Monthly Archives: May 2012

Participating in culturally elite activities related to lower BMI?

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A new sociological study suggests there is a relationship between participating in certain cultural activities and having a lower BMI:

The study uses survey data from 17 nations, most of which are in Europe. In each country, a representative sample of the population was asked not only about height and weight, but also about time spent in a variety of activities. These included reading, going to cultural events, socializing with family and friends, attending sporting events, watching TV, going shopping, and exercising.A scale that measures interest in ideas, art, and knowledge—by surveying the amount of time spent reading, attending cultural events, going to movies, and using the Internet—is associated as strongly as exercise with a lower body-mass index, or BMI (a measure of weight relative to height). In other words, reading and exercise appear similarly beneficial in terms of BMI.

In contrast, people participating in other activities such as watching TV, socializing, playing cards, attending sporting events, and shopping have higher average BMI. Although time spent reading and time spent watching TV both expend few calories, one is associated with lower weight, and the other with higher weight…

So why might reading and related cultural activities be associated with thinness? The social meaning of the activity rather than the activity itself must be important for weight control. Leisure-time activities involve more than the calories burned; they also reflect differences across social groups in motives and means for good health.

These sound like interesting findings but I wonder if this is a classic example of “correlation does not imply causation.” Since these cultural activities might be related to social class, how do these findings line up with current statistics about weight (and health) by social class?

Moms in TV advertisements buy products for the good of their families

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Two sociologists argue that a majority of mothers in TV commercials buy products for the good of their children:

Nearly two-thirds of mothers featured in ads on prime time Canadian television are “intensive” moms who buy products solely for the good of the family, while non-mothers were more likely to be portrayed as independent free agents, enjoying themselves far more, a new analysis has found.

The lion’s share of mothers were shown to be “organized, informative and in control,” and always purchasing the product for the benefit of their children, according to University of Toronto sociology researchers Kim de Laat and Shyon Baumann, who combed through 68 television ads…

But Ms. de Laat and Mr. Baumann say the advertising they studied is promoting “sacrificial consumption” — a term they coined to describe the act of buying products primarily for the care of others, rather than for self-care.

“It’s only been within the past 20 to 25 years that we’ve seen increasing emphasis solely on the children to the point where women are supposed to derive satisfaction from all of this caregiving,” said Ms. de Laat, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto.

“Sacrificial consumption” is an interesting phrase but it isn’t a new idea. I’m reminded of the research of Viviana Zelizer (in Morals & Markets) regarding how the once controversial product life insurance came to be viewed as a necessary and sacrificial product that would provide for one’s family. What might be new here is the idea that these commercials are tying motherhood, a social role, to a particular action, providing for children. It attaches a different idea to products: if you’re family needs the product or would at least benefit, whatever money that needs to be spent is well-spent. Being a good mother means buying the “needed” products, not necessarily providing love, support, time, or attention. Do these commercials work by guilting people into action (i.e, “I’m not a good mother unless I do this”)? I wonder how this ties in with the whole idea of “concerted cultivation” where middle- and upper-class parents look to give their kids advantages (including necessary products?).

Is sacrificial consumption used effectively to sell products to other groups? Can you imagine such marketing aimed at men/fathers?

Sociology grad student: scholars need to and can make their research and writing more public

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Sociology PhD student Nathan Jurgenson argues that scholars need to make their research more public:

To echo folks like Steven Sideman or danah boyd, we have an obligation to change this; academics have a responsibility to make their work relevant for the society they exist within.

The good news is that the tools to counter this deficiency in academic relevance are here for the taking. Now we need the culture of academia to catch up. Simply, to become more relevant, academics need to make their ideas more accessible.

There are two different, yet equally important, ways academics need to make their ideas accessible:

(1) Accessible by availability: ideas should not be locked behind paywalls.

(2) Accessible by design: ideas should be expressed in ways that are interesting, readable and engaging.

Considering that Jurgenson researches social media (see my earlier post on another of his arguments), I’m not surprised to see him make this argument. Though most of his argument is tilted toward the brokenness of the current system, Jurgenson wants to help the academic world see that we now have the tools, particularly online, to do some new things.

A few other thoughts:

1. Does every generation of graduate students suggest the current system is broken or is this really a point in time where a big shift could occur?

2. Jurgenson also hints that academics need to be more able to write for larger publics. So it is not just about the tools but about the style and rhetoric needed to speak through these other means. I can’t imagine any “Blogging Sociology” courses in grad schools anytime soon but Jurgenson is bringing up a familiar complaint: academics sometimes have difficulty making their case to people who are not academics.

