Tag Archives: academic disciplines

Books that influenced sociologists to pursue sociology

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Sociologist and psychologist Sherry Turkle discusses some of the books that most influenced her:

BOOKS: Which books had the biggest effect on you?

TURKLE: Jean Piaget’s “The Child’s Conception of the World,” Freud’s “The Uncanny,” Claude Levi-Strauss’s “The Savage Mind.” Getting into those books got me into this notion that we love the objects we think with, and we think with the objects we love. That became my life’s work.

BOOKS: Any other pivotal book?

TURKLE: I think the most influential book for me was “The Lonely Crowd” by David Riesman. I read that in high school. I said to myself I want to be the sort of person who could write a book like that. So I decided to study sociology and psychology. In fact, he became my mentor.

Given that Turkle was trained as a sociologist and psychologist (she did both together: “Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.”), these books don’t look so surprising. But, would we have known this when Turkle was in college or younger? Or were these the books that she found at an academic level that then influenced her later research and writing? It would be interesting to see: (1) what books a number of other sociologists would cite as influential and (2) whether these texts line up with the books and articles cited the most in the discipline.

Additionally, The Lonely Crowd has had an outsized effect on studying the American suburbs. I admit that I have not read the whole thing though it sits on the shelf in my office. Its claims about conformity have been widely echoed by critics of the suburbs – while cities are often presented as the bastions of individuality and authenticity – even as the data behind the claims was somewhat thin.

More sociologists and other scholars advocating for marriage?

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There isn’t much data here presented to defend a trend but here is a brief look at recent research that highlights the benefits of marriage in the United States:

The new wave of pro-marriage scholarship is challenging orthodoxy in academic fields with reputations — fair or not — of being politically liberal, and perhaps even antimarriage, or at least marriage-neutral. Part of the shift is because marriage itself has changed within the last few generations. “Criticism of marriage as a social institution comes from the universal and basically compulsory system of marriage in the 1950s,” said Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland at College Park who has been critical of some recent scholarship promoting marriage. “When people got married who did not want to get married, especially women, and when women’s rights within marriage were much more limited, employment opportunities much less, domestic violence taken much less seriously, when rape wasn’t even a crime within marriage — that system deservedly had a bad rap.”

The new champions of marriage disagree on how, and even whether, to encourage marriage through public policy. Nonetheless, there is an emerging consensus around an idea that would have sounded retrograde just a few decades ago: that having married parents is best for children’s well-being, that marriage is beneficial for parents’ psychological and economic stability, and that it should be a priority in public policy…

It’s low-education (and often low-income) “fragile families” that most concern researchers. Princeton University sociologist Sara McLanahan recently wrote that children growing up with a single mother are “doubly disadvantaged”: They spend less time and receive less money from their biological fathers, and their mothers are also likelier to earn less than married mothers are. Children born to unmarried parents fare worse on a wide variety of measures, including an increased likelihood of developing behavior problems and of not making it to college…

Single people aren’t resisting matrimony because of some sort of moral weakness or stubbornness, these critics say, but because they have existing disadvantages, including economic ones. “The people who get and stay married — and make it look like married people are better off than people who aren’t married — were better off already,” Cohen said. “Marriage is a privileged position.” Simply prodding the currently unmarried into matrimony will not magically make them more stable, healthy, and wealthy.

As the article notes, scholars on different sides of the political spectrum disagree on what policies to enact to promote marriage and have different definitions of what marriage should be. But, could the two sides ever come together to promote a middle policy or in order to broker a compromise? If anything, it might be the pressure within each academic discipline that keeps the sides apart.

Errors committed by surgeons, plagiarism, and disciplinary errors

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Megan McArdle highlights the work of a sociologist who studied the categories of errors made by surgeons and then connects those findings to plagiarism in journalism:

For my book on failure, I thought a lot about what constitutes failure. One of the most interesting interviews I did was with Charles Bosk, a sociologist who has spent his career studying medical errors. Bosk did his first work with surgical residents, and his book divides the errors into different categories: technical errors (failures of skill or knowledge), judgment errors (failing to make the right decision in a difficult case), and normative errors. The last category includes not being prepared to discuss every facet of your patient’s case, and interestingly, trying to cover up one of the other kinds of error.

