Category Archives: Sociology

New ABC pilot: Suburgatory

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Here is a short description of Suburgatory, a new comedy pilot for ABC:

Suburgatory has been dubbed a satirical look at life in the suburbs that centers on a New York City woman who moves to a cookie-cutter community only to realize that life there is much more frightening.

Hasn’t this “satirical look at life in the suburbs” been done a number of times before? From The Stepford Wives (review of the original and the remake) to Desperate Housewives, this seems like well-traveled territory. What will set this show apart and how frightening can the suburbs get? This could be just another piece in the suburban genre.

The premise of the show seems to go against what most Americans have sought in suburbia. For many, the city is the frightening place and the suburbs represent safety, good schools, and more space. This is not to say that the suburbs don’t have their problems; they certainly do. But to go so far as to say that life is “more frightening” in the suburbs seems strange.

And if the suburbs are a place like purgatory, where exactly would a show like this (and other stories like it) say heaven and hell are located?

Australian commentator: movies don’t depict the suburbs

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A writer in The Daily Telegraph suggests that Australian films have not told the stories of typical, suburban life:

Yet it’s not the working class who are neglected.

In fact, according to our films, these are the only people who inhabit Australia.

For all the frustration that exists among moviegoers as to an over-representation of bleak morality tales, it’s this unspoken class warfare that goes unchecked.

From salt-of-the-earth drovers to down-on-their-luck-gangsters, we’re traditionally very fond of our battlers. It’s the prospect of venturing near a McMansion, 4WD or flat-screen TV that seems to paralyse our finest scriptwriters.

The aspirations of families in tree-lined suburbia all too rarely catch the eye of local filmmakers. Perhaps it’s all a bit common.

We pride ourselves on telling real tales, but we don’t want to get too real…

We have been too busy wallowing in the down-and-out to delve into where and how most of us actually live.

An interesting take. I have had the impression that Australia is more suburban than other industrialized nations but it is difficult to find data to back this up. (I spent about 25 minutes searching the Australian Bureau of Statistics website and it appears that at least part of the issue is how the Bureau defines suburbs. While the American Census Bureau essentially says suburbs are the spaces between central cities and rural areas, it appears that Australia tends not to make these clear distinctions. There may be Inner Sydney and North Sydney and Outer South Western Sydney but they are all part of Sydney.) We do know that in late 2009, the average new Australian home was bigger than the average new American home.

More broadly, this doesn’t seem to have been a problem in American media and entertainment. Whether we look at novels or TV shows or movies, the suburbs are a common setting. We could argue about whether these depictions of suburban life are accurate. There is a long history of suburban stories serving as suburban critique: the characters are often portrayed as being unfulfilled, shallow, and unsophisticated. Additionally,  the “typical” TV sitcom or movie family tends not to be that typical: their homes are fairly large, money or subsistence issues rarely come up, and the family always end up in wacky situations.

The familial link between Kate Middleton and Harriet Martineau

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As the press continues to look for news on Kate Middleton in advance of the royal wedding, a sociologist popped up in Middleton’s family tree. Through a common ancestor, Middleton is related to early woman sociologist Harriet Martineau. Here is a description of Martineau’s life:

Harriet Martineau, to whom Kate bears more than a passing resemblance, is today a largely forgotten figure, yet during the Victorian era she was a powerhouse, a towering intellect who braved male prejudice to carve out a unique career in the world of letters. She is generally acknowledged as the first woman sociologist.

Born the daughter of a Norwich textile manufacturer, she grew up in a household dominated by Unitarianism and underpinned by a progressive attitude towards the education of girls. By the time she was 21 she had published her first article: perhaps unsurprisingly, “On Female Education”.

She moved to London and soon came her first book, Devotional Exercises for the Use of Young Persons in 1826 – but this was merely a warm-up: her big plan was to write books on politics and economics for the ordinary reader. Illustrations of Political Economy, which followed, was an instant success and brought her financial independence at a stroke…

Her circle included Thomas Malthus, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë and Wordsworth. These people, the heralds of change, thought they could improve the world and, to a greater or lesser extent, did so. Buoyed up by their vision of the new, Harriet yearned to experience nascent cultures for herself, and at a time when few of her age or class undertook such solo trips, she sailed to the United States in 1835.

While The Telegraph may suggest that Martineau is unknown in the UK, she is certainly known to sociologists. There is (or was) a Harriet Martineau Sociological Society and there have books written about her (an example here).

While Martineau’s accomplishments are impressive for her era, it is amusing that the news story continually tries to link Middleton to Martineau. Here are some of the comparisons:

Miss Martineau was renowned for her zeal and her intellectual rigour while, on the surface at least, Miss Middleton is better-known for her saintly patience in waiting for her prince and her impossibly glossy hair.