3. Jurgenson doesn’t really get at this but these new tools also mean that data, not just writing, can be shared more widely. This could also become an important piece of a more open academia.

4. The idea that academic writing should or could be fun is intriguing. How many academics could pull this off? Might this reduce the gravitas of academic research?

Using the Internet to meet your neighbors

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The New York Times takes a look at Nextdoor.com, a website that privately allows neighbors to meet each other and interact online:

Nextdoor’s site provides a house-by-house map of neighbors who are members — although members can choose not to have their names attached to their addresses — as well as a forum for posting items of general interest; classified listings for buying, selling or giving away things; and a database for neighbor-recommended local services.

The company, which introduced its service last October, says it has set up more than 2,000 such neighborhoods in the United States, each containing about 500 to 750 households. These mostly follow boundaries defined by Maponics, a supplier of geographic data…

Neighborhood identity has not been destroyed by the Internet. Robert J. Sampson, a sociology professor at Harvard, says: “There’s a common misreading that technology inevitably leads to the decline of the local community. I don’t believe that. Technology can be harnessed to facilitate local interactions.”…

In his new book, “Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect,” Professor Sampson argues that worries about the supposed loss of community in cities are nothing new. In 1938, for example, the sociologist Louis Wirth described “anonymous” and “superficial” social relations as essential elements of urbanism. But Professor Sampson says that this ignores the way that a city was, and remains, ordered by distinctive neighborhoods — what he calls “the enduring significance of place.”

Sampson’s comments give me an idea (which I’m sure others have already discovered): the Internet itself is a place/space that is built upon existing places. Another way to think about this is that the Internet is another social layer that both interacts with existing places but also has its own places and rules of social conduct. People can interact more with those who live near them and/or they can choose to interact with people around the world (that were previously unavailable to them). This is not the same as places like “Second Life” – it seemed to me that a lot of academics were really interested in this idea as they were curious to see how people would handle being in a new realm they could help create – as programs like Facebook or Nextdoor don’t let people completely escape from their surroundings and may just enhance existing acquaintances and relationships. Going forward, should we think of Facebook as a new kind of extended neighborhood?

Sampson’s ideas also are an interesting reply to questions like whether Facebook is making us lonely. Sampson is not the only sociologist who is arguing that the Internet does not necessarily isolate people.

McMansions are so big you need staging to define the rooms for potential buyers

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A New York firm talks about why staging is needed in McMansions:

Staging is a concept that started on the West Coast, and was virtually unknown when Guest and Kramer started introducing it to real estate brokers 12 years ago.

“The advantage is huge,” says Guest. “People walk in to these McMansions. There are so many rooms they don’t know which one is used for what. Is this the family room? Parlor? Great room? We define it. It lets them see that they could live there.”

“We would try to explain to the real estate brokers,” says Kramer, “giving them figures and excerpts from articles in San Francisco and London. It was a difficult idea to sell to a seller.”…

But since then, times have changed. From the real estate boom to the recession that followed, house staging has continued to grow.

“The worst year for everyone was out best year ever,” says Kramer. She acknowledges that perhaps, as it gets harder to sell a house, people are willing to put a little more effort into the process. In addition, people have gotten more involved in the process.

McMansions are so large that people don’t know what to do with the space! Why not get prospective homebuyers maps or at least architectural plans in order to make it through the house! On one hand, this seems to reinforce some stereotypes about McMansions: they have a lot of unnecessary space and Americans, for some reason, really like to have that kind of space. I can imagine Sarah Susanka would have a good time talking about why people should go with smaller homes rather than have to have their spaces defined for them.

On the other hand, staging seems to be pretty common today across housing types. It can be difficult for homebuyers to envision what a space can become without a little help. What does it cost to stage the typical McMansion (let’s say between 3,500 and 6,000 square feet) these days? And what staging touches in McMansions work the best for selling the house?

It takes time to fight the effects of inequality

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A new sociology study suggests that the health effects of inequality in the United States aren’t felt immediately but rather take several years to develop:

Higher levels of U.S. income inequality lead to more deaths in the country long-term, an Ohio State University sociologist suggests.

Study author Hui Zheng said the findings suggested income inequality at any one point doesn’t work instantaneously — it begins to increase mortality rates five years later, and its influence peaks after seven years, before fading after 12 years.

Zheng used data from the U.S. National Health Interview Survey from 1986 to 2004 with mortality follow-up data from 1986 to 2006. His final sample involved more than 700,000 people age 30 and older…

The study, published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, found a 0.01 unit rise in the Gini coefficient increased the cumulative odds of death by 122 percent in the following 12 years.

