Redistricting with “sociological integrity”

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Redistricting can often a contentious activity. But what if it is done with “sociological integrity”?

“Districts are ordered generally to maintain sociological integrity. Seward was happy paired with Homer and Seldovia as having the only outside deep water ports for the Kenai Peninsula,” Seaton said. “Now Seward is with Nikiski and Sterling – Homer with no other ports; Seldovia with Kodiak.”

A well-ordered voting district is one that generally has an amiable sociological mix that share economic and cultural ties to work toward common legislative goals. Nonetheless, Homer fares well with other Lower Kenai Peninsula communities like Ninilchik and Kasilof, and now the Russian village of Nikolaevsk, which formerly was represented in an entirely different district. The residents of Funny River Road may lack common issues and it “could take a while to develop that cohesiveness,” Seaton said. “It’s just different issues because they are looking at a main economic structure that is inland and revolves around the river. Not that there’s anything wrong with their new alignment, it’s just people will need to feel their way through and acclimate to working with different areas and different interests.”…

Since Alaska is one of the few states once found guilty of gerrymandering districts to favor issues or candidates, Alaska elections are overseen by the Federal Election Commission to ensure a strong voice for electing a minority candidate.

I like this term, “sociological integrity,” and think it has potential if it generally referred to positive social outcomes and plans drawn up from sociological principles.

Perhaps this is unique to Alaska, but this sounds like a different way of drawing up legislative districts: they should have a “amiable sociological mix that share economic and cultural ties to work toward common legislative goals.” What sounds different about this is that districts in other states are often drawn to collect a certain number of votes for a particular party. Those in charge of redistricting want to solidfy their own positions and reduce the ability of their competition to compete in districts. The definition from this article refers not to votes but rather a shared cultural and economic history as uniting voters. Perhaps party affiliations are tied to this (an example from the article above: perhaps deep water port communities are all on one side) but cultural and economic ties are also important as this is how residents and community leaders connect with each other more frequently.

Does any other state consider cultural ties when drawing up legislative boundaries or is it all just a naked grab for votes?

Using mapping to help students understand the racial dimension of their world

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A sociologist describes a mapping project that helps students connect their everyday experiences to larger racial patterns:

Theresa Suarez, an associate professor of sociology at San Marcos, has taught partially online courses on racial and ethnic identity for years. But Suarez found it was difficult to enable her students, many of whom are people of color, to connect the theoretical material she taught in class and their own narratives, she explained during a session here on Tuesday at the Emerging Technologies in Online Learning conference, hosted by MERLOT and the Sloan Consortium…

Suarez, who describes herself as late-adopter (her presentation here was a rare foray for her into teaching with PowerPoint) and an occasional techno-skeptic, resolved to find a technological solution that would not require a lot of complexity or jargon. So she turned to online software that uses geographic information systems to let students superimpose demographic data about race and ethnicity onto maps of their local communities.

Suarez instructed her students to place digital pushpins on places that shape their own experiences of where they live. “Where do you shop?” she said, by way of example. “Where do you surf? Where does your girlfriend or boyfriend live? What schools did you attend? Where do you work? Where don’t you go?”

The students then had to reflect, in essay form, on the points of reference marked by the pushpins, describing how each of those places plays a role in their identities — particularly in light of what they learned by seeing demographic data mapped on to their communities.

Perhaps this project is not all that innovative but I like it for several reasons:

1. This seems to be a microcosm of a sociological perspective: providing a structural context for our individual actions. This project would help students see how their daily activities and identities are shaped by demographic patterns, even if they hadn’t noticed them before. Instead of seeing these activities as individual choices, students can see how racial patterns influence their behavior.

2. Students can use their personal experiences as “data” and then work to provide sociological explanations.

3. These mapping abilities and software are fairly easy to obtain and they would be useful for future work.

4. I’ve always liked maps as they provide an overhead view of the world (just like sociology).

I’ve thought about doing some sort of mapping project in my Introduction to Sociology class and this may just be a good springboard.

Gangs in the suburbs

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Suburbanites often dream that they have escaped or avoided the problems of the big city. But some of these issues are no longer just big city problems: gangs have been in the suburbs for some time now.

Gangs, once a threat confined to city streets, began expanding outward two decades ago. Now, suburban and rural communities are the center of a significant and growing gang problem, according to the 2009 National Gang Threat Assessment report.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation found that nearly all communities surrounding Nashville have gang activity, including the traditional suburbs of Nashville, such as those around Hickory Hollow Mall, and small towns in Williamson, Rutherford, Sumner and Wilson counties.

These smaller, residential communities offer fresh territory for selling drugs and that increases the gang’s revenue.

“There’s money out in the suburbs,” said Mike Carlie, criminology and sociology professor at Missouri State University. “There are people in the suburbs that want drugs.”

