Category Archives: Sociology

Intergenerational conflict across countries

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LiveScience reports on a study of relationships between adult children and parents across six developed nations. According to the study:

American families were more than twice as likely as those living anywhere else to have so-called disharmonious relationships, or those defined by strong negative feelings, such as disagreement and tension, without any strong positive feelings, including feelings of closeness and amicability.

The authors suggested some of this conflict may come from welfare systems – if adult children feel they need to care for their parents and older parents need to ask for help, tensions may rise.

But the authors also note the differences in cultural values. This makes sense to me: American children, in particular, are taught from a relatively young age that they should be independent from their parents. While this is perhaps most obvious in the teenager and college years, it carries through into adulthood. American mobility probably plays a role (cell phone calls and Facebook relationships to cover the distance probably don’t carry the same weight) as families scatter over time.

Keeping the elderly in their hometowns

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The USA Today reports on efforts by communities to help the elderly grow old in their hometowns. These communities have built “villages” where services for the elderly are coordinated. According to the article:

More than 50 villages in a neighbor-helping-neighbor system have sprouted in the past decade from California and Colorado to Nebraska and Massachusetts. They are run largely by volunteers and funded by grants and membership fees to provide services from transportation and grocery delivery to home repairs and dog walking…

AARP research shows that 90% of people want to grow old in their home and community.

This would seem to be wise for communities: the elderly know many useful things about a community, have made many connections among residents, and can teach and mentor a younger generation. Communities and suburbs without elderly residents are missing a key piece of their own social fabric.

In the Chicago area, when suburbs talk about “affordable housing,” they are not always talking about housing for low-income residents. They are often referring to programs that would help the elderly remain in places where costs of living make it difficult for residents to live on limited incomes.

The diverging diamond interchange

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American interchanges can take many forms – see this field guide to highway interchanges from The Infrastructurist – including one called “the diverging diamond.” The goal is to provide better traffic flow from a road onto a highway through switching the lanes of traffic through the interchange area. That is, traffic entering on the right side of the road are then driving on the left through the interchange and vice versa.

Illinois Department of Transportation officials are considering this design, primarily being touted by Missouri officials, for an interchange in Naperville. See the design here and the background to the interchange here.

Cultural ideas about only children

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Time explores some of the cultural ideas Americans have about only children. These ideas date back to the late 1800s and are still common today.

Some of the recent research on this topic has been conducted by sociologists. Toni Falbo has countered some of the prevailing cultural ideas:

Twenty-five years ago, she and colleague Denise Polit conducted a meta-analysis of 115 studies of only children from 1925 onward that considered developmental outcomes of adjustment, character, sociability, achievement and intelligence. The studies, mainly from the U.S., cut across class and race. Generally, those studies showed that singletons aren’t measurably different from other kids — except that they, along with firstborns and people who have only one sibling, score higher in measures of intelligence and achievement. No one, Falbo says, has published research that can demonstrate any truth behind the stereotype of the only child as lonely, selfish and maladjusted.

People also have ideas about families that have too many children. Recent coverage and discussions of the Octomom and the Duggars (of 19 Kids & Counting) show there are powerful thoughts about not having too many children.

According to the article, a 2010 Pew survey showed 46% of American adults thought two children was the best number.

It’s fascinating to think that much decision-making about this is driven by economics. When families had farms and mortality rates were higher for children, families had more kids. Today, raising a child is expensive and life expectancy is higher so people have fewer kids.

The effects of decreased mobility

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Christianity Today explores the implications of decreased American mobility for churches. According to Census figures:

Despite commercial air travel, interstate highways, mobile phones, and e-mail, the mobility rate has declined steadily since the U.S. Census Bureau began tracking such data in 1948. In the aftermath of World War II, as suburbs began sprouting from farmland, a record 21.2 percent of Americans moved between 1950 and 1951. But only 13.2 percent of Americans moved between 2006 and 2007. Then in April 2009, the Census Bureau reported that a mere 11.9 percent of Americans moved in 2008. This rate was the lowest in recorded U.S. history, and the 1.3 percent drop between 2007 and 2008 was the second-largest one-year decline. The number rebounded only barely in 2009, to 12.5 percent.