Surgeons, he said, view the first two kinds of errors as acceptable, indeed inevitable, during residency. You learn to do surgery by doing surgery, and in the early days, you’re going to make some mistakes. Of course, if you just can’t seem to acquire the manual skills needed to do surgery, then you may have to leave the program for another branch of medicine, but some level of technical and judgment error is expected from everyone. Normative error is different; it immediately raises the suspicion that you shouldn’t be a surgeon…

Plagiarism might actually fall into Bosk’s fourth category of error, the one I find most interesting: quasi-normative error. That’s when a resident does something that might be acceptable under the supervision of a different attending physician, but is forbidden by the attending physician he reports to. In the program he studied, if your attending physician did a procedure one way, that’s the way you had to do it, even if you thought some other surgeon’s way was better.

In other words, quasi-normative error is contextual. So with plagiarism. In college and in journalism, it’s absolutely wrong, because “don’t plagiarize” is — for good reason — in your job description. In most of the rest of corporate America, lifting copy from somewhere else might be illegal if the material is copyrighted, but in many situations, maybe even most situations, no one, including the folks from whom you are lifting the copy, will care. They certainly won’t care if you “self-plagiarize” (as Jonah Lehrer was also accused of doing), and I’m very thankful for that, because I wrote a lot of proposals for my company, and there are only so many original ways to describe a computer network. Yet I’d never copy and paste my own writing for Bloomberg without a link, a block quote and attribution.

All errors are not created equal yet I suspect all professional and academic fields could come up with similar lists. The third and fourth types of errors above seemed to be related to professional boundaries; how exactly are surgeons supposed to act, whether when in surgery or not? The first two are more linked to surgery themselves: could you make the right decision and execute the decision? Somewhat frustratingly, some of the same language might be used across fields yet be defined differently. Plagiarism in journalism will look different than it does it academic settings where the practice McArdle describes of “re-researching” a story and not making any attributions to the original researcher would not be good in a peer-reviewed article.

Cantor’s victorious opponent, an economics professor, to face off against Democrat sociologist professor

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The academic disciplines of sociology and economics don’t always get along so it will be interesting to watch an economics and sociology professor square off in Virginia’s 7th district:

In sociology, education is often championed as the best path to a vibrant society—an idea Trammell clearly subscribes to. He is running on a platform of college access, student-loan forgiveness, and special-education reform. In 2012, Trammell published a book, The Richmond Slave Trade: The Economic Backbone of the Old Dominion. (More recently, he has planned to write a vampire novel.) Trammell’s ancestor, Thomas Trammell, was an indentured servant when he arrived in Fairfax in 1671.

Brat joined the faculty at Randolph-Macon in 1996 after receiving his Ph.D. in economics at American University. Since then, he’s taught classes on micro- and macroeconomics, public finance, and business ethics. And he coauthored a paper titled, “An Analysis of the Moral Foundations in Ayn Rand”. Back in January, Brat told the National Review that while he doesn’t consider himself a Randian, “he has been influenced by Atlas Shrugged and appreciates Rand’s case for human freedom and free markets.”…

The idea of a Republican economics professor facing off against a Democratic sociology professor presents a near-perfect microcosm of American political thought. What matters most in governance—the good of the market or the good of society? Should government serve to keep the free market as uninhibited as possible, or to impose checks on the market to protect citizens? Is education or entrepreneurship a more important path to individual and collective success? These are questions ripe for a Poli-Sci 101 discussion.

Perhaps a bit overstated (the next, and last, paragraph of the story goes on to tell who has the highest score at RateMyProfessor.com) but it sounds like the two have different perspectives on the world.  Given their disciplines, it could be easy to caricature the two sides without seeing what exactly the points of agreement and disagreement are between the two candidates. Is it easy to argue its education versus free markets or would voters generally support both? It is not immediately clear how much voters care much about this academic food fight –  both candidates are PhDs after all.

If you are curious, here are the demographics of Virginia’s 7th House District which skews Republican and more white, educated, and wealthy than American averages.

According to the United States Census Bureau’s 2010 data for the 111th Congress, the total population of the district is 757,917. Median age for the district is 39.2 years. 74.3% of the district is White, 17.1% Black, 3.9% Asian, 0.3% Native American or Alaskan, and 2.1% some other race with 4.9% Hispanic or Latino. Owner-occupied housing is 72.0% and renter-occupied housing is 28.0%. The median value of single-family owner-occupied homes is $188,400. 88.1% of the district population has at least a high school diploma, 36.7% at least a bachelor’s degree or higher. 9.9% of the district are civilian veterans. 12.7% are foreign born and 20.1% speak a language other than English at home. 9.9% are of disability status. 68.2% of the district is in the labor force, which consists of those 16 years and older. Mean travel time to work is 26.2 minutes. Median household income is $64,751. Per capita income is $33,628. 5.3% of the population account for families living below the poverty level, and 7.6% of individuals live below the poverty level.