Growing up in a suburb of Chicago, I can recall when local law enforcement and other officials started talking about gangs in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was something that people in the community weren’t completely prepared for and that threatened the idyllic suburban lifestyle.

I haven’t read much research about suburban gang activity, particularly beyond inner-ring suburbs and in more affluent communities. I would be interested to know how it affects average suburban residents and civic organizations: are they willing to combat the problem and deal with some larger social issues or would they prefer to throw the book at gang members or would they move to further out or more affluent suburbs that don’t have a perceived gang problem?

One of my favorite scenes from Gang Leader for a Day involved the gang leaders meeting at a large suburban house to talk business. While the gang business, mainly involving poor neighborhoods in Chicago, was taking place, their kids were swimming in the pool and acting out the suburban lifestyle. What did the neighbors think? Even a more realistic show like The Wire is set in a place where the public would expect gang activity: run-down areas of Baltimore. Why not put together another show that takes gangs to the suburbs?This would perhaps be too scary for many Americans to consider.

How neighborhood affluence affects heat wave deaths

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In describing which residents are more affected by heat waves, a newspaper piece cities a sociological study and misses the bigger picture by emphasizing whether there is a shopping district nearby:

People who live in areas without “inviting” businesses are more at risk of dying. A 2006 study published in the American Sociological Review looked at the 1995 heat wave in Chicago and found that mortality rates were higher in areas where businesses were not well tended and leaned toward the bar-and-liquor-store variety.

With fewer businesses that could coax the elderly and other at-risk residents out of their homes and into the safety of air-conditioning, death rates rise, the study authors found.

What is the lesson here: move to a neighborhood with well-kept stores in order to reduce one’s risk of dying in a heat wave? On the whole, it isn’t really the stores that matter: it is about the overall affluence of the neighborhood which then affects the stores. People living in neighborhood with fewer stores are also more likely to be in places with less resources and perhaps less social services. The newspaper is presenting some data without providing a deeper look at the underlying relationship between these two factors.

Then, perhaps fighting the effects of heat waves goes far beyond opening swimming pools and “cooling centers.” Even as many cities have developed plans to deal with heat waves, including Chicago which was hit hard by a 1995 heat wave, it is part of larger structural issues that dictate which neighborhoods have resources and which do not.

McMansions don’t represent progressive home design

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Here is a suggestion that McMansions are not in the best tradition of modern American architecture:

McMansions

In the past American design was modern and the emerging architectural vernacular reflected that, from the Farnsworth to LA’s Case Study houses (such as the one pictured above) or to Eichler’s industrialisation of modernism, for the masses.

But now this has been replaced by a new version of the old, from McMansions to Pottery barn, Victorian design represents regression in the form of aspiration to a pre-industrial age, America’s current design prudery is a form of technological regression that is so pervasive, we should be very thankful for the brilliant exceptions such as Apple.

In this critique, the McMansion is simply recycled architecture, an example of our “design prudery.” I will grant that McMansions may borrow from older designs and may even do a poor job of combining multiple styles.

But, I think there could be a larger argument made here: Americans have been fairly resistant to modernist home designs. The functional and simple ranch may be the most modern home most Americans would consider. (Was there a historical point where home design really took a great leap forward or where it took a great leap back?) Thinking in Bourieu’s terms, are Americans more concerned with the functionality of homes rather than their aesthetic value?

This quick description of McMansions also leaves out another element: home design is also about status for homebuyers and residents. Older or established styles can confer a sense of permanency, history, and grandeur. Do Americans not like more modern home designs because it paints them in a negative light by suggesting they are elitist or too individualistic?

“The most closely studied troublemakers in history”

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See this story for how a large study of Boston’s youths begun in 1939 sheds light on the recent arrest of mobster James “Whitey” Bulger:

It all began in 1939, when husband-and-wife researchers Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck assembled a team of investigators to go door to door through a number of poor Boston neighborhoods and collect data on boys who had grown up there. Their goal was to understand what causes some boys and not others to get involved with crime, a question which, as it happened, would be dramatically brought to life in the story of Whitey Bulger and his overachieving brother in the state Senate, William.

The Gluecks picked a sample of 1,000 boys, half of whom had stayed out of trouble while the other half had racked up records and gotten themselves locked up at one of two local reform schools, Lyman and Shirley. The boys were interviewed repeatedly – once when they were around 14, then again when they were 25 and 32 – as were their teachers, parents, and neighbors. Their world – Whitey’s world – was carefully documented, and their lives were charted as they grew from adolescents into adults…

The original researchers didn’t publish all of their data and several decades later, two criminologists dug into the data and interviewed some of the original participants. Here is what they found:

Their study earned Laub and Sampson accolades in their field for their insights into the nature of crime. But it also points to a few truths specifically about Boston, and the way the city shaped the Glueck boys while they grew into the Glueck men. It mattered a lot where these boys came from, Laub and Sampson concluded: The city had influenced them like no other city could have. Specifically, according to Sampson, it had made them cynical about authority.