Harriet counted among her friends the reformers and intellectuals John Stuart Mill, Sydney Smith, Florence Nightingale and Thomas Carlyle. Speak it not unkindly but Kate, though photographed often, has rarely been seen with a book as a companion…

Quite how much of that rebellious streak still resides in the sleek Miss Middleton’s DNA is hard to judge… But it does raise the question: is there a Harriet lurking inside Miss Middleton ready to burst forth?

This is silly: how much can someone of today really resemble an ancestor of over 100 years ago? However, we could ask if Middleton was to act like a feminist today or to undertake activities similar to Martineau, what would be the public’s response be to her joining the Royal family?

Conference talks suggest future is bright for big cities

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A number of mayors and planners from big cities around the world are meeting in France this week. According to one report, the future looks bright for big cities:

“The future of the world lies in cities,” London’s mayor Boris Johnson told a packed auditorium at the opening day of MIPIM Monday…

“We have to keep putting the village back into the city because that is fundamentally what human beings want and aspire to,” Johnson told the crowd, adapting a famous statement made by India’s Mahatma Gandhi that the future of India lay in its 70,000 villages.

“Cities are where people live longer, have better education outcomes, are more productive,” Johnson noted, adding that cities are also where people emit less polluting carbon dioxide per capita…

A recent study by Citigroup published in Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper forecast that mega-cities expected to have the fastest growing economies by the middle of the next decade include London, Chicago, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles and Hong Kong, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Mumbai and Moscow.

What is being said here is not just the optimism of big-city mayors: others agree about the benefits cities offer such as reduced carbon emissions and being centers of innovation.

A few questions about this conference:

1. Are people bullish about the prospect of big cities because they live and work in big cities and therefore have to be more optimistic? Is this simply boosterism?

2. Is there a distinction made at this conference between central cities and metropolitan regions? When Boris Johnson, mayor of Greater London, talks about London’s prospects, is it safe to assume that he is referring to the whole region and not just Central London? I assume this is really about full metropolitan regions and not just about central cities.

3. Do city leaders in the developing world see things in the same way as the mayors from First World countries cited in this story? For example, mayors of places like London or New York or Chicago or Tokyo are already in charge of world-class cities that have established their place at the top of the hierarchy. Would a mayor of Cairo or Calcutta or Sao Paulo have the same rosy perspective?

McMansions a legacy of the 1980s?

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A Philadelphia man who loves the 1980s suggests that one of the legacies of this decade is the McMansion:

Remember the ’80s? Greed. Narcissism. Size.

“Everything was big — really big,” Sirota writes. “Big hair. Big defense budgets. Big tax cuts. Big shoulder pads. Big blockbuster movies. Big sports stars. The Big Gulp.”…

Sirota (who was born in 1975) says the ’80s speak to us today for one simple reason: “Because it’s still the ’80s. The calendar doesn’t say ’80s, but we’re still looking through an ’80s mind-set.” Think Charlie Sheen. Think Lehman Brothers. Think McMansions.

I don’t know if this guy is right or not about these specific links between the 1980s and today. I suspect people growing up in different time periods (whether it is was the 1980s or 1960s) would suspect that the periods of their early lives are most consequential for subsequent events.

But, we could examine more closely his idea that the 1980s gave rise to the McMansions of recent years. Let’s first look at the average square footage of new homes. Here are the increases over the decades (US Census data):

1973-1979: from 1,660 to 1,760 square feet – increase of 100 (5.68%)

1980-1989: from 1,750 to 2,035 square feet – increase of 285 (14.00%)

1990-1999: from 2,080 to 2,223 square feet – increase of 163 (7.33%)

2000-2009: from 2,266 to 2,438 square feet – increase of 172 (7.59%)

So it appears the 1980s did see a larger increase in the size of new homes.

Second, we could look at when the term McMansion entered the popular lexicon. From news sources that I have looked at (this is not one of them but it does give a similar idea), the term really started picking up steam in the late 1990s. Even if the houses started getting larger in the 1980s, it wasn’t until the late 1990s and early 2000s that people frequently started calling them McMansions. In this case, perhaps the term took some time to develop or McMansions really originated in changes of the 1990s.

Overall, these sorts of sweeping ideas (everything was BIG in the 1980s!) could use some more nuance.

How living in the city affects social behavior

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Recent research and commentators have suggested that cities are greener and more innovative. This post from The Infrastructurist summarizes recent research on another possible outcome of interest for city residents: prosocial behavior.

Using census data, Samuel Arbesman and Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard Medical School examined urban populations for their tendencies to display several prosocial behaviors, including voting, organ donation, and political contribution. As they report in the journal Physica A (in press), Arbesman and Christakis believed this positive social behavior would indeed be superlinear, in part to offset the less desirable elements of a city, such as crime:

If larger networks … fostered increases in violence more rapidly than, say, increases in kindness, city growth would be constrained in a fundamental way.

