Tag Archives: media

Sociologist: Canadians and Americans are more alike than people might think

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A Canadian sociologist argues that Americans and Canadians are quite similar:

But experts suggest English Canadians — though the QMI Agency poll found we’re still divided whether stereotyping is widespread — are alike on most fronts.

In fact, so much so that most of us could blend in with our U.S. cousins, according to one scholar.

Ed Grabb, a professor in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Sociology, has begun a new course outlining how Canadians and Americans, while not identical, are more alike than most of us would have thought.

In fact, on things like attitudes toward health care, government and individuality, research has found we’re very similar.

Even differences in religion are shrinking. In 1991, Americans were 16% more likely than Canadians to take in a religious service at least once a week.

By 2006, that number had dropped to 11%.

While Grabb sees regional differences in both countries — during national elections, Quebec generally pulls Canada to the left just as the southern U.S. pulls that nation to the right — he’s also noticed a softening of old hackneyed chestnuts.

“I do think the Alberta redneck jibe is an endangered species,” Grabb said.

“I think that the assumption that all Ontarians are affluent is also going by the boards.

It would be interesting to see comparisons across the board: income, political and social views (both at home and abroad), religion, education, and consumer purchases and entertainment choices. Then, compare these to what Americans and Canadians think about each other. Why do I think Canadians would know way more about Americans than the other way around?

I also want to know how to explain this. Both the United States and Canada are settler colonies but we have different histories as Canada has had a different relationship with Great Britain in the last few centuries. Perhaps people might fall back on the frontier hypothesis since both countries pursued territorial expansion and span between two different (geographically and cultural) coasts. Perhaps today we tend to share a lot of media and cultural influences. For example, how many Americans care or would they have been able to tell without being told that Justin Bieber is Canadian. Perhaps our geopolitical position away from major international wars has led to similar ways of viewing the world. Perhaps the better way to differentiate between the countries is to refer to the “Jesusland” map where Canada joins with the East and West American coasts plus some of the Great Lakes states and red America is the south, great plains, and mountain west.

Why two media sources ranking the world’s wealthiest people is a good thing

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While Forbes had the corner on the market for years in compiling a ranking of the world’s richest people, there is now another option: this week Bloomberg released its Billionaires Index. One commentator thinks we don’t need both Forbes and Bloomberg examining this topic:

The Forbes list, available online today, is published every March. (Its companion, the “Forbes 400” list of richest Americans published in September.) It’s hard to not feel that Bloomberg’s outing takes some of the air out of Forbes usually-hyped cover story on who are the world’s richest people. This year’s edition proves unexciting not only because there were few shake-ups in the top spots from 2011’s list, but also because these rankings don’t appear all that different from Bloomberg’s.

Highlights from 2012’s version: With $69 billion, Mexico’s Carlos Slim Helu ranks No. 1 again for the third year in the row. (The magazine also profiled him.) Helu was followed by another 1,225 billionaires, starting with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Bernard Arnault (of Louis Vuitton fame), who were also two through four last year. But beside no one being knocked off the top of this year’s Forbes list, it’s markedly similar to how rich Bloomberg News told us these folks were. Here’s a side-by-side comparison, with Forbes on the left and Bloomberg on the right.

So there are slight differences. Bloomberg has Arnault one spot lower and places fashion mogul Amancio Ortega down to seventh. Bloomberg puts the Koch brothers in the top 10, whereas Forbes had them both pegged at 12th. But isn’t this hair-splitting? If anything, the discrepancies show how hard it is to measure rich people’s riches.

What today’s Forbes list shows more than anything is that we don’t need two billionaires lists reminding us how wealthy the wealthy are. If we had to choose one, we’d go with Bloomberg’s, since it’s updated daily instead of once a year. But we doubt that will stop Forbes from producing its longstanding annual issue as long folks keep buying it.

I disagree. Here is why: I think that having two media sources looking at this topic will actually give readers better information. With two publications tackling the subject, I hope this improves their measurement of wealth for both publications. Perhaps we could average the rankings across the publications to get a more accurate assessment of what is going on. In the end, two sets of people looking at the data is better than one. Because Bloomberg is updating this list daily, perhaps this will push Forbes to update their lists more frequently and move away from a magazine era schedule to an Internet era schedule. The two lists do have some differences and this is not inconsequential. Lots of people are interested in this list and I’m sure some of the people at the top of the list have some interest in where they rank. Of course, these differences can indicate “how hard it is to measure rich people’s riches” but this doesn’t mean we should just throw up our hands and go with one list. Just because these people are really wealthy doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have more fine-grained analysis of their financial holdings. (This sometimes seems to happen quite a bit in sociology: we assume we know about the elites and so spend more time studying marginalized groups but we have fewer in-depth studies of the elites who do have a lot of influence in society.)