Looks like people are staying put though 35 million Americans still moved in 2008. This also suggests the suburbs are no longer drawing people like they used to – perhaps the result of many Americans growing up in suburbia and then sticking around. Some of these suburbs (and their churches) will become established places and will have to move past an image of being “new” or “recent.”

I would think this mobility rate will increase when the economy picks up again.

A disappearing middle class?

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Yahoo Finance has a story that contains 22 statistics to “prove” the American middle class is “radically shrinking.” Interestingly, some of these statistics don’t prove much of anything about the middle class even if  they do indicate something about America as a whole. The post does show that the wealthy have gotten wealthier but without more context (statistics to compare to from the past, rates from other nations, etc.), there are better statistics to use to make this argument. Some of the statistics are linked to the latest economic downturn such as a rising number of bankruptcies and a rising time for finding a job.

Some examples of weaker statistics:

-“36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.” How does this compare to previous rates? Perhaps the Americans of today don’t save like people in the past?

-“More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.” Service jobs are often low paying – but we don’t know much more from this statistic.

-“For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.” Sounds bad – but since we now have more people in the country, a percentage would be a much better measure.

-“Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.” This is a shot at Wall Street more than an explanation about the middle class.

Other statistics do back up his point (even though they would all benefit from more explanation):

-“66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.”

-“Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.”

-“The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.”

On the whole, this seems more an alarmist piece. There is evidence to back up his argument – but the evidence here is not presented well and needs a lot more context.

Chicagoland residents prefer more spending on mass transit

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A new poll from the Chicago Tribune and WGN shows that more suburbanites would prefer to spend money on mass transit than on highways and roads. According to the poll:

Fifty-two percent of suburbanites said they agree with investing more of limited government resources in public transit, versus 32 percent who chose improvements to highways and toll roads. In a 1999 Tribune poll, 34 percent of suburban residents said more money should be spent on mass transit than on roads.

Even in the collar counties, half said public transit deserves a higher priority in spending decisions.

These are some surprising figures as suburbanites typically prefer road spending in their auto-dependent lives. How exactly this increased mass transit spending might happen is less clear with the state of Illinois facing a major budget crisis.

One citizen interviewed for the story mentioned adding “an around-Chicago rail line.” This would help improve rail service to the suburbs as the current Metra system is a hub-and-spoke model where travelers have to go into Chicago before heading back out. A plan for this has been in the works for a long time as the Star Line would use the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern right-of-way (just recently bought by Canadian National) to connect Joliet and O’Hare while crossing a number of Metra spoke lines. Read more about the Star Line here.

Being left off the guest list for the Clinton wedding

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The New York Times talks to some people left off the guest list for the Chelsea Clinton wedding. Those left off the list may want to be at the wedding to wish Chelsea well (and several do say this toward the bottom of the article) but there is another dynamic at work:

After all, Washington is a town that revolves around power and access to power, and Ms. Clinton’s wedding has inadvertently provided the chattering class with an imprecise — and, many say, inaccurate — measure of where they stand in Clintonworld.

This is a reminder that much of the adult world revolves around acquiring and defending one’s social status.

Ending summer vacation

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Time makes an argument for ending the typical American summer vacation from school. Numerous studies indicate that children lose ground during the summer and low-income students lose a lot of ground:

And what starts as a hiccup in a 6-year-old’s education can be a crisis by the time that child reaches high school. A major study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University concluded that while students made similar progress during the school year, regardless of economic status, the better-off kids held steady or continued to advance during the summer — while disadvantaged students fell back. By the end of grammar school, low-income students had fallen nearly three grade levels behind. By ninth grade, roughly two-thirds of the learning gap separating income groups could be blamed on summer learning loss.
The article also mentions the romanticism linked with summer vacation: trips, outdoor activity, freedom. This seems particularly crucial for American teenagerdom when teenagers get a first taste of being away from their parents. Even though I really liked school, I did enjoy summer vacation and all the options that were available to me (which not everyone has).
Would it be too difficult to split the summer vacation into two sections of about a month or a month and a half long? This seems like a reasonable compromise: some time off for everyone, shorter gaps for students to lose knowledge.

Swimming skills and race

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The Chicago Tribune reports on efforts to teach more minority children to swim. The reason is that minority children have fewer swimming abilities (70% of black children and 60% of Hispanic children have limited or no abilities compared to 40% for white children) and the drowning rate for 5 to 14 year olds is three times higher for blacks compared to whites.