Category Archives: Sociology

Innovative solution to homelessness: taxpayer funded stadiums in Florida have to host homeless

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It sounds like this idea has a long way to go in the Florida legislature but it is an innovative attempt to deal with homelessness: insist that owners of taxpayer funded stadiums host homeless residents.

As reported by the Miami Herald, state legislators have unearthed an obscure law that has not been enforced since it was adopted in 1988. It states that any ballpark or stadium that receives taxpayer money shall serve as a homeless shelter on the dates that it is not in use.

Now, a new bill would punish owners of teams who play in publicly-funded stadiums if they don’t provide a haven for the homeless. Affected ballparks would include the Miami Marlins’ new ballpark in Miami’s Little Havana, the Tampa Bay Rays’ Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg and several spring training facilities. It also includes the homes of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Tampa Bay Lightning, Miami Heat, Jacksonville Jaguars and Florida Panthers.

The newspaper estimates that owners might have to return $30 million in benefits that were already bestowed if the bill passes and they can’t prove they were running homeless shelters (to the newspaper’s knowledge, no teams have been).

I think the overriding concern here based on one thing: governments (and others) are lacking money. This could be an innovative solution: use an existing structure that often sits empty which then cuts costs for building/renting other homeless shelters. Lawmakers have some leverage here because they helped secure funding for these stadiums. A growing body of research suggest that these taxpayer funded stadiums are not boons to the local community. Research suggests that taxpayer funded stadiums don’t help out communities as much as help line the pockets of owners. In other words, communities don’t get the money back that they put into stadiums in the form of taxes and team owners reap the benefits. Also, when teams leave, certain businesses may suffer but eventually residents spend their entertainment dollars elsewhere in the city so the city doesn’t lose out in the long run. Why shouldn’t stadium owners have to give back a little bit more?

I wouldn’t be surprised if more cities try to pursue similar ideas that attach more strings to accessing public funding.

Overblown concern about Google “replacing” or “destroying” our memory

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The headlines read: “Google ousts brain,” “Google replaces the brain,” “Here’s how Google search is destroying our memory.” These are all based on a new study:

The Internet is becoming our main source of memory instead of our own brains, a study has concluded.

In the age of Google, our minds are adapting so that we are experts at knowing where to find information even though we don’t recall what it is.

The researchers found that when we want to know something we use the Internet as an ‘external memory’ just as computers use an external hard drive…

‘The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.’

This an example of “distributed cognition,” the idea that humans use other sources to extend their brain’s capacity. In this case, memory space in the brain may be freed up by relying on Google and computers to store certain information. Instead of “replacing” the brain, Google is extending the brain and helping humans offload certain information that can helpfully be stored elsewhere. Google isn’t the first technology that allows this; so does the printed page. Rather than storing a bunch of arcane and typically unhelpful information in our head, we could look up basic information in a reference book.

Perhaps people are more concerned about Google itself and the idea that a corporation, an organization more interested in profit than our well-being, may be behind changes in our brain.

Claim that Putin plagiarized a sociological monograph disputed by its author

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Here is an odd sociological story: ahead of an upcoming election, bloggers accuse Vladimir Putin of plagiarizing a sociological monograph when writing about “ethnic issues” in Russia.

Putin’s article, titled “Russia: The National Question,” was published in the influential daily “Nezavisimaya gazeta” on January 23 and was the second in a series of publications by Putin in the run-up to the March 4 presidential election…

Bloggers, however, allege that approximately one-third of the publication was lifted from a monograph by sociologist Valery Tishkov and two other researchers.