A second issue: Bloomberg obviously thinks there is a market for another list that is updated daily and so this is a market decision as well as a journalistic interest in updating this information more frequently. The Forbes list always gets a lot of attention and Bloomberg probably wants to draw away some of that market. I imagine there is enough room in the market for both lists to survive, particularly as the two could serve different markets. However, it will be interesting to see how the rest of the media responds to changes in the Bloomberg list: if someone moves up from #3 to #2 in the next few days, will there be news stories about it? Will journalists providing background information about the wealthy reference the Forbes or the Bloomberg list?

Sociologist to journalists: “Racism: Not Isolated Incidents but Systemic”

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After several recent incidences in East Haven, Connecticut, a sociologist explains why racism is a systemic issue, not a matter of a few racist individuals:

As a sociology professor whose specialties include the study of racism, I am sometimes asked to explain what is happening following such a flurry of racist incidents. That question is based on the faulty assumptions that what is happening now is something new and that what occurred is no more than a disturbing accumulation of isolated incidents of racial bigotry committed by a few Neanderthals who didn’t get the memo that in today’s colorblind America we have moved past all that.

Social structures, racist, or otherwise, don’t just disappear or grow old and die. Consequently, when I get that “what is happening now?” query from the press, I feel like yawning as I mutter, “There you go again.” Lately I have advised reporters to connect the dots. I challenge them to, for once, abandon racism-evasive language such as “race” or “the race issue” and to call the thing what it is, racism, which is by its nature always systemic.

So far, to my knowledge, no reporter has taken my advice. Instead they tend to write stories that, if they even acknowledge a pattern of racist incidents, seem to attribute it to the bad economy, the coming of a full moon or perhaps some foul-smelling concoction that was secretly slipped into our drinking water. Then they go away for another few months; and when still more overtly racist stuff happens, they email again to ask me to explain, once more, what is happening, now.

Unfortunately that type of news reporting supports the dominant response to racism by European Americans — the militant denial of its existence or significance. A very successful racism denial tactic is to conveniently confuse the racial, bigoted attitudes and behaviors of some person of color with systemic racism as a way of suggesting that white racism is no more of a problem than is so-called black racism. On other occasions a person of color may be accused of being a racist for simply bringing up the issue of racism.

This is a message needed for more than just journalists.

I wonder if journalists are any better on this issue than average Americans. On the whole, Americans often privilege individualistic situations to social problems, race or otherwise. White Americans, in particular, would prefer to act like race doesn’t matter and claim that we should move on. I’ve noted before that the reverse should be true: Americans should have to show that race isn’t involved in social situations instead of suggesting it doesn’t matter until there is incontrovertible proof otherwise.

Is Charles Murray really a sociologist?

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I’ve seen a number of news stories about Charles Murray’s latest book and one thing caught my eye: the claim that Murray is a sociologist. (See examples from the Philadelphia Inquirer, BusinessWeek, and the National Catholic Reporter.) Is he really?

Murray’s page at his current scholarly home, the American Enterprise Institute, says he is a “political scientist, author, and libertarian.”

Wikipedia’s main entry for Murray clearly calls him a political scientist and records his PhD in political science but this list of sociologists includes Murray.

Perhaps the confusion comes from the fact that Murray is working with a lot of topics that are commonly covered by sociology such as race, social class, and family life. Even the New York Times describes his work as sociology:

Few people today would dismiss the idea that values, culture and intelligence all play a role in economic success. But it is hard to know what to make of some of Murray’s findings. As with David Brooks’s “Bobos in Paradise,”Murray’s sociology depends a lot on his own, sometimes highly idiosyncratic, fieldwork. To demonstrate that the elite are more likely to drive foreign cars than domestic ones, Murray notes the makes of automobiles in a couple of mall parking lots. In an otherwise persuasive chapter arguing that Ivy League graduates tend to live near one another, Murray quotes a remark by Michael Barone, the conservative commentator, complaining about the profusion of Harvard and Yale graduates on his former block. If Murray believes that wealthy yuppies suffer from creeping nonjudgmentalism, I invite him to spend an hour on UrbanBaby.com.

This quote suggests that Murray’s work is sociology because he is explaining sociological phenomena, not because he is working within the sociological tradition, utilizing sociological theories and methods, or even thinking like a typical sociologist. Practicing sociology (sometimes termed “pop sociology”) is quite different from being a sociologist. Is this simply lazy journalism or a bigger problem in that people don’t know how sociologists actually go about their work?

In a related question, how many sociologists would claim Murray is a sociologist? First, this could be tied to whether he is practicing good sociology. Second, this could be about whether he is espousing ideas that fit with sociological theories and data (and they generally don’t). How many sociologists would want to add libertarian as a descriptor of their image?

