Transnationalism
(University of California Press, 2014) Mouw, Ted; Chavez, Sergio; Edelblute, Heather; Verdery, Ashton
While the concept of transnationalism has gained widespread popularity among scholars as a way to describe immigrants' long-term maintenance of cross-border ties to their origin communities, critics have argued that the overall proportion of immigrants who engage in transnational behavior is low and that, as a result, transnationalism has little sustained effect on the process of immigrant adaptation and assimilation. In this article, we argue that a key shortcoming in the current empirical debate on transnationalism is the lack of data on the social networks that connect migrants to each other and to nonmigrants in communities of origin. To address this shortcoming, our analysis uses unique binational data on the social network connecting an immigrant sending community in Guanajuato, Mexico, to two destination areas in the United States. We test for the effect of respondents' positions in cross-border networks on their migration intentions and attitudes towards the United States using data on the opinions of their peers, their participation in cross-border and local communication networks, and their structural position in the network. The results indicate qualified empirical support for a network-based model of transnationalism; in the U.S. sample we find evidence of network clustering consistent with peer effects, while in the Mexican sample we find evidence of the importance of cross-border communication with friends.
Families, Resources, and Suicide: Combined Effects on Mortality
(Wiley, 2014) Denney, Justin T.
Important resources from family support systems, employment, and educational attainment inhibit the risk of death. Independently, these factors are particularly salient for suicide, but it is less clear how they combine to affect mortality. Using National Health Interview Survey data from 1986 to 2004 (N = 935,802), prospectively linked to mortality through 2006 (including 1,238 suicides), reveals a process of compensation in the way work status and family combine to affect adult suicide: those not working experience more suicide defense from more protective family support systems than do working adults. But a process of reinforcement occurs in the combination of education and family: more education associates with more protection from the family than does less education. The findings demonstrate how families and resources combine to affect mortality in unique ways.
Perceptions of Science Education Among African American and White Evangelicals: A Texas Case Study
(Springer, 2014) Korver-Glenn, Elizabeth; Chan, Esther; Ecklund, Elaine Howard
Evangelicals have been highlighted at the intersections of religion, science, and education, yet little is known about how evangelicals perceive public science education and how these perceptions compare across racial lines. Here we analyze how African American and white evangelicals view science education through 40 in-depth interviews collected from two evangelical congregations in Texas. Without raising the topic of evolution, we find that African American leaders, white leaders, and white laity engaged in faith-based, evolution-contesting discourse, but African American laity rarely framed science education in faith-based ways. For them, science education was often linked to educational resources or was distant from their lived experiences. Our findings clarify disjuncture and overlap among African American and white evangelicals by exploring perceptions that challenge and affirm the public institution of science education in different ways. Our conclusion stresses the need to examine perceptions of science and education among religious subgroups differentiated along social and historical lines.
Does Height Matter? An Examination of Height Preferences in Romantic Coupling
(Sage, 2014) Yancey, George; Emerson, Michael O.
Amidst increasingly equality in belief and in practice between the sexes, we ask if height preferences still matter, and if so, why people say they matter. First, we collected data from Yahoo! dating personal advertisements. Second, we used answers to open-ended questions in an online survey. The Yahoo! data document that height is still important in decisions to date but that it is more important to females than to males. Results from the online survey indicate that women wanted tall men for a variety of reasons, but most of the explanations of our respondents were connected to societal expectations or gender stereotypes. Gender-based legitimation of height preferences seem to be more central than evolutionary-based legitimation, but future work may discover a more nuanced interpretation.

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