All the poor neighborhoods in Boston were isolated to some degree in the 1940s: As Sampson and Laub discovered, kids who grew up in ethnic enclaves like Southie or the North End during that time did not identify with the city as a whole. Their lives were just too separate from everyone else’s, their daily routines too local. Plus, they knew the people who ran the show on Beacon Hill thought of their neighborhoods as slums, and they resented it.

This is an interesting piece as such large studies can offer a wealth of data and insights. This makes me wonder if other large datasets would benefit from teams of researchers later combing through the data to explore different areas and follow-up.

This is the sort of information that would help provide a broader context to Bulger’s case but I suspect the media will mainly stick to his mob background.

The ASA, the NRA, and St. Louis

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The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had a recent piece that included the American Sociological Association:

When more than 5,500 association executives hold their convention next month in St. Louis, it will give tourism officials a rare opportunity to pitch the city for future conventions.

From an economic development perspective, the gathering of the American Society of Association Executives, though modest in size, represents the mother of all conventions — because its attendees have the power to bring thousands more visitors to the city, along with millions in revenue, during future conventions. The visiting executives represent groups as diverse as the National Rifle Association, American Sociological Association and Electrical Apparatus Service Association, to name a few confirmed attendees…

Though St. Louis, like many Midwest cities, struggles to compete with tourism meccas such as Las Vegas, New Orleans or Orlando, conventions nonetheless brought about 350,000 people and about $370 million into the local economy last year. And those figures leave room for growth, according to officials with the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission, who plan to field a sales team to woo as many as 1,500 of the associations represented at the conference…

For people living on the coasts, “St. Louis is thrown into the mix of Midwest cities,” Ratcliffe said. “We need a differentiator.”

This raises some questions:

1. Might this be the only time that anyone from the ASA would even be in the same room as someone from the NRA? Or do these association executives interact more often?

1a. It is interesting that this newspaper selected the NRA, ASA, and Electrical Apparatus Service Association as three diverse organizations.

2. Why not hold ASA in St. Louis? And how exactly does the organization select which cities in which it will hold a conference? Here are the factors the ASA says it uses to select its meeting sites:

  • Sites where members are afforded legal protection from discrimination on the basis of age, gender, marital status, national origin, physical ability, race, religion, and sexual orientation
  • Meeting space–flexibility, accessibility, under one roof
  • Date options
  • Hotel contract provisions, particularly room rates
  • Facilities’ recycling, compostable, and sustainability initiatives
  • Extent of unionization at facilities to be used for meeting space and guest rooms
  • Air access/service and local transportation multiplicity
  • Restaurant proximity and diversity
  • General “city feel”
  • City/Convention Bureau assistance

I would be interested to know exactly how some of these are figured out. And is there an official list of cities that could be approved?

3. Here is a tidbit about the ASA and St. Louis:

Stryker joined ASA in 1948 when he was a graduate student. He attended his first annual meeting in 1950 in Denver, CO. This was when ASA meetings had a sit-down dinner for all attendees. In an interview, Stryker said the proudest he has felt of the ASA was when the Association threatened to cancel its annual meeting in St. Louis because the hotel refused to allow African-Americans to register. The hotel backed down, thus effectively desegregating St. Louis.

4. It is interesting that St. Louis is supposedly off the radar of a lot of associations. At one point, St. Louis was poised to become the main city in the Midwest, leading Chicago in population as late as 1870 and was still the 8th largest city in the US in 1950. Is it simply a population issue now or is it something else: is it not interesting enough, does it not have large enough facilities, is travel in and out not easy/cheap enough? I’m sure St. Louis is like many cities that would want to attract more conventions and bring more money into the local economy.

Moving away from academic journals and toward “Performative Social Science”

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Most sociologists aim to publish research in academic journals or books. One sociologist suggests a new venue for sharing research: creating fiction films.

Kip Jones hates PowerPoint presentations. He doesn’t care much for academic journals, either. An American-born sociologist, who teaches in the school of health and social care at Bournemouth University in England, Mr. Jones says that “the shame of research is that you spend a lot of money and the knowledge just disappears — or worse, ends up as an article in a scholarly journal.”

So when he was invited to participate in “The Gay and Pleasant Land” project — an investigation into the lives of older gay men and lesbians living in rural England and Wales — Mr. Jones decided that the best way to present the project’s findings to the public wasn’t by publishing the results or delivering a paper at a scholarly conference, but by making a short fiction film…

That’s what Mr. Jones is counting on. “Most of my own work is around developing a method — what’s known as Performative Social Science. I’ve worked with theater. I’ve worked with dancers,” he said. The idea is to combine serious scholarship and popular culture, using performance-based tools to present research outcomes.