So perhaps the sociologist, compared to an economist, starts at a disadvantage.

Analyze big data better when computer scientists and social scientists share knowledge

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Part of the “big-data struggle” is to have more computer scientists interacting with social scientists:

The emerging problems highlight another challenge: bridging the “Grand Canyon,” as Mr. Lazer calls it, between “social scientists who aren’t computationally talented and computer scientists who aren’t social-scientifically talented.” As universities are set up now, he says, “it would be very weird” for a computer scientist to teach courses to social-science doctoral students, or for a social scientist to teach research methods to information-science students. Both, he says, should be happening.

Both groups could learn quite a bit from each other. Arguably, programming skills would be very useful in a lot of disciplines in a world gaga over technology, apps, and big data. Arguably, more rigorous methodologies to find and interpret patterns are needed across a wide range of disciplines interested in human behavior and social interaction. Somebody has to be doing this already, perhaps even within individuals who have training to both areas. But, joining the two academic bodies together on a more formal and institutionalized basis could take quite a bit of work.

How much do academics cite work in another discipline?

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Sociologist Jerry Jacobs has a new book about the value of specific academic disciplines and presents this data regarding how much academics cite work outside their field:

“Interdisciplinarity depends on strong disciplines,” he said.

He said he became interested in the topic while serving as editor of American Sociological Review. He wanted to see if the articles in that journal were showing up as citations in the work of non-sociologists, and found that they were, leading him to question the idea that disciplines don’t communicate with one another. Using National Science Foundation data, he looked at where science journals are cited, and found that a “substantial minority” of citations come in other fields.

Citation Outside of Disciplines

Discipline % of Citations From Outside Field
Physics 18.3%
Chemistry 31.0%
Earth and space sciences 16.8%
Mathematics 22.6%
Biology 38.3%
Biomedical research 24.6%
Clinical medicine 28.6%
Engineering and technology 38.1%
Psychology 34.5%
Social sciences 22.7%

Jacobs then analyzes the various social sciences, and finds that scholars in the interdisciplinary field of area studies are more likely to cite non-area studies work than their own fields, while economics scholars are mostly likely to cite their own field. “These data on cross-field citations raise an important question for advocates of interdisciplinarity, namely whether the fields that are most open to external ideas are also the most intellectually dynamic,” Jacobs writes. “If this were true, area studies would be the envy of the social sciences, and economists would be busy trying to figure out how best to emulate the success of areas studies scholars. In fact, the reverse is true: economics is the most influential field in the social sciences, and it is also the most inwardly focused.”

While interdisciplinary is a hot topic, it is nice to see some data on the topic. How much should scholars cite those outside their disciplines? Jacobs suggests here that he thinks 20-30% of citations outside of one’s field is a good total – roughly one-fifth to one-third of citations. Should this be higher? Who gets to set these guidelines? The table also suggests this can vary quite a bit across disciplines.

I’ve noticed in my own research that certain topics in sociology lend themselves to more interdisciplinary citations, particularly for certain subject matter and new areas of study. I study within the subfields of urban sociology and the sociology of culture, subjects with plenty of sociologists but also plenty of interest in other disciplines. Some of my recent projects have been more historical, meaning I’m interacting more with historians, and about the media, meaning I’m interacting with work in media studies, communication, English, and elsewhere. Also, studying less-studied topics means one has to go further afield to understand what all of academia has said. In my work with McMansions, I’ve found that sociologists haven’t said much so I’ve worked with sources in history, planning, law, and housing (a rather interdisciplinary field).

Sociology departments “holding steady” across American colleges

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Inside Higher Ed summarizes a new report from the American Sociological Association on the state of sociology departments across the country. A few highlights:

“We’re doing relatively well,” said Roberta Spalter-Roth, director of research and development for the ASA. “We aren’t doing as well as we would like to be, but we’re doing relatively well compared to other disciplines,” such as physics and foreign languages, which have seen widespread closures in recent years…

One noticeable finding is that bigger sociology departments actually have decreased their employment of adjunct faculty, bucking a long-term, national trend toward hiring more adjuncts across disciplines. That probably accounts for the fact that tenure-line faculty workloads at those kinds of institutions have gone up, Spalter-Roth said. She called the latter trend “problematic.”…

There also was a slight “graying” of the faculty, the survey notes, with the most growth in the associate professor ranks. In 2001-2, departments had, on average: three full professors; two associate professors, and two assistant professors. In 2011-12, they had: 3.7 full professors, three associate professors; and 2.6 assistant professors. The study calls the distribution pattern an “inverted triangle,” with more full professors than assistant professors…

Spalter-Roth said the data was mostly for internal use to report on the data-driven profession, but would also be available to individual departments to report back to their institutions. The association usually surveys departments on different matters every five years, she said.

