Monthly Archives: February 2012

Exploring the Gen Y home

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The International Builders Show that recently concluded featured a Gen Y home. Here is what it involved:

The so-called Gen Y House, one of a trio of Builder Concept Homes constructed for the show, also departs from housing’s (and the trade show’s) long-running obsession with the baby boom generation.

Its 2,163 square feet marry indoors with outdoors: One all-glass exterior wall literally disappears, folding away to open the home to the patio and pool. The party-hearty vibe is hard to miss…

It’s a wide-open floor plan that emphasizes flexibility and gives a nod to the fact that, being in Florida, relatives and friends are likely to show up to visit: There’s a separate studio apartment with kitchenette just off the front courtyard. That courtyard provides a roomy alternative to the traditional notion of a front yard. Out back, there’s that pool and hot tub; a separate entrance from the master bedroom leading to the pool practically screams “midnight swim.”

The architect said that homes have to have contemporary styling for this age group.

One architect quoted in the story suggests that Generation Y “can lead out of this [down housing] market.” Thus, it sounds like builders and others think there is a lot of money in designing homes for the younger generation.

Four thoughts about this home:

1. Does it work outside of Florida? This home seems to take advantage of its setting but it might look a little different for a Gen Yer in Minneapolis.

2. This goes along with a larger industry theme that smaller might be better today. Again, however, this home is not short on features and has a price tag of $300,000. This is not exactly affordable housing though it appears that people want to make clear it is not a McMansion.

3. Would this home stand the test of time? What I mean here is whether this home would look dated in 15 to 20 years or if it is so geared to a particular group that it would have little appeal for the larger market. Styles and accoutrements do change over time but I assume builders don’t want to limit who would purchase these homes.

4. This home seems to emphasize fun and entertainment. Would these homes encourage sociability in the long run or reinforce a lack of attachments to civil society a la Bowling Alone?

Sociology of gambling laboratory in Las Vegas

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While Chicago might still be the urban laboratory of choice for some sociologists, a sociologist at UNLV talks about Las Vegas as a fantastic laboratory for studying human motivations and gambling:

We live in the largest gambling laboratory in the world. A sociologist who studies gambling in Las Vegas is probably like being a physicist and living in a vacuum. I tell all my students to sit on a bench and watch all the humanity. That’s why market research firms like to come to Las Vegas. In an hour and a half, they can meet 40 people from 40 countries and states. Humanity comes here…

You’re struck by the similarities and differences in various markets. Las Vegas is a sea of slot machines with a smattering of table games. Macau is a sea of table games with a smattering of slot machines. As a social scientist, you watch the different behaviors. In Macau, no one is consuming alcohol. There is always a calculus going on, where gamblers are demonstrating math skills while hoping to be smiled upon by the gods of chance. What’s fascinating is to contrast the Chinese gambler against the American or European gambler.Question: You recently authored a report that said Las Vegas could learn much from Houston. How?

Answer: Houston suffered a downturn when its main economy, oil production, moved overseas and became a global industry. The slump ended when Houston began exporting its intellectual capital.

Las Vegas could do the same thing as gaming becomes more international. In some ways, our companies are already doing that. Las Vegas can become the global command center of the international gaming industry. One way you do that is education. Of course, I’m completely biased but the gaming institute can play a leading role in this transformation.

I bet you could use gambling research in a lot of examples within a research methods class.

I’m intrigued by a couple of ideas mentioned above:

1. There are different cultural approaches to gambling. I should have known this but I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it before. It would be interesting to hear if Americans live up to typical stereotypes (confident, brash, etc.).

2. I wonder if social scientists would be allowed by casinos to conduct academic studies with gamblers/customers. I’m guessing this is likely off-limits unless the work could be beneficial to the casinos. If there are a lot of people already in Las Vegas who want to engage in gambling, why not let them do it in the context of monitored academic research?

3. What holds Las Vegas back from becoming a finance center? Gaming requires large flows of capital from both companies and visitors. To truly become a world-class city, this would seem to be a way the city could go by working with the money in innovative ways.

This reminds me of comments from sociologists after the American Sociological Association meetings were held there last August. Do most sociologists think the city is simply an oddity or are there real things that could be learned from the city (Sun Belt city, center of the gaming industry, ecological concerns, many foreclosures) and applied elsewhere?

When only bad people live in McMansions

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I doubt I will see the movie Wanderlust but this quick description of the film caught my eye:

Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston star in “Wanderlust,” the raucous new comedy from director David Wain and producer Judd Apatow about a harried couple who leave the pressures of the big city and join a freewheeling community where the only rule is to be yourself. When overextended, overstressed Manhattanites, George (Rudd) and Linda (Aniston), pack up their lives and head south to move in with George’s McMansion-living jerk of a brother, Rick (Ken Marino), they stumble upon Elysium, an idyllic community populated by colorful characters including the commune’s alpha male, Seth (Justin Theroux), the sexually adventurous Eva (Malin Akerman), and the troupe’s drop-out founder, Carvin (Alan Alda).