Aleksandr Morozov, editor of “Russky Zhurnal” (Russian Journal), posted the allegations on his blog, generating more than 100 comments and sparking follow-up stories on widely trafficked online news sites like Lenta.ru and Polit.ru. He spoke to RFE/RL’s Russian Service:

“When I read Putin’s strange article on the national question, I noticed that special terminology was being used that is only used by professional cultural anthropologists — words like ‘socio-cultural code,’ ‘poly-cultural,’ and ‘poly-culturalism.’ There is a standard set of [commonly used] political words such as ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘civil nation.’ But [the language of Putin’s article included] some pretty specialized expressions — even though speechwriters usually watch closely to stop scientific jargon from making its way into political statements by politicians of Putin’s level.”…

But in comments to RFE/RL, Tishkov, who is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said he was unconvinced that his work had been plagiarized:

“As for [Putin’s use of] ‘poly-culturalism,’ he also got this a little confused. Everything there is a little vague. The article is sort of eclectic; [it is written in a] purely pre-election style…so that it appeals to everyone who is voting. As for those who aren’t voting, what does he say about them? Migrants… and so on — ‘Are they responsible for everything?’ I didn’t write that kind of book. It is different from this article.”

In this day and age, wouldn’t it be fairly easy for people to determine whether Putin truly plagiarized the monograph or not? Perhaps it is not simply a case of cutting and paste text but rather using reworded ideas that seem to come from another source. Using technical terms doesn’t necessarily mean someone is plagiarizing, particularly if that person could have had plenty of speechwriters or experts write the article or help him write it. It would be a different story for a student who had never shown the ability to use such terms before.

I wonder how much sociological work is plagiarized. From my grad school days, I remember one academic talking about work being plagiarized in other countries and the difficulties one might encounter in trying to reprimand the plagiarizer. Does an increased number of  instances of plagiarism reflect positively on the popularity or value of an idea or text?

Argument: land restrictions lead to the American cities with the “most and least affordable housing”

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A new survey names the “most and least affordable housing” markets in the United States. Not too many surprises here. The top ten most affordable markets: Detroit, Atlanta, Phoenix, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Rochester, Columbus, Kansas City, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. The top ten least affordable markets: San Jose, San Francisco-Oakland, New York, San Diego, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, Richmond, Providence, and Portland.

What is particularly interesting is the reason given to explain the differences in affordability:

The authors specifically call out new construction that is significantly controlled by comprehensive plans or through more restrictive land use regulations “referred to as ‘compact development,’ ‘urban consolidation,’ ‘growth management’ and ‘smart growth.’” The thesis is that these places create housing that is unaffordable. And conversely, the places ranked as affordable – Phoenix, Atlanta, Las Vegas – tend to be areas associated with sprawl development.

These two authors are known for their market-based preferences for land use and housing development, so their argument is no surprise. And though there is certainly a case to be made that restrictive land use policies can limit supply and drive up costs, these aren’t the only factors in play. That New York City is less affordable than its upstate neighbor Rochester has more to do with the fact that it is a much more vibrant and attractive city, and that people are willing to pay more to live that lifestyle than people who prefer Rochester living. Taking this and other factors into account would expand the understanding of why some places are less affordable than others. And while the picture painted by Cox and Pavletich is not wrong, per se, its limited scope offers a less-than-comprehensive analysis that could benefit from more context.

This sounds like an argument from the urban ecology school that argued sprawl could be explained by a search for cheaper land. If governments or other agencies restrict the amount of land available for development, then prices will have to go up.

This explanation also seems to suggest that the affordability sprawl allows should be a primary goal. Of course, sprawl comes with other problems including increased costs, longer commutes, more environmental concerns, and a loss of space that could have been used for other purposes or left open. If the affordability of a home was the only thing that mattered for public policy, policies would be quite different. But when doing urban and regional planning, there are a number of other concerns that must be taken into consideration.

Also: I’ve always wondered why lists of affordable or unaffordable places don’t try to overlay other data on the prices. At a quick glance, it looks like the more affordable places tend to be in the Rust Belt, the South, and foreclosure centers while the more expensive places are on the coasts. Some other factors that may matter: perhaps “creative class” cities more expensive on the whole, even controlling for other factors; demographics; the particular industries and companies located in each place; where cultural centers are located; the historical context.

Lots of American cultural values on display in State of the Union speech

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While State of the Union Speeches can contain specific information and plans, they are often great places to spot American cultural values and ideals. Democrat or Republican, the themes are often similar. (Of course some topics are more contentious than others but these speeches tend to try to appeal to a broad demographic.) Here is the text of the full speech.