See the full report here.

It is too bad there aren’t similar figures from other disciplines to compare to. Without good comparisons, the ASA can only compare to ten years ago and not assess the relative movements among disciplines. Isn’t that probably what sociologists really want to know?

It is a little amusing that the ASA collects such data and produces a number of reports on things like mismatches between graduate student subject area interests and jobss and the state of jobs in the discipline. Should we expect much different from a data-driven discipline? At the same time, shouldn’t other disciplines collect similar data to better serve their members? I don’t know what kind of personnel or offices are required to pull off such research but I assume there is some added value to collecting it and distributing the results.

Social psychologist on quest to find researchers who falsify data

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The latest Atlantic magazine includes a short piece about a social psychologist who is out to catch other researchers who falsify data. Here is part of the story:

Simonsohn initially targeted not flagrant dishonesty, but loose methodology. In a paper called “False-Positive Psychology,” published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science, he and two colleagues—Leif Nelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Wharton’s Joseph Simmons—showed that psychologists could all but guarantee an interesting research finding if they were creative enough with their statistics and procedures.

The three social psychologists set up a test experiment, then played by current academic methodologies and widely permissible statistical rules. By going on what amounted to a fishing expedition (that is, by recording many, many variables but reporting only the results that came out to their liking); by failing to establish in advance the number of human subjects in an experiment; and by analyzing the data as they went, so they could end the experiment when the results suited them, they produced a howler of a result, a truly absurd finding. They then ran a series of computer simulations using other experimental data to show that these methods could increase the odds of a false-positive result—a statistical fluke, basically—to nearly two-thirds.

Just as Simonsohn was thinking about how to follow up on the paper, he came across an article that seemed too good to be true. In it, Lawrence Sanna, a professor who’d recently moved from the University of North Carolina to the University of Michigan, claimed to have found that people with a physically high vantage point—a concert stage instead of an orchestra pit—feel and act more “pro-socially.” (He measured sociability partly by, of all things, someone’s willingness to force fellow research subjects to consume painfully spicy hot sauce.) The size of the effect Sanna reported was “out-of-this-world strong, gravity strong—just super-strong,” Simonsohn told me over Chinese food (heavy on the hot sauce) at a restaurant around the corner from his office. As he read the paper, something else struck him, too: the data didn’t seem to vary as widely as you’d expect real-world results to. Imagine a study that calculated male height: if the average man were 5-foot?10, you wouldn’t expect that in every group of male subjects, the average man would always be precisely 5-foot-10. Yet this was exactly the sort of unlikely pattern Simonsohn detected in Sanna’s data…

Simonsohn stressed that there’s a world of difference between data techniques that generate false positives, and fraud, but he said some academic psychologists have, until recently, been dangerously indifferent to both. Outright fraud is probably rare. Data manipulation is undoubtedly more common—and surely extends to other subjects dependent on statistical study, including biomedicine. Worse, sloppy statistics are “like steroids in baseball”: Throughout the affected fields, researchers who are too intellectually honest to use these tricks will publish less, and may perish. Meanwhile, the less fastidious flourish.

The current research may just provide incentives for researchers to cut corners and end up with false results. Publishing is incredibly important for the career of an academic and there is little systematic oversight of a researcher’s data. I’ve written before about ways that data could be made more open but it would take some work to put these ideas into practice.

What I wouldn’t want to happen is have people read a story like this and conclude that fields like social psychology have nothing to offer because who knows how many of the studies might be flawed. I also wonder about the vigilante edge to this story – it makes a journalistic piece to tell about a social psychologist who is battling his own field but this isn’t how science should work. Simonsohn should be joined by others who should also be concerned by these potential issues. Of course, there may not be many incentives to pursue this work as it might invite criticism from inside and outside the discipline.

Sociologists lost their public voice because of increasingly liberal political views?