This reinforces an idea I have seen hinted at in many other places: the people who live in McMansions are jerks or bad people. McMansion owners don’t care about the environment, love to consume, have little taste, and don’t want to interact with people unlike them. The converse would look like this: smart or nice or enlightened people would not live in the homes. This is a great example of drawing moral boundaries by attaching character traits to certain home choices. This could be tied to the idea that living in a large home is viewed as morally wrong by some.

I would love to get my hands on sociological data to examine this claim. Of course, this would require first determining whether someone lives in a McMansion and this itself would require work. But then you could examine some different factors: do McMansion owners interact with their neighbors more? Are they involved with more civic organizations? Do they give more money to charity? Do they help people in need more often? Do they have a stronger prosocial orientation? If there were not significant differences, how might people respond…

“Scientists and scientific studies have a minimal effect on public opinion” about global warming

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While one might think that scientific data and reports are convincing, a sociologist argues that these matter little in the debate over global warming:

“Scientists and scientific studies have a minimal effect on public opinion,” says Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle, lead author of a new climate attitude study in the Climatic Change journal. “What really drives public opinion on climate change are the ways that political elites describe the science.”…

In the current Climatic Change journal, Brulle and colleagues looked at 74 public opinion surveys from 2002 to 2010, in a bid to figure out the contradiction in opinions between experts and everyone else…

“The science doesn’t matter because the science isn’t the real issue,” Brulle adds. “It’s about politics and money.” All we have with climate change, he suggests, is politicians taking sides in an economic debate over whether we should spend money to address climate change, or not (with one side very strongly opposed), and hiding behind a smokescreen of debate about settled science to avoid making those issues clear.

Brulle is suggesting that instead of debating how much we should respond to global warming (which seems like an interesting debate to have in itself), the debate has turned to the credibility of the actual science. So if conservatives admit that there is warming, then they would have to admit that money needs to be spent on fighting it and they don’t want to do that? There seem to be two issues here: the actual data and then the value judgments about what should be done.

I’ve been seeing reports on Brulle’s findings for several months now. If he is correct, are politicians taking notes about how to change public debates? At the same time, I imagine it is more difficult to make the case for spending money on environmental concerns with such economic issues (see the Keystone pipeline debate).

I wonder if there are other areas where there is something similar going on and scientific studies have little impact. If there is a common view that science is the province of liberals and elitists, how many people will trust what it has to say?

Sociology: challenging common sense

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One simple way to view sociology is that it often challenges common sense understandings of the world:

We talk a lot about common sense; as if that’s a good thing. I remember my uncle describing a guy once by saying that he was smart as a whip but didn’t have a lick of common sense. So it has always been something held up as a good thing. The problem is that common sense is sometimes wrong too. In my sociology classes each semester, we take ten common sense statements and prove their error through research, rather than just assuming they’re correct because they sound right.

A few quick thoughts about common sense.

1. Common sense is often cultural. In other words, different cultures have different default or common understanding about how the world works.

2. Common sense is often learned through socialization. Sometimes this happens explicitly, such as when parents talk to a child, but other times it happens through observation. Kids have to learn about common sense and has to know how society “typically” works.

3. Sociology courses are a good place to discuss common sense because we tend to talk about topics that people haven’t thought through before. Why do people live where they do? Why do some occupations get paid more than others? What is behind going to college? Why do we attach certain ideas or statuses to particular objects, like a house or an Apple laptop? Sociology often “pulls the curtain back” on social life, exposing what is really influencing our actions and group behavior.

4. This is not to say common sense is necessarily wrong. But the issue is that many people do not have the time or take the effort to evaluate common sense. College is a good place to learn how to evaluable common sense through critical thinking, reading, and writing.

5. Challenging common sense is not an easy task. We like our typical explanations for how things work. Even when confronted with better evidence, we tend to stick with our accepted ways of thinking. You see this all the time in the political realm: the ideological commitments of each side can trump evaluating the facts.

6. Common sense is a typical foil for much academic work. Here is a typical academic argument: “the accepted wisdom is X but we have research that shows it actually is more like Y.” Or, “there is a typical explanation for this phenomena but we think the real world is more complex or is more nuanced.”