Some of the ideas contained in the speech:

-Americans who work hard should be able to get ahead

-There is an American Dream of a middle-class lifestyle

(Here is a summary of these first two: “They understood they were part of something larger; that they were contributing to a story of success that every American had a chance to share – the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement.”)

-American will win out in the end

-American workers are the best in the world

-More and better education will help our country move forward

-Our troops are heroes and embody the best of America

-May God bless the United States of America

Any other big common ideas you can spot?

Indicators that loyalty among family members is up in America

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Even though we supposedly live in a disconnected and fragmented age, there are some indicators that suggest Americans feel more loyal toward their families than in the past:

“There’s been a social and economic change that’s actually made us more dependent on family loyalties,” says Stephanie Coontz, author of “Marriage, A History” (Penguin).

“You don’t know your neighbors. It would be crazy to be loyal to your employer in the same way you used to be because your employer’s not going to be loyal to you. All of those things have simultaneously made us want more loyalty — long for more loyalty — and try, I think, to have more loyalty in our personal lives.”

Loyalty itself is difficult to measure, but likely indicators such as family closeness appear to be on the rise. A 2010 Pew Research Center study found that 40 percent of Americans say their family life is closer now than when they were growing up, and only 14 percent say it is less close. Another Pew study showed that the percentage of adults who talked with a parent every day rose to 42 percent in 2005 from 32 percent in 1989.

The family loyalty picture is complex, with Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, saying that though couples who marry today are less likely to get divorced than couples that married in the 1970s, more people are forgoing marriage or delaying it.

The article suggests several reasons why people would be feeling more loyal toward their family today: rapid economic and social change, different expectations about family life, and people are entering intimate relationships more cautiously.

There could also be a few other factors at work:

1. I wonder if there is some social desirability bias in answering a question about family closeness. What adult today would say they are doing a worse job in creating family closeness than their parents did? Also, there is a memory issue here: how many current adults can accurately remember or assess the closeness of their family when they were younger? Their current family status is much more immediate.

2. I’m surprised this wasn’t mentioned in the article: it is relatively easier to communicate in families with the advent of email, cell phones, and text messages. However, I wonder if these easier methods of connection mean that people are confusing connected with closeness or if they are indeed one and the same.

Even if loyalty isn’t truly up compared to the “golden era” decades ago (at least in our popular culture we have this image of an era where the nuclear family never let each other down), the perception that loyalty is more important or stronger matters. This is an expectation that many people will bring to relationships and affect their actions.

(A side note: Wilcox and Coontz get interviewed for a ridiculous number of news stories about family life and marriage.)

Thief caught stealing used sociology textbook at IPFW

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Here is a story you don’t see everyday: a thief was caught stealing a used sociology textbook from the Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne bookstore.

A Fort Wayne man is facing a charge of felony theft for allegedly stealing a used sociology textbook.

Surveillance video at Follett’s bookstore at IPFW showed Neil W. White leaving the store without paying for the book, “Sociology in Our Times: The Essentials,” which cost $139.50, according to court papers.

White, 29, told an IPFW police detective that he stole the book, and he also admitted taking textbooks from the store 10 to 12 other times, court papers stated.

A few thoughts:

1. This guy needed a sociology textbook so bad that he stole it?

2. The bookstore was asking nearly $140 for a used copy of a intro to sociology textbook? It looks like you can buy this new at Amazon for $110 and used for around $70.

3. Have sociologists really ever gotten behind a cheaper textbooks movement or even gone so far to use the “steal this book” marketing campaign? If not, you would think sociologists might support this given their ideological commitments.

Just the beginning of using social media to study political and social beliefs and behaviors

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As the 2012 election nears, here is an overview of where we stand in using social media to understand people’s political and social beliefs and behaviors:

Marc A. Smith, a sociologist who studies online communities and founded the Silicon Valley-based Social Media Research Foundation, said “we are in the Model T Ford era of information systems” and analyzing their content.