“This finding is striking and it supports the argument that income inequality is a public health concern,” Zheng said in a statement. “For the first time, we can clearly capture the long-term effect of income inequality on health.”

While I don’t study health outcomes, I like a conceptual path a study like this offers: we need to think about and discuss the longer-term effects of inequality. In other words, decisions made now for better or worse will have extended effects down the road. In terms of all public policy, we don’t want to be at a place where one or several decades have passed and we haven’t thought through where public policies have led us.

On the flip side, it is common for critics of sociology to argue that certain changes can be made in public policy and magically two groups will be on equal footing. For example, housing discrimination was made illegal in the 1960s – doesn’t this mean that everyone is now on equal in the marketplace? Here is how I describe this in class: you have a graph with two upward curves, one with a steeper rise representing a more privileged (income, education, etc.) and one with a slower rise. If after fifty years there is a wide gap between the two groups but a policy is changed to help level the playing field, this does not mean that automatically that gap disappears. In terms of the housing example, there are still plenty of examples of disparities and discrimination even though certain actions are clearly illegal. It takes time to reverse social inequality and the social world is not easy to change. Thus, if inequality today leads to health disparities down the road, it will take more time to reverse that trend and get us back to the same starting point, let alone make things more equal in the long run.

The implications of discontinuing the American Community Survey

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This didn’t exactly make the front page this week but a vote in the House of Representatives about the American Community Survey could have a big impact on how we understand the United States. Nate Berg explains:

So the Republican-led House of Representatives this week voted 232-190 to eliminate the American Community Survey, the annual survey of about 3 million randomly chosen U.S. households that’s like the Census only much more detailed. It collects demographic details such as what sort of fuel a household uses for heating, the cost of rent or mortgage payments, and what time residents leave home to go to work.

In a post on the U.S. Census Bureau’s website, Director Robert Groves says the bill “devastates the nation’s statistical information about the status of the economy and the larger society. Modern societies need current, detailed social and economic statistics. The U.S. is losing them.”

While the elimination of the ACS would take a slight nibble out of the roughly $3.8 trillion in government expenditures proposed in the 2013 federal budget, its negative impacts could be much greater – affecting the government’s ability to fund a wide variety of services and programs, from education to housing to transportation.

The issue is that the information collected in the ACS is used heavily by the federal government to figure out where it will spend a huge chunk of its money. In a 2010 report for the Brookings Institution, Andrew Reamer found that in the 2008 fiscal year, 184 federal domestic assistance programs used ACS-related datasets to help determine the distribution of more than $416 billion in federal funding. The bulk of that funding, more than 80 percent, went directly to fund Medicaid, highway infrastructure programs and affordable housing assistance. Reamer, now a research professor George Washington University’s Institute of Public Policy, also found that the federal government uses the ACS to distribute about $100 billion annually to states and communities for economic development, employment, education and training, commerce and other purposes. He says that should the ACS be eliminated, it would be very difficult to figure out how to distribute this money where it’s needed…

And it’s not just government money that would be wasted. Reamer says many businesses are increasingly reliant on the market data available within the ACS, and that without it they would have much less success picking locations where their businesses would have market demand. It would affect businesses throughout the country, “from mom-and-pops to Walmart.”

Some history might also be helpful here. The United States has carried out a dicennial census since 1790 but the American Community Survey began in the mid 1990s. There has been talk in recent years of replacing the expensive and complicated dicennial census with a beefed up American Community Survey. There would be several advantages: it wouldn’t cost as much plus the government (and the country) would have more consistent information rather than having to wait every ten years. In other words, our country is rapidly changing and we need consistent information that can tell us what is happening.

In my mind, as a researcher who consistently uses Census data, dropping the ACS would be a big loss. The government funding is important but even more important to me would be losing the more up-to-date information the ACS provides. Without this survey, we would likely have to rely on private data which is often restrictive and/or expensive. For example, I’ve used ACS data to track some housing issues but without this, I’m not sure where I could get similar data.

This is part of a larger issue of conservatives wanting to limit the reach of the Census Bureau. The argument often is that the Census is too intrusive, therefore invading the privacy of citizens (see this 2011 story about an insistent ACS worker), and the Constitution only provides for a dicennial census. I wonder if these arguments are red herrings: there is a long history of battling over Census counts and timing depending on which political party might benefit. For example, see Republican claims that inappropriate sampling techniques were used to correct undercounts for big cities, claims that the Census “imputes” races to people (so mark your race as American!), or efforts by New York City to ask for a recount in order to boost their 2010 population figures, which are tied to funding. In other words, the Census can turn into a political football even though its data is very important and it uses social science research techniques.