Sociology grad student: “the Internet is a sociologist’s playground”

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A sociology graduate student makes an interesting claim: “the Internet is a sociologist’s playground“:

The Internet is a sociologist’s playground, says Scott Golder, a graduate student in sociology at Cornell University. Although sociologists have wanted to study entire societies in fine-grained detail for nearly a century, they have had to rely primarily upon large-scale surveys (which are costly and logistically challenging) or interviews and observations (which provide rich detail, but for small numbers of subjects). Golder hopes that data from the social Web will provide opportunities to observe the detailed activities of millions of people, and he is working to bring that vision to fruition.  The same techniques that make the Web run—providing targeted advertisements and filtering spam—can also provide insights into social life. For example, he has used Twitter archives to examine how people’s moods vary over time, as well as how network structure predicts friendship choices. Golder came to sociology by way of computer science, studying language use in online communities and using the Web as a tool for collecting linguistic data. After completing a B.A. at Harvard and an M.S. at the MIT Media Lab, he spent several years in an industrial research lab before beginning his Ph.D. in sociology at Cornell.

I would think that having a background in computer science would be a big plus for a sociologist today. Lots of people want to study social networking sites like Facebook and work with the data available online. But I wonder if there still aren’t a few issues to overcome before we can really tap this information:

1. Do companies that have a lot of this data, places like Google and Facebook, want to open it up to researchers or would they prefer to keep the data in-house in order to make money?

2. How will Internet users respond to the interest researchers have in studying their online behavior if they are often not thrilled about being tracked by companies?

3. Has the sampling issue been resolved? In other words, one of the problems with web surveys or working with certain websites is that theses users are not representative of the total US population. So while internet activity has increased among the population as a whole, isn’t internet usage, particularly among those who use it most frequently, still skewed in certain directions?

4. Just how much does online activity reveal about offline activity? Do the two worlds overlap so much that this is not an issue or are there important things that you can’t uncover through online activity?

I would think some of these issues could be resolved and the sociologists who can really tap this growing realm will have a valuable head start.

When a sociological survey about Hong Kong angers Chinese authorities

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Politics can interfere with research studies and findings. For an example, here is a case of a sociological survey done in Hong Kong that has gotten the attention of Chinese authorities:

In December, a Hong Kong sociologist by the name of Robert Chung found himself at the center of a political storm. A study commissioned by Chung, director of opinion research at a leading university in the territory, discovered that the number of people who identify themselves primarily as citizens of Hong Kong was higher than it’s been for the past 10 years. The survey showed that the number of those who viewed themselves as Chinese had fallen to 16.6 percent. That’s a 12-year low and less than half of what it was three years ago.

Since then the territory’s communist press has launched a vicious attack on the pollster. “Political fraudster” and “a slave of dirty political money” are just two of the Cultural Revolution style epithets trotted out against Professor Chung. Hao Tiechuan, a Beijing official stationed in Hong Kong, called in local reporters to denounce Professor Chung’s work as “unscientific” and “illogical.”

Beijing, always wary of Hong Kong’s loyalty because of its colonial heritage, ratchets up the rhetoric even higher during “election” season. In March, 1200 mostly pro-Beijing loyalists will choose the next chief executive, and in September, Hong Kong citizens will go to the polls to choose 35 of 70 seats in the partially-democratic legislature. Last fall, pro-Beijing candidates won local district-level polls overwhelmingly, although an investigation has been opened into possible vote-rigging. Beijing’s attacks on Professor Chung– as well as on a so-called “Gang of Four” of prominent democracy advocates — may be calculated to keep the minions who choose the chief executive in line and dampen turnout by the solid majority of Hong Kong voters who favor progress toward full democracy.

Does this make complaints about academic freedom in the United States seem rather tame?

The attacks by the communist press are intriguing. First, “political fraudster” implies that the work is unscientific. Second, the charge of being  “a slave of dirty political money” suggests that the work is politically motivated and skewed. In both critiques, the attack is against the scientific credibility of the sociologist. The argument is that Chung has done poor research and the results shouldn’t be trusted. Furthermore, it suggests that Chung himself is not capable of good conducting good research.

These are serious charges for a sociologist. It is one thing to disagree with findings or about their interpretation or suggest that they should have used another method. It is another thing to claim that the researcher intentionally found certain results or can’t do good research. Yes, methodological errors are made occasionally (and sometimes fraudulently) but this cuts to the heart of sociology and the claim that we are searching for replicable and valid results. I hope Chang is able to show his proper use of sociological methods and is supported by others.