What they found, however, was that prosocial behaviors “do not obey a clear pattern.” People in cities aren’t more likely to vote or to donate a living organ, though they’re much more likely to give a deceased organ or a political contribution. Taken together, these positive behaviors do not scale the same way that innovation and economic growth typically scale within cities. In short, conclude Arbesman and Christakis, “prosocial behavior is not a single category when it comes to understanding urban scaling with respect to population.”

The mixed results harmonize with previous findings. Some studies have found that people in cities are more likely to return a lost letter than those in both suburbs and small towns. Others have found that willingness to trust strangers declines as a region’s population grows.

The unexpected findings might be explained, in part, by which behaviors the researchers chose to define as “prosocial.” Political contributions, particularly the sizable sort found in cities, could rightfully be considered a selfish endeavor, as opposed to a positive social one. (At the same time, it seems likely that Arbesman and Christakis were limited by available data sets.)

These results are interesting for several reasons. First, there are methodological questions: do we have data in which researchers in the city were specifically looking at prosocial behaviors? A common approach to looking at social behavior and networks these days asks respondents to name their five closest friends and then how closely their personal beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes align with the respondent. But if this study is based on Census data, these social network questions are not present. I’m not quite sure why political contributions would not be considered prosocial – participating in the civic process would seem to be part of being prosocial.

Second, these questions about prosocial behavior are not new. Some of the earliest sociologists developed the discipline for exactly these reasons: what would happen to relationships and society with more and more people moving from small, rural communities to large, anonymous cities? Durkheim and Tönnies developed typologies to explain this: mechanical and organic solidarity and gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, respectively. Simmel, in particular, seemed worried about the effect that the city would have on individuals. He talked about how urban individuals would need to develop blasé attitudes in order to cope with all of the commotion and people they would meet. Simmel continued on to ask whether the individual could maintain their individuality amidst the life of the big city.

It would be interesting to look at data over the years about American perceptions about whether city or suburban dwellers are more prosocial (if such data is available). On one hand, the suburbs are supposed to be the place where kids run free and families know each other yet we talk about how people just drive in and out of their garages without ever knowing their neighbors. On the other hand, we see reports all the time about crime and disorder in the city even as we occasionally hear stories of vibrant neighborhood and storefront life. My guess would be that the suburbs win out easily in this battle of perceptions – even as the research data is mixed on whether city or suburban residents actually exhibit more prosocial behavior.

Another composite measure: “the happiest person in America”

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Happiness studies are a cottage industry unto themselves (see related posts here, here, and here for several examples) as are composite measures that tells us things like the mean population center of the United States or the world’s most typical face. Here is a new measure that gives us some information about the happiest person in America:

The New York Times asked Gallup to come up with a statistical composite for the happiest person in America, based on the characteristics that most closely correlated with happiness in 2010. Men, for example, tend to be happier than women, older people are happier than middle-aged people, and so on.

Gallup’s answer: he’s a tall, Asian-American, observant Jew who is at least 65 and married, has children, lives in Hawaii, runs his own business and has a household income of more than $120,000 a year.

This may make for an interesting news story but I’m not sure it really tells us much. Composite measures like this take different pieces of information, such as differences in happiness by gender, age, race, income, and more, and then try to attach them to a “typical” person. Is it more helpful to see a “typical” person or to have a series of graphs that show the differing levels of average happiness by various demographic characteristics? Personally, I think it would be more helpful to have the series of graphs or tables – which are also included with this story (just need to click on the tables/maps on the left side).

Of course, this article goes a step farther by trying to actually to track down someone who fits this profile. And this N of 1 who says he is “a very happy person” shows or proves what exactly?

Microsoft is a place where sociologists could work

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Sociology majors are always wondering what kinds of jobs they might have in the future. I ran across an article that mentioned a talk by “Mark Smith, Research Sociologist at Microsoft.” With a little Google searching, I found an excerpt from a 2003 interview with Smith who describes how he ended up at Microsoft:

How did a guy like you get to work for a company like Microsoft?
I’m a sociologist. I’ve now been at Microsoft Research about four-and-a-half years. Microsoft has a few social and cognitive psychologists, but I’m the only sociologist.

Which means what, exactly, in the context of technology employment?
A sociologist studies the attributes of relationships and the group of relationships that add up to a collective or a community. As a technology group, our mandate is to both explore and to build tools to study the phenomenon that we could call online community. We sociologists don’t like to use the term “community,” particularly–we like to refer to them as social cyberspaces…

So why exactly does Microsoft need a resident sociologist?
Microsoft has a big investment in online communities, and has not had until recently many tools to enhance that investment. What Microsoft wants around communities is what every enterprise does, which is a peer-support, knowledge-management application. And that means that if you go into Usenet, you’ll find 3,000 Microsoft public newsgroups, with 1.5 million people posting 10 million messages. And that’s 2002–and it’s going to more than double this year, because it more than doubled in ’01. We don’t see traffic flagging at all.