When a Frank Lloyd Wright home in Wilmette is threatened by McMansions

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McMansions don’t only threaten the unspoiled fields of America; they also threaten houses designed by notable architects like Frank Lloyd Wright.

A dollar can’t buy you much these days. But for Joseph Catrambone, a contractor, real estate manager, and self-proclaimed architecture buff living in Oak Brook, Illinois, one dollar secured him a 594-square-foot historic Prairie Style cottage, churned out by Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio in its 1920 heydays. The only caveat: He has about two weeks to devise a plan and acquire the permits to dismantle and remove the building from its present location. “I wake up in the morning thinking how crazy I am,” Catrambone told the Chicago Tribune. “It’s exciting and crazy all at the same time.”

Exciting, crazy, and heroic. Catrambone’s plan to relocate the cottage from its original site has saved one of two endangered Frank Lloyd Wright-connected buildings in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette from imminent destruction. The cottage, which currently sits on 1320 Isabella Street, was designed by Austrian-born architect Rudolph Schindler, who was working in Wright’s studio at the time, propagating the American architect’s patented style before striking out on his own as a prominent modernist architect with an entire platform frame system attributed to his name (the Schindler Frame)…

As soon as talks of demolition began, alarm bells went off. Preservationists swiftly entered the scene, tracing the two buildings back to Schindler, Van Bergen, and Wright and meticulously unearthing original blueprints that would qualify the works as Wright creations. While any Wright association is usually enough to earn a reprieve for buildings facing ruin, Wilmette, unlike Chicago, does not have a landmark ordinance. Like the recently razed Palos Verdes beach house built by Lloyd Wright, Wright’s son, the Isabella Street houses are sitting on prime real estate for aspiring McMansion owners.

Fending off the stereotype of the big, bad developer, Hausen opened the door to the Chicago-based Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. Together, they arrived at an agreement, which placed the Van Bergen-designed house on the market for four months starting on May 1 at a listing of $599,000. The Conservancy is taking careful measures to monitor potential buyers, determined to find a future owner who will preserve the existing residence.

This sounds like a decent compromise: the homes are saved (though moved) and property owners and builders can utilize the prime property.

I’m sure there are some fascinating stories out there about preservation battles over structures like these. Why weren’t these homes given landmark status? Why do some towns move to preserve Frank Lloyd Wright homes and others do not? How much of a Frank Lloyd Wright home does a structure have to be to be worth saving – this home simply came out of his workshop.

Also, if an important building is saved but moved, is it still just as important?

When do Americans think midlife begins?

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A new sociological study examines when Americans think midlife begins:

The topic intrigued the 41-year-old associate professor of sociology at Florida State’s Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy (who views herself as middle-age, by the way) because “there are so few clear markers of its boundaries, unlike adulthood or old age.” Few studies have examined people’s views of middle age compared to young adulthood or old age.

So Barrett and graduate student Erica Toothman combed through two waves of nationally representative data collected in the United States in 1995-1996 and 2004-2006 that examined how various factors influence people’s views of the timing of middle age…

Here are some key findings:

• Both women and men view the start and end of middle age as occurring earlier for women than for men, consistent with the argument that a “double standard of aging” exists that disadvantages women.
• Younger adults tend to see middle age as occurring at younger ages than do older adults. In other words, as people grow older, they tend to see this life stage as occurring later.
• People who are more socioeconomically disadvantaged or belong to racial or ethnic minority groups tend to view this stage as occurring earlier than do their peers.
• Others likely to view middle age as occurring earlier include those in poor health, those who began families young, those who are divorced, and those without living parents…

According to Barrett’s research, most people think of middle age as beginning at 44 and ending at 60.

This seems particularly interesting in a youth-obsessed culture. Acknowledging that one might be in midlife means that one also has to acknowledge that their youth is over. Does this bring along ideas about not being as important in society and needing to step aside or to help the younger generation? A range from 44 to 60 is quite narrow – this means that only roughly 16 out of the 80 expected years of life are in the middle.

While Barrett there are few markers that signify midlife, I can think of at least two common markers of midlife in American culture today.

1. Having children. This often signifies something about responsibility and now needing to take care of another person.

2. Reaching milestone birthdays like a 30th or 40th. Just go check out the “humorous” cards available for these milestones to see what popular perceptions are about these days.

Overall, this research seems to be part of a larger push among sociologists to look for the cultural markers of certain life periods. For example, there has been a lot of discussion and research about the boundaries between being a teenager and adult, giving rise to talk of a new liminal period called “emerging adulthood.” These markers and life periods will certainly change as society changes.