Residents still benefit in paying taxes for schools even with no children

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These days, you can find plenty of people who make this argument: I don’t have any children in school so why should I have to pay high property taxes? A sociologist counters this common argument:

In their study, Neal and co-author Jennifer Watling Neal, assistant professor of psychology, analyzed the data from a Gallup survey of more than 20,000 people from 26 U.S. communities from Michigan to Florida to California. As part of the survey, participants were asked how satisfied they were with their communities and to rate the overall quality of their public schools.The researchers found a strong relationship between those who were satisfied with their communities and quality schools. This finding was not affected by gender, age, race, employment status or whether the participant owned or rented a home or had children in school…

Neal said this is likely due to two major reasons:

  • Public schools offer amenities to the entire community such as adult education courses, after-hours computer labs, workout facilities, auditorium space for churches and other groups, and more.
  • Public schools have the more indirect benefit of promoting relationships among neighborhood residents. These relationships lead to issues getting solved – such as broken streetlights, unplowed streets or crime problems – that benefit everyone.

Additionally, good schools are often seen as markers of a good community. I think this is often tied to ideas about class and race: if the schools are good, people think this is due to being in an upscale, quality community.

I would be interested to see if these researchers controlled for the socioeconomic status of the community. Are communities that are wealthier more or less likely to reject additional funding for schools? Are residents who are more able to pay for increased education funding the ones who are most resistant to it?

If all residents do benefit from better schools, what is the best way to pitch educational funding increases? Perhaps you could throw a study like this at them but I don’t think that would be enough…

Still using Chicago as “urban laboratory”

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Following in the tradition of the Chicago School which saw the city as an “urban laboratory,” sociologist Robert Sampson explains how the findings from studying Chicago apply to the entire country:

Many cities were considered as a possible launching pad for the study, but Chicago got the nod for its composition of whites, blacks, and Latinos — the three largest groups in the United States — and for the access to the city’s extensive statistics on health, police, and more. “Chicago offered us a picture of American life that we thought was broadly representative,” Sampson said.

According to Sampson, a vast array of social activity is concentrated in place. “We studied crime, health, altruism, cynicism, disorder, collective efficacy, civic engagement, leadership networks — all of which are influenced and shaped by neighborhood effects.”…

Even as the world is increasingly globalized, neighborhood structures remain local and important. “Neighborhoods have legacies,” he said. “Crime and poverty are durable over long periods of time. From the 1960s onwards, cities went through amazing social change — riots, crime — to one of the largest decreases in violence from the late 1990s to the present. Yet communities are persistent in rank ordering. People are moving in and out of neighborhoods, but the perceptions of neighborhoods stay largely the same.”

What’s more, he found, no community in Chicago transitioned from black to white, a pattern he shows is similar to the United States as a whole.

To sum up: place matters.

I’ve thought several times over the years that I would like to see more work about whether Chicago is really representative of America as is often suggested or if other cities are better options. To put it another way, is Chicago studied more often because there is a legacy of studying Chicago well at the University of Chicago and other schools or because Chicago is truly unique? Others have argued that other places are more emblematic of more recent patterns – check out the Los Angeles School for a differing opinion. Chicago might represent Rust Belt cities but what about Sun Belt cities?

When looking at American cities that seem to get most research attention or are covered in “classic works”, having an established research school with an interest in urban sociology seems to matter. Chicago gets a lot of attention as does Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. This makes sense: these cities have great universities and it is logical that researchers and graduate students would look at some of the surrounding areas and be able to justify this study beyond simply saying it is more convenient or cheaper. In contrast, other major cities don’t seem to get the same level of scrutiny, places like Washington, D.C., Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and a number of other ascendent Sun Belt cities.

Perhaps my thoughts are too impressionistic and one could try to quantify just how much each city actually does get studied. But even then, there are cities with histories that matter, research legacies that have inertia and are likely to continue for some time. Someday we might have a Houston school or an Atlanta school but that requires resources, effort, and research that is recognized as being relevant and innovative.

Participant observation or “sociological stalking”?

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A psychotherapist tells a story about observing, interacting with, and being blessed by  a woman in Mexico and calls what she does “sociological stalking.”

A couple of thoughts:

1. Stalking clearly has negative connotations so why use this term? If you talk to people about using Facebook, “stalking” is crossing the line from simple observer, which you are supposed to do on Facebook by reading the news feed and interacting with information others post, to an aggressive observer who looks at too much. And since this story has a happy ending, can’t we replace the term “stalking”?

2. In sociological terms, this is more like participant observation than nefarious stalking. On one hand, you want to observe to understand better why people do what they do. On the other hand, you end up interacting with those they observe, sharing in what they do with the hopes that the participation helps provide new insights. Put together, you get both the insider and outsider perspective.

3. Here is the summary made about the benefits of observing:

Sometimes, when in doubt, just observe. It is a fine remedy for assumptions, bias, judgments, and the angst that can accompany living. It is also a fine remedy for spiritual bank accounts.

In other words, observation can help take the focus off yourself, see the world in new ways, and involve you in the lives of others. I wonder if taking the time needed to truly observe and also the skills required to figure out what is really going on are lost arts.