Category Archives: Sociology

The ill effects on men of competing for a spouse

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A study in the August issue of Demography found “guys who lived in areas where there was more competition for women wound up dying younger.” The findings were based on data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (a fantastic data source: “a long-term study of a random sample of 10,317 men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957“) and Medicare and Social Security records.

According to the authors, there are multiple reasons why this might occur:

Perhaps the increased competition to find a wife made them feel more stress, which can have negative consequences for long-term health.

The men might have had to wait longer to get married, which could be bad for their health. A number of studies have shown that spouses (especially wives) play a role in contributing to one another’s health and survival.

In places where men outnumbered women, the men (on average) had to settle for what the researchers described as a “lower-quality spouse,” which could translate into less coddling and pampering from the wife and thus worse health.

This study is part of a growing body of research that suggest social factors, like the weight of our friends, have a profound influence on our well-being and lifespan.

Also: will the calculators of RealAge add this to their formula?

Determining the best colleges…using RateMyProfessor.com?

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Forbes recent published another installment of their rankings of the best colleges in America. One of the question that arises with such a list is the methodology behind the rankings. To their credit, Forbes provides a lengthy explanation.

Even as the ranking is supposedly from the point of view of students, I initially had some questions about one of the major criteria which accounts for 17.5% of the score for a college: using student evaluations of professors at RateMyProfessor.com. At first, this sounded crazy to me – how representative is the data from RateMyProfessors.com and does it accurately reflect what is going on in the classroom?

Forbes sums up why they used this data:

In spite of some drawbacks of student evaluations of teaching, they apparently have value for the 86% of schools that have some sort of internal evaluation system. RMP ratings give similar results to these systems. Moreover, they are a measure of consumer preferences, which is what is critically important in rational consumer choice. When combined with the significant advantages of being uniform across different schools, not being subject to easy manipulation by schools, and being publicly available, RMP data is a preferred data source for information on student evaluations of teaching–it is the largest single uniform data set we know of student perceptions of the quality of their instruction.

To recap why these used data from RateMyProfessors.com:

1. RMP ratings are similar to evaluation scores gathered by colleges. There is some scholarly research to back this up.

2. RMP ratings are “a measure of consumer preference.” This is data generated voluntarily by students. If Forbes wants the students’ perspective, this website offers it. (Though it is still a question whether it is a representative measure – but point #1 may take care of that.)

3. RMP ratings are perhaps the only data source to answer the question of what students experience in the classroom. It may not be perfect data but it can be used as an approximation.

Overall, Forbes logic makes some sense: RateMyProfessor.com offers a unique dataset that when cleaned up (and they describe how they weighted and standardized the scores) offers some insights into the classroom experience.

However, I’m still leery of giving 17.5% of the total score over to RateMyProfessor.com evaluations. Perhaps the scholarly literature will continue to examine this website and determine the value of its ratings. And you can see that Forbes is tweaking their measurements: the 2009 methodology explanation has some differences and the RateMyProfessor.com score then counted for 25% of the total score (compared to 17.5% in the 2010 edition).

Shared religious activity enhances marital relationships

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New sociological research suggests that certain kinds of shared religious  practices among married couples leads to better relationships:

[F]or all groups, shared religious activity – attending church together and especially praying together – is linked to higher levels of relationship quality.

The findings were particularly significant for African-American couples (and to a lesser extent, Latinos), according to sociologist and co-author W. Bradford Wilcox:

“Without prayer, black couples would be doing significantly worse than white couples. This study shows that religion narrows the racial divide in relationship quality in America.”

But not all religion is beneficial for marriages:

Couples holding discordant religious beliefs and those with only one partner who attends religious services regularly tend to be less happy in their relationships, the researchers found.

The findings make sense: couples who share a religious perspective and activities benefit while those who don’t share perspectives or activities suffer. The most interesting finding seems to be that about African-American and Latinos benefiting from shared religious activity: the authors suggest such activity helps overcome stress minorities experience.