Trained sociologists could be very useful to businesses and organizations who want to conduct their own research and see how potential customers or clients operate in the world. I remember reading an article years ago about Microsoft employing anthropologists who would live with (or spend extended periods of time with) families in order to see how the different family members would use the computer and Windows.

What would it take for more sociologists to convince organizations they can help add to their bottom line or help them reach their goals? Or what might it take for businesses or organizations to start seeking out more sociologists?

Rationalizing the economic costs of raising children

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Discovery News reports on two recent studies that look at how parents respond to information about how much it costs to raise children today:

New research suggests that people may exaggerate the perks of being parents to rationalize the financial costs of raising children.

Two studies, featured in the journal Psychological Science, measured more than 140 parents’ feelings after being presented with information regarding the hefty bill of raising a child. In the Northeast, raising one child to the age of 18 costs nearly $193,000, according to the research.

In one of the studies, researchers exposed half of parents to the overall costs of raising a child, while the other half received information about the costs as well as information suggesting that children care for and financially support aging parents later in life.

The team discovered that parents who were only exposed to the costs of parenthood (not the benefits) rationalized such costs by reporting a higher intrinsic value of being parents. The other group, which received information regarding the costs and benefits of parenthood, did not show an increase in rationalization…

These findings by no means suggest that parents do not enjoy parenthood or fail to love their children, but rather emphasize that parents are sometimes faced with conflicting feelings regarding the costs and benefits of having children.

It would be interesting to hear what it means to parents when they talk about “a higher intrinsic value of being parents.” Are there certain kinds of behaviors from children or experiences parents have with children where the economic costs end up outweighing “the intrinsic value”? How much can parents openly talk about the economic costs of children when it seems like a crass way to talk about their kids?

Quick Review: Catfish

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Perhaps we could consider the movie Catfish a companion to the more publicized film The Social Network (reviews from Brian here, Joel Sage here): both films consider the effects that Facebook and other digital technologies have on our world. But while The Social Network was a stylized retelling of the founding of Facebook, Catfish covers the lives of more ordinary people as they use these technologies to search for love. Here are a few thoughts about this film:

1. The story revolves a guy, Nev, from New York and a girl from Michigan, Megan, who build a relationship built around a Facebook friendship, IM chats, text messages, and phone calls. Both parties are looking for love though why they are doing this ends up being the plot twist of the film.

1a. I think what makes this film work is that Nev is an appealing character. Even though he hasn’t met Megan in the early stages of the film, he falls hard and ends up giggling and swooning like a teenager. But when things turn out to be more complicated than this, he still finds a way to make sense of it all.

2. More broadly, the film presents a question that many people wonder about: can two people really build a lasting relationship through Facebook?  While this is an interesting question, research on Facebook and SNS (social networking site) use suggests most younger people are not looking to meet new people online. Rather, they are reinforcing existing relationships or reestablishing past relationships. And this film deserves some credit: whereas a film like You’ve Got Mail suggests that email and other electronic communication work the same way as traditional dating (and the typical romantic comedy happy ending), this film introduces some complications.

3. The Social Network seems to suggest that technology helps keep us apart. (A side note: this seems to be an argument from the older generation talking about younger generations. One thing I wonder about The Social Network: was it so critically acclaimed because it fed stereotypes that older people have about younger people? How much did the characters in this film resonate with the lives of younger film-goers?) In that film, Zuckerberg founds Facebook in order to join the in-crowd, is being sued by two people after arguments related to developing community-building websites,  and at the end, he is shown still searching for a connection with a girl he lost years ago. Catfish seems to make an opposite argument: despite the imperfect people who try to connect online, the film suggests there is still some value in getting to know new people. When Nev’s love becomes complicated, he doesn’t just withdraw or call it quits – he tries to move forward while still getting to know Megan.

4. This film claims to be a documentary though there is disagreement about whether this is actually the case. Regardless of whether the film captures reality or is scripted, it is engaging. (The presentation seems similar in tone to Exit Through the Gift Shop, reviewed here.) Have we reached the point in films where the line between what is real and what is written doesn’t matter? And should we care or do we just want a good story?

Overall, this film seems more hopeful about the prospects of Facebook and other digital technology. With a documentary style and an engaging storyline, Catfish helps us to think again about whether people can truly get to know each other online.

(This film was generally liked by critics: it has a 81% fresh rating, 109 fresh out of 134 total reviews, at RottenTomatoes.com.)