Timothy Noah at Slate has put together a ten-part series about “the great convergence,” a Paul Krugman term for the recent thirty year stretch in the United States where the income gap has grown between the top 1% and the rest of the population.
Category Archives: Sociology
Depression in cyber-bullying vs. in-person bullying
Cyber-bullying has drawn a lot of recent attention from commentators, schools, and parents. A new research study in the Journal of Adolescent Health argues that in contrast to in-person bullying where both the bully and bullied are more likely to be depressed, in cyber-bullying, it is the victim who is more likely to be depressed. The research examined “7,500 students from 43 countries.”
The researchers argue this finding may be due to the unique traits of cyber-bullying:
A big reason for the depression could be that word spreads faster and more easily online: Blog posts, comments and e-mails can be written anonymously and readily copied and pasted, said researcher Ronald Iannotti, a staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Once made, such posts may survive indefinitely.
“Cyber-bullying goes on, it persists,” Iannotti told MyHealthNewsDaily. “So not only does it happen the first time you’ve seen it, but you know it’s still out there circulating.”
Unlike traditional face-to-face bullying, where there is a limited number of witnesses, cyber-bullying can have an audience of hundreds or thousands of online bystanders. The anonymity of the poster can add to the victim’s stress because there’s no easy way to get the person to stop, Iannotti said.
While this may explain why those who are bullied suffer more from depression, it doesn’t explain why the bullies feel less depressed when their bullying takes place online. Perhaps because they are able to remain anonymous and can’t feel any backlash or public pressure if no one knows who they are?
Generation Y sees the downsides to cars
A short article from Kiplinger suggests Generation Y has a different relationship to the automobile than previous generations. Rather than viewing them as status symbols, Generation Y sees them as polluting objects and the use of mass transit and car sharing is on the rise.
This has car makers worried:
The trend won’t cause car sales to tank, of course, but the generational shift doesn’t bode well for manufacturers and auto dealers, which for decades have counted on wooing young new drivers to their brands in hopes of cementing lifetime customer relationships.
Gen Yers are a big potential market: At 80 million strong, they represent the biggest generation in U.S. history. Baby boomers are a close second, but millions of them begin turning 65 next year — an age at which car purchases drop off sharply.
There is nothing that guarantees that the American obsession with the car will continue. It sounds like manufacturers will need to change their tack and convince people that they need cars – perhaps it could be tied to ideas about personal freedom.
If this is the case among Generation Y, this has big implications for urban planning and the suburbs.
Learning about race from the South
The Christian Science Monitor has a story about seven lessons that can be learned about race from the South. Here is the list: “recognize how far we’ve come,” “talk about race like a Southerner,” (#3 is not listed in a heading but is something like “see the benefits of frequent interaction between blacks and whites”), “Blacks love Southern opportunity,” “don’t stereotype whites,” “segregation by any other name…,” and “keep moving forward.”
One thing that caught my attention: #6 discusses segregation in the North, a region which supposedly has been more favorable to blacks. Several academics dispute this notion:
“The concept of Southern exceptionalism has obscured a lot of American history and a lot of Southern history, and it’s time to put that to rest and understand how deeply interrelated America and the South is, and how much the two have always resembled each other,” says Larry Griffin, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of “The South as an American Problem.” “For decades and decades, the South’s legacy has been the basic trope that permitted white Americans [to excuse] themselves from all racial guilt and project it to the American South.”
A group of historians – including Mr. Sokol and the University of Michigan’s Matt Lassiter – are revisiting how the North and South diverged after the Civil War. One of Mr. Lassiter’s findings is that Northern segregation happened largely by the same kind of government decrees that enshrined segregation in the South.
“The North has been a freer place, in some ways a better place [for blacks], but on the level of spatial segregation, structural inequalities, and poverty, [the North] is no better than the South and is, in many cases, worse,” says Sokol.
Sociologist James Loewen has also tackled this subject in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Loewen found that in the North between 1890 and 1940, blacks were forced out of many communities, often by informal “sundown laws” that required them to be out of a community by sundown or suffer the consequences.
An interesting article in a country that has difficulty discussing race and dealing with the consequences of a racialized society.