Deciding who is really rich

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As the American government considers changes to the tax brackets, James Surowiecki of the New Yorker says this involves an important question: how much money does one have to make to be rich?

While the administration has suggested being rich starts at $200,000 income per year, Surowiecki describes why it is not so simple:

Judging from surveys of how Americans describe themselves, most of the privileged don’t feel all that privileged. Why is that? One reason is the American mythology of middle-classness. Another is geography: in a place like Manhattan, where the average apartment sells for nine hundred thousand dollars, your money doesn’t go as far. And then there’s a larger truth about how wealth is getting concentrated in this country. As the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez have documented, people who earn a few hundred thousand dollars a year have done much worse than people at the very top of the ladder.

Indeed, wealth and income is often relative: if you made $150,000 a year but lived in a neighborhood and mainly associated with people who made around $1,000,000 a year, you might feel poor. The same concept is used to describe various levels of poverty: the relative poverty of the United States versus the absolute poverty experienced in Third World nations. Americans are notorious for feeling like they are middle-class, even if they clearly are not.

At the same time, I find it slightly difficult to believe that $200,000 doesn’t make one rich. Of course, one has choices about how to spend that money. Making $200,000 in Manhattan is not the same as the making that money in Nebraska. However, it should cover all of one’s expenses. Those making over $200,000 are still part of a small and elite group: according to the Census Bureau, in 2006 3.5% of American households made over $200,000 a year.

Surowiecki suggests the solution is to create separate tax brackets for the rich and “super-rich.” If the tax rates are changed, this seems reasonable to me – though it complicates the tax code.

The attractiveness of professors

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The Chronicle of Higher Education takes a look at how the attractiveness of professors affects their career. Some of the highlights of the article:

Research shows that attractive people do better in life. They are treated better by teachers, doctors, even strangers, and are more likely to be hired and promoted than those who are less attractive. But in academe, being hot has a downside: Professors who are considered too good-looking can be cast by their peers as lightweights, known less for their productivity than for their pulchritude…

Although research shows that students give better teaching evaluations to professors they think are attractive, good looks can also be a burden in the classroom.

An interesting factor to keep in mind when assessing student evaluations.

Sociologist peeks behind the curtain of Vatican II

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Vatican II was a momentous movement in the modern history of the Catholic Church. However, how some of these decisions were made was not public knowledge.

Sociologist Melissa Wilde, with a team of researchers, obtained unprecedented access to Vatican II voting records in the Vatican Secret Archive. Their recent paper in American Sociological Review, “Religious Economy or Organizational Field? Predicting Bishops’ Votes at the Second Vatican Council” provides some answers about the voting patterns of the council. Some of the key findings:

They concluded that in places where the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed a stable monopoly as the state church, religious leaders were almost impervious to outside influence and opposed to most kinds of change. In areas in which Catholicism was not the established faith but where the religious field was stable, however, leaders of other religious institutions were a crucial source of influence on Catholic bishops who attended and voted at Vatican II.

Essentially, in places where the Catholic Church was not the state-supported religion, Catholic leaders were more willing to consider reforms that could make them more attractive in the religious marketplace. Or that is my quick interpretation based on this quick overview…I’ll need to read the complete article.

Interesting glimpse at unprecedented data.

Cathy coming to an end

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Cathy, the long-running comic strip, is coming to end in early October, as its creator, Cathy Guisewite wants to spend more time with her family. I’ll admit to often skipping this comic as I read the comic page in the Chicago Tribune – it often seemed too whiny and stereotypically feminine with a lot of talk about food, weight, and swimsuits.

But as I read the story about the close of the comic strip, I was reminded that Cathy is still a relative oddity on the comics page. There are still very few comics about female characters or strips drawn by females. While I would read these two strips, “For Better or For Worse” is retired and “Sally Forth” is not terribly popular (and not carried by the Tribune). Broom-Hilda doesn’t cut it (not really any content here) nor does Brenda Starr (a serialized strip that features an attractive star). ”

Cathy at least has a perspective about women that seems more real:

Critics have called “Cathy” anti-feminist, and while Guisewite didn’t reject that claim, she said certain stereotypes about women are the most fun to write about.