Jones suggests that research is often forgotten and that is why he sought to make a film. This raises some questions:

1. Is a film more “permanent” than a research article or book? Without widespread distribution, I suspect the film is less permanent.

2. Is this really about reaching a bigger audience? Academics sometimes joke about how journal articles might reach a few hundred people in the world who care. A film could reach more people but it would need effective distribution or a number of showings for this to happen. This also requires work and how many academic films are actually able to reach a broad audience?

3. Can a film acceptably convey research results compared to a more data-driven paper? Both data-driven work and films need to tell a story and/or make an argument but they are different venues.

In the end, I don’t think we will have a sudden rush to make such films as opposed to writing more academic work. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more established researchers create films and documentaries to supplement their work. (See Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk disc which included a documentary.) Such films could reach a broader and younger audience, i.e., putting it in the Youtube world of today’s college students.

(Another note: can you find many academics who would actually defend the use of Powerpoint? It seems like an odd way to begin the story.)

New data for American debate over immigration

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The debate over immigration to the United States should incorporate some new data:

An important article in the New York Times reports that illegal Mexican migration to America has “sputtered to a trickle”. According to Douglass Massey, a professor of sociology who co-directs Princeton’s Mexican Migration Project, “a trickle” may overstate it:

“No one wants to hear it, but the flow has already stopped,” Mr. Massey said, referring to illegal traffic. “For the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative.”

Why? Lots of reasons. Ramped-up border policing and harsher treatment of undocumented Mexicans living in the US has probably had some effect. But, much more importantly, Mexico has become a better place to live. Here’s the Times:

Over the past 15 years, this country once defined by poverty and beaches has progressed politically and economically in ways rarely acknowledged by Americans debating immigration. Even far from the coasts or the manufacturing sector at the border, democracy is better established, incomes have generally risen and poverty has declined.

Read this data here and here.

As I read this piece, I was reminded that Americans seem to know very little about what is happening in nearby countries like Mexico or Canada. Most if not all of what I have heard in recent months about Mexico has to do with drug cartels and their violence. Do we not hear much because of American exceptionalism, narrow-mindedness, a lack of media attention, jingoism, or something else?

The piece also suggests that Americans would benefit by helping Mexico develop. I wonder if most Americans would buy into this logic or rather think that if Mexico improves, America loses (a zero-sum game). Would Americans even approve the Marshall Plan if it came up today?

The troubles with studying Facebook profiles at Harvard

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Many researchers would like to get their hands on SNS/Facebook profile data but one well-known dataset put together by Harvard researchers has come under fire:

But today the data-sharing venture has collapsed. The Facebook archive is more like plutonium than gold—its contents yanked offline, its future release uncertain, its creators scolded by some scholars for downloading the profiles without students’ knowledge and for failing to protect their privacy. Those students have been identified as Harvard College’s Class of 2009…

The Harvard sociologists argue that the data pulled from students’ Facebook profiles could lead to great scientific benefits, and that substantial efforts have been made to protect the students. Jason Kaufman, the project’s principal investigator and a research fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, points out that data were redacted to minimize the risk of identification. No student seems to have suffered any harm. Mr. Kaufman accuses his critics of acting like “academic paparazzi.”…

The Facebook project began to unravel in 2008, when a privacy scholar at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Michael Zimmer, showed that the “anonymous” data of Mr. Kaufman and his colleagues could be cracked to identify the source as Harvard undergraduates…

But that boon brings new pitfalls. Researchers must navigate the shifting privacy standards of social networks and their users. And the committees set up to protect research subjects—institutional review boards, or IRB’s—lack experience with Web-based research, Mr. Zimmer says. Most tend to focus on evaluating biomedical studies or traditional, survey-based social science. He has pointed to the Harvard case in urging the federal government to do more to educate IRB’s about Web research.

It sounds like academics, IRBs, and granting agencies still need to figure out acceptable standards for collecting such data. But I’m not surprised that the primary issue that arose had to do with identifying individual users and their profiles as this is a common issue when researchers ask for or collect personal information. Additionally, this dataset intersects with a lot of open concerns about Internet privacy. Perhaps some IRBs could take on the task of leading the way for academics and other researchers who want to get their hands on such data.

It is interesting that these concerns arose because of the growing interest in sharing datasets. The Harvard researchers and IRB allowed the research to take place so I wonder if all of this would have ever happened if the dataset didn’t have to be shared where others could then raise issues.

I understand that the researchers wanted to collect the profiles quietly but why not ask for permission? How many Harvard students would have turned them down? I think most college students are quite aware of what can happen with their profile data and they take care of the issue on the front end by making selections about what they display. The researchers could then offer some protections in terms of anonymity and who would have access to the data. Or what about having interviews with students who would then be asked to load their profile and walk the researcher through what they have put online and why it is there?