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Sociologist Stephen P. Turner makes a historical argument about how American sociologists lost their public voice. Here is the abstract:

Sociology once debated ‘the social’ and did so with a public readership. Even as late as the Second World War, sociologists commanded a wide public on questions about the nature of society, altruism and the direction of social evolution. As a result of several waves of professionalization, however, these issues have vanished from academic sociology and from the public writings of sociologists. From the 1960s onwards sociologists instead wrote for the public by supporting social movements. Discussion within sociology became constrained both by ‘professional’ expectations and political taboos. Yet the original motivating concerns of sociology and its public, such as the compatibility of socialism and Darwinism, the nature of society, and the process of social evolution, did not cease to be of public interest. With sociologists showing little interest in satisfying the demand, it was met by non-sociologists, with the result that sociology lost both its intellectual public, as distinct from affinity groups, and its claim on these topics.

And here is another paragraph excerpt with some interpretation as reported on a Smithsonian blog:

Basically, he’s wondering: what happened to sociologists? When did they give up questions of human nature, altruism, society? Well, Turner argues that a big problem is that sociologists started getting political. “It is evident that many of the most enthusiastic adherents of the new model of professionalization in the United States had roots in the left, and not infrequently in the Communist Party itself.” And that political slant limited the types of questions sociologists were allowed to ask. He writes:

“Sociology was once a place where intellectuals found freedom: Giddings, Sorokin, Alfred Schutz and many others who could have pursued careers in their original fields chose sociology because of this freedom. To some extent sociology still welcomes outsiders, though now it is likely to be outsiders with ties to the Women’s Movement. … But in general, the freedom of the past is in the past.”

Turner’s basic point is that sociology is now a joke because every sociologist is a liberal. That’s not untrue: over 85 percent of the members of the American Sociological Association (ASA) vote for either the Democratic or Green parties. One survey found the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the ASA to be 47 to 1. Now, whether or not sociology is joked about because its researchers political leanings is another question. But that’s the argument Turner seems to be making here.

I wonder if social psychologist Jonathan Haidt would agree with this assessment in light of his look at the political leanings of the field of social psychology.

If sociology gave up this freedom, what other fields filled in academic vacuum? If I had to guess, economics generally provided some room for conservatives. Does this mean that some bright academic stars that once might have gone to sociology have instead pursued other fields?

Faculty advice column: for the “average student,” sociology might not be most practical way to get a job

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Choosing a college major is definitely a charged subject today, particularly when discussing potential earnings. Here is some interesting advice given by a faculty member to an undergraduate interested in sociology:

Anonymous asks, “I’m an undecided freshman. My parents want me to choose a ‘practical major’ like engineering, but I think I would be more passionate about a sociology major. Should I study what my parents want me to study, or should I do what I want?”

Hmmm. You should choose sociology! Or any CHASS major! (Just kidding, sort of, I need to make up for last time.) Honestly, in this current job and economic climate I think it would be foolish to not at least strongly consider the employment prospects of one’s chosen major. That said, employment means doing something at least 40 hours/week for many, many years. The last thing you want to do is choose an area which will be drudgery instead of fulfillment. While engineering is particularly practical for the current job market, that does not mean sociology (or any other major) is impractical. As I mentioned in an earlier column, social sciences are great for developing critical thinking skills and good writing skills. These are most definitely highly-valued skills by many employers.

That said, if you choose a more passion-based major, you really need to invest your passion in it because it probably will not be as easy to find a job as if you had a mechanical engineering degree. Don’t take classes because you were told they were easy. Take them because they have a great professor who will challenge you to think and learn in new ways. Don’t shy away from the classes with 20 page papers — take them and hone your writing skills. Be proactive in working with faculty, researching with faculty, and in building relationships. Work with a local non-profit or government agency that fills your passion and build your job-market skills.

For the average student, sociology may not be as practical as a degree with a more obvious and direct pipeline to employment, but if you put your heart into it, develop your skills, abilities and maturity, you will come out just as employable — if not more so — than if you chose a practical major to which you found you could not truly dedicate yourself.

These are common ideas: certain majors lead more easily to jobs while sociology and other social science majors don’t lead as easily to jobs but students majoring in them can gain valuable skills that employers want.

However, the last paragraph is key here: the suggestion is that sociology students should be more dedicated to their major/field because they will have to overcome the difference in practicality compared to other majors. This is interesting because sociology is often considered an easier major. But, this professor suggests sociology majors should be even more interested and devoted to the major to be able to compete on the job market. Does this mean sociology majors should be higher caliber students?