Scott Keeter, the president of the American Assn. of Public Opinion Research, said that members of the professional organization and journalists should “proceed with a degree of humility” in deciding what social media can tell us about political campaigns. “Until we have more experience with real world outcomes, it’s hard to know the meaning of what we have captured from social media,” said Keeter, director of survey research at the Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Much of the debate followed a Jan. 12 article by Politico, the online news site, which reported that it had partnered with Facebook to examine all “posting, sharing and linking about candidates” from Dec. 12 to Jan. 10. The arrangement was a first not only in that Facebook delved into both public and private messages but also used computer analysis to “identify positive and negative emotion in text.” (The company stressed that while computers draw an aggregate view of user sentiment, human beings do not monitor individual messages.)

Facebook said it employed a “well-validated software tool used frequently in social psychological research.” But Smith said he was “highly skeptical” of some of the precise findings in the Facebook analysis. He added that the intellectual disciplines focused on deciphering texts — natural language processing and computational linguistics — “are very deep and can do remarkable things, but they don’t necessarily have the ability to predict the next president of the United States of America.”

A few thoughts:

1. I like the urge to be cautious: too many news outlets jump on relatively small and meaningless events in the realm of social media and try to draw big conclusions. For example, the size of a Facebook group doesn’t say much. Similarly, I am still surprised by the number of media outlets that show the results of unofficial (and often low-count) poll results (though they now say they are not scientific results).

2. While being cautious is good now, it does suggest that this is a burgeoning area with lots of potential. The researchers who develop good methodologies and get access to specific or unique data will get a lot of attention. I wonder how much companies like Facebook really want to contribute to social science research as opposed to using their data to make money.

3. The counts of positive and negative feelings seem fairly unhelpful to me. For example, what does tracking the emotions of the world through tweets really tell us? Another example from the offline realm: “how the Bible feels.” This is where we need more than just descriptive research.

Update on radioactive thorium cleanup near West Chicago

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The Chicago Tribune has an update on the thorium cleanup in western DuPage County. The story provides an overview of the issue: a rare earths plant in West Chicago closed down in 1973, leading to a long battle between the company that had acquired the facility and different government bodies to get the radioactive thorium removed. Here is where there is still some thorium awaiting cleanup:

About $21 million is needed for work scheduled this year on the West Branch of the DuPage River and an adjacent creek, officials say. But more than a third of that is still up in the air.

“We are so close to being at the finish line,” said John “Ole” Oldenburg, director of natural resources for the DuPage County Forest Preserve District, who has been working with Naperville, Warrenville and other local municipalities along with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the cleanup since it began in 2005…

Cleanup has occurred along 7 of the 8 river miles where thorium was identified, including Kress Creek and the West Branch of the DuPage River from the West Chicago Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant to the northern end of McDowell Grove County Forest Preserve in Naperville. Three sites remain: an area near Bower Elementary School in Warrenville, part of Kress Creek that runs under the Illinois Highway 59 bridge and a part of the forest preserve…

The river and creek constitute one of four sites in DuPage County designated by the federal government as Superfund sites, all of which were left in the wake of the Rare Earths Facility. Work at two of the sites has been completed, and remediation efforts continue at the site of the factory.

Hopefully this gets cleaned up soon so these suburbs can put this story behind them.

Here are few things that are understated in this story:

1. While the article suggests there wasn’t much scrutiny until 1976, there were signs in earlier years. At several points, residents complained about various issues (plants dying, for example) and the city was also worried about contaminated water. But no one knew the full scope of the problem until a bigger investigation was started and then radioactive waste was found on many properties in town that had once used the fill-in material with thorium waste offered for free by the facility.

1a. I’ve never seen the story about an “unnamed tipster” alerting people to the radioactive waste. What I do know is that a West Chicago resident filed a civil suit in US District Court in July 1976 questioning the competence of Kerr-McGee in properly handling the radioactive waste.