“The subjects like weight and style and look are these microcosms of all the extra expectations that are placed on women,” Guisewite said. “As women have become more powerful and stronger, it has become a lot more complicated for women to feel good about themselves. I like to think that ‘Cathy’ is the voice for women who can’t say, ‘I feel stupid about something silly, but it still really ruined my day.'”

Another commentator added:

Said John Glynn, 42, vice president of rights and acquisitions at Universal Uclick: “Cathy really broke a lot of ground in the ’70s. … She was talking about what a real woman goes through and the real-life concerns of women, and that I think was something very different for the comics section.”

So where are the comic strips by women or about women? A Zits-type strip about a teenage girl would have a lot of material to mine. Another comic strip about an adult woman, married or unmarried, could cover a lot of ground. Or are typical comic readers not interested in female leads?

Experiments in the social sciences

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Jim Manzi writes in City Journal about using experiments in the social sciences to help make decisions like whether the economic stimulus in the United States was successful. Manzi writes:

Another way of putting the problem is that we have no reliable way to measure counterfactuals—that is, to know what would have happened had we not executed some policy—because so many other factors influence the outcome. This seemingly narrow problem is central to our continuing inability to transform social sciences into actual sciences. Unlike physics or biology, the social sciences have not demonstrated the capacity to produce a substantial body of useful, nonobvious, and reliable predictive rules about what they study—that is, human social behavior, including the impact of proposed government programs.

Manzi provides an overview of experimentation and discusses using randomized field trials. An interesting look at how we know – and don’t know – about the social world.

Using undergraduates in research experiments

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It is common for research experiments to use undergraduates as subjects: they are a convenient and often willing sample pool for researchers. These studies then draw conclusions about human behavior based on undergraduate subjects.

In Newsweek, Sharon Begley writes about a new study that suggests American undergraduates are unlike many people in the world and therefore, it is difficult to make generalizations based on them.

Three psychology researchers have done a systematic search of experiments with subjects other than American undergrads, who made up two thirds of the subjects in all U.S. psych studies. From basics such as visual perception to behaviors and beliefs about fairness, cooperation, and the self, U.S. undergrads are totally unrepresentative, Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia and colleagues explain in a paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. They share responses with subjects from societies that are also Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD), but not with humanity at large.

One way around such issues is to replicate studies with different people groups. The article describes some of these attempts, such as with the ultimatum game where two people have to negotiate a split of $10. When done with different people, the studies produce different results, suggesting that what we might think is “human nature” is heavily culturally dependent.

Another possible outcome of this study is that researchers may continue to use undergraduates but would have to scale back on their ability to generalize about humanity as a whole.

Finally, this study is a reminder that “typical” behavior in one culture is not guaranteed to be the same in another culture. What we may think of as givens can be quite different with people who do not share our cultural assumptions and practices.

Walgreens and food deserts in Chicago

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Chicago Breaking Business reports that Walgreens is about to unveil expanded food offerings in a South Side store in Chicago. The expanded food line at 10 Walgreens stores is part of an effort to help combat the city’s food deserts:

The stores will offer more than 750 new food items such as fresh fruits and vegetables, frozen meat and fish, pasta, rice, beans, eggs and whole-grain cereals. The Deerfield-based drug store chain said it was approached by Mayor Richard Daley last year to bring more healthy food to areas that the city has identified as food deserts, namely neighborhoods that lack supermarkets.

Large American cities often struggle with this issue: low-income neighborhoods that have little or no access to fresh and healthy food. If the only options available are buying food from a convenient store or gas station, it is more expensive and less healthy. In the long run, this has consequences for building wealth and public health.