Calculating how much transportation, and driving, costs
A new website, Abogo, offers an estimate of how much transportation costs you per month based on your address. While the estimates for driving a car may seem high, it is a reminder of how much it actually costs to maintain, insure, and drive a car. The website uses a methodology that suggests even the cheapest car, a sub-compact, costs $3,606 a year based on driving 14,000 miles (see page 7 of this pdf).
On top of the personal costs, driving has a lot of other costs including building and maintaining roads, pollution, sprawl, and time lost to congestion and traffic. Of course, it has benefits as well including freedom and privacy.
While most Americans have clearly chosen the car as the transportation of choice, we should not forget that it is a rather costly choice.
Masculinity throughout American history
Newsweek provides a photo overview of changing ideals of masculinity throughout American history. The gallery is based on the work of sociologist Michael Kimmel and his 2005 book Manhood in America: A Cultural History. According to the gallery, we are now in the era of “The New Macho (2000s-2010s)”:
Beta Males–younger guys who treat masculinity as a winking, ironic act–are probably the most noticeable variation on masculinity today, but this piece is about the future, a time when, weirdly, Brad Pitt looks a lot like the New Macho, at least from a parenting perspective. He and his wife (Angelina Jolie) are co-breadwinners, alternating movies while the other one parents the brood. Nannies help, of course, but earlier this year, when asked to explain how she balances work and family, Jolie credited Brad as “the word that makes it possible.”
It is interesting to trace how the ideal has changed over time and how it has been influenced by larger social forces.
The importance of having meaningful work
Recent research suggests that the satisfaction individuals derive from work is not based just on a paycheck but rather on the meaning found in even doing menial tasks:
In several recent studies, social scientists have zeroed in on why paychecks alone can’t explain the link between work and well-being. The evidence shows that people can find meaning in seemingly insignificant jobs and that even trivial tasks make us far happier than no tasks at all.
“We become very dedicated to things it would be hard to be dedicated to if we were perfectly rational,” says behavioral scientist Dan Ariely, author of “The Upside of Irrationality,” published in June. “It turns out you can give people lots of meaning in lots of ways, even small ones.”…
The findings suggest that, although people often yield to idleness, deep down they seek excuses to stay busy, because busyness is happiness. However much Sisyphus rued his meaningless job, the authors conclude, he would have been even more miserable with no job at all.
Interesting findings that would have profound implications for the workplace.
Some quick questions:
1. Do these researchers argue that these benefits of working are linked to human nature or is it a conditioned response based on culture and other factors?
2. What are the long-term consequences of people having no work? If work is meaningful, what happens if people cannot work for different reasons (health, unemployment, other possibilities)?
3. How many workplaces (or what percentage) explicitly talk to employees about the meaningfulness of their individual work?
Fantasy football in the classroom
Fantasy football is not just for adults or for recreation. Some teachers are now using it in the classroom to help teach math:
Empirical data show that classroom fantasy-sports programs help improve grades and test scores.
In a 2009 survey of middle and high school students by the University of Mississippi, 56 percent of boys and 45 percent of girls said they learned math easier because they played fantasy sports in class. And 33 percent of boys and 28 percent of girls said their grades improved.
This sounds like a fun way to learn math. And the story suggests that whole families got involved with the process and helped the children decide whom to draft and how to score.
On another front: will everyone will be playing fantasy football in the future?
Listing the “coolest suburbs worth a visit”
Critiques of suburbs have often included the charge that they are boring. But perhaps this stereotype is cracking: Travel+Leisure provides a list of the “coolest suburbs worth a visit.” A few things seem to unite these communities: they have “cool” cultural attractions (and some have drawn the attention of celebrities) and have a uniqueness or character that sets them apart from the “typical” suburb.
While I don’t suspect that suburban tourism will soon explode, this is a reminder that there is a lot of interesting things to see and do in suburbs. And if more and more visitors and tourists do head to the suburbs, I’m sure the communities will be happy to see them.
Palin prompts questions about what feminism actually is
The OnFaith blog at the Washington Post looks at the debate between Sarah Palin and feminists about whether Palin can actually call herself a feminist.