2. There is not much mention of the protests and legal wrangling over the issue between the mid 1970s and late 1980s before the Thorium Action Group (TAG) came on the scene. A small early 1980s protest consisting of roughly 50 to 100 people marching through the town even drew the attention of the New York Times. The court case bounced around as the courts sorted out who was responsible for regulating the clean-up (with national, state, and local governments all involved).

3. The negative effect the radioactive waste had on West Chicago’s image. One Chicago media source dubbed West Chicago the “radioactivity capital of the Midwest.” It wasn’t until plans for removal came together in the early 1990s that West Chicago was able to start turning a corner.

4. Something hinted at the article as officials think “the thorium does not pose an immediate public health risk”: one of the issues in the last two decades of cleanup has been the adoption of stricter standards for “acceptable” radioactivity. This has led to more cleanup sites and even repeat cleanup sites.

Sociological study says junk food sales in middle schools don’t lead to weight gain

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A new study in the Sociology of Education provides some insights into the current debate over whether public schools should be selling junk food to students:

The authors found that 59.2 percent of fifth graders and 86.3 percent of eighth graders in their study attended schools that sold junk food. But, while there was a significant increase in the percentage of students who attended schools that sold junk food between fifth and eighth grades, there was no rise in the percentage of students who were overweight or obese. In fact, despite the increased availability of junk food, the percentage of students who were overweight or obese actually decreased from fifth grade to eighth grade, from 39.1 percent to 35.4 percent.

“There has been a great deal of focus in the media on how schools make a lot of money from the sale of junk food to students, and on how schools have the ability to help reduce childhood obesity,” Van Hook said. “In that light, we expected to find a definitive connection between the sale of junk food in middle schools and weight gain among children between fifth and eighth grades. But, our study suggests that—when it comes to weight issues—we need to be looking far beyond schools and, more specifically, junk food sales in schools, to make a difference.”

According to Van Hook, policies that aim to reduce childhood obesity and prevent unhealthy weight gain need to concentrate more on the home and family environments as well as the broader environments outside of school.

“Schools only represent a small portion of children’s food environment,” Van Hook said. “They can get food at home, they can get food in their neighborhoods, and they can go across the street from the school to buy food. Additionally, kids are actually very busy at school. When they’re not in class, they have to get from one class to another and they have certain fixed times when they can eat. So, there really isn’t a lot of opportunity for children to eat while they’re in school, or at least eat endlessly, compared to when they’re at home. As a result, whether or not junk food is available to them at school may not have much bearing on how much junk food they eat.”

This study has a big sample of nearly 20,000 students and the findings were so counterintuitive that the authors waited two years to publish the results.

While this study suggests schools don’t contribute to weight gain, it doesn’t necessarily mean that schools should suddenly revert to selling all kinds of junk. At first glance, this could be the sort of study that people worried about the “nanny state” could jump on. For example, see the response of the Center for Consumer Freedom: “Maybe it’s time for the “food police” to educate themselves. All the attempts to limit choices apparently won’t do the students any good.” At the same time, schools can be part of a larger package of social forces pushing for better eating and exercise but they aren’t likely to solve the problems by themselves or by operating in simplistic ways.

I wonder if this points to a bigger issue: Americans expect that schools will be able to even a lot of social ills. In this case, being obese and overweight is a complex issue that schools themselves can’t overcome. As the authors note, there are a lot of other factors at play and by the time students reach middle school, they have already been shaped in significant ways. While education is one of the best ways to promote upward mobility and the opportunity to compete in a rapidly-changing world economy, it is not a silver bullet for all problems. Of course, public policy is limited in what it can feasibly or popularly change and politicians and advocates only have so many levers they can move.

Another thing to note: I wonder how some might see an admission from one of the authors. One author said, “We were really surprised by that result and, in fact, we held back from publishing our study for roughly two years because we kept looking for a connection that just wasn’t there.” Some might be suspicious and wonder if there is an ethical issue: did the authors data mine looking for other connections? Were the authors afraid of how some might respond to their findings? At the same time, scientists can also be surprised by their findings and I would guess they were simply being thorough before exposing their work to the public.