TMQ takes apart “police procedurals” (otherwise known as crime shows)

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After some analysis of the Super Bowl, Tuesday Morning Quarterback gets down to his real business of dissecting “police procedurals.” Here are some points I appreciated:

Television is swamped in police dramas. During a recent week, 14 of the 45 Big Three prime-time hours were crime shows. Except they no longer are called that — the genre is now “procedurals.” In theory this means the shows depict police procedure. In practice, being a procedural means a formula. Here it is…[a 15 point formula follows]

On TV, cops exist in constant jeopardy of life and limb. This, though “most police officers retire at the end of a 20- or 25-year career without ever having fired a weapon other than at the practice range.” Despite the bullets ricocheting around them, TV detectives are NEVER frightened. Most are spoiling to charge headlong into obvious danger…

But isn’t the violence realism? In the world of TV, murder and mayhem are an epidemic. Actually crime is in generation-long cycle of decline. Today, strollers are safer in Central Park after dark than in the 1950s. Last year, Central Park averaged slightly more than one robbery a month, versus two robberies a day a generation ago. Yet on procedurals, crime is getting worse. This plays to preconceived notions about the nation falling apart, especially such notions held by senior citizens, who watch a lot of television.And on procedurals, the police always catch the bad guy. Actually a significant number of homicides are never solved, while most burglaries never even lead to an arrest. Of course, procedurals are just Hollywood nonsense. But procedurals get it wrong both ways: making crime seem more common than it is, but also making crime seem never to pay.

Lots of good material here.

One might say that this doesn’t matter, people clearly know what is entertainment on television and they don’t mistake police shows for what actually happens. But I would argue that this is not the case: most people’s knowledge about police work and crime likely comes from the mass media, particularly depictions on television and in movies. Crime rates are going down yet one wouldn’t know it from its rising popularity on TV. Serial killers are uncommon except on television. Children are rarely abducted except on television. These shows and movies aim to trigger emotional reactions (as TMQ notes, the grisliness of the crimes is often shocking) and fearful responses.

A silly and yet illustrative example from my own life: where I hear news that someone was killed during the day, I have a hard time reconciling this with media images I’ve seen for years that murders tend to take place in stormy situations. While the storms in shows and movies might be more metaphorical than anything else, I have this idea in my head that this is when killing happens. I would guess there is not much data to back this up but this is an idea that has stuck with me even though it was never clearly expressed to me. Violent crime = bad weather.

If we expect citizens to be able to discuss and vote intelligently about important topics like crime and punishment (and have no doubt, we like to punish people), how can this happen if television is painting a heavily slanted story? I wouldn’t suggest that television needs to be completely realistic but at the same time, common images have a cultural power that is difficult to counteract.

Argument: “The SportsCenter-ization of Politics”

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This is a fascinating claim: political journalism today has adopted the genre of sports reporting/entertainment from ESPN. It all comes down to the entertainment of an emotional argument and who is “winning.”

Did this sharing of genres simply come about because ESPN has been successful? Or have ESPN staffers made a name with sports and then branched out into other areas?

Sociologist talks about the downside of choosing your own news

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A sociologist suggests you may be missing something by only choosing what news you want to read:

It’s in no sense odd to find American academe wrangling over journalism. Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review and Clay Shirky of New York University have recently been hammering away at each other, seeking to determine whether investigative journalism can only be conducted by highly resourced news machines (like the Guardian’s) or by a more individual, digital-first approach (like… um… the Guardian’s). But what’s sociology got to contribute here?

Plenty, Klinenberg says, outlining the fundamental bargain that underpins newspaper life. You, the reader, want crosswords and cartoons, recipes and TV programme guides. You want all the stuff that journalists serve up with a sigh (because, well, it’s not exactly journalism, is it?). And, in return, as part of the deal, journalism is allowed to have a civic purpose – to report and analyse the workings and frailties of democracy – beyond quick ways to whip up a cottage pie.

That bargain, sealed in print, means you can’t have one without the other. Put your cash on the newsagent’s counter and you get some things you desire and other things, from Cardiff or Chad, that you didn’t know had happened until you turned to page five.

Of course, like any other neat thesis, there are readers and editors who don’t quite fit. But the nature of print – flipping from column to column, noticing stories that intrigue you, naturally expanding your spheres of interest – isn’t “versioning” at all – it’s more eclectic. An iPad or Kindle version works within narrower bounds. A Facebook version is even more selective, tailored to your most immediate demands. And the logical version at the end of this line is utterly simple: no deals, no bargains – just what you want, electronically provided on the basis of past predilection.

This is part of a larger question about the consequences of people only being exposed to certain points of view. Only selecting news that we want to read can be self-reinforcing as then we only seek out certain kinds of stories, limiting our view of the world.

I wonder, though, about blaming this issue on the medium. How much does having a newspaper in hand really increase the odds that someone will read something that didn’t plan to? Can’t people simply pick out parts of the newspaper that they want to read as well? Further, was there ever really a “golden age” where average citizens always tried to engage with alternative points of view? I would guess not though that doesn’t mean it isn’t a worthwhile ideal. We need citizens (and journalists) who can understand our complex world which transcends simply “left” or “right” understandings. Perhaps the Internet makes this easier in some ways but I would guess the Internet could be changed to meet these challenges or people’s behaviors could be altered.

This reminds of an argument I was reading last night. People could argue, rightly, that all media viewpoints are biased in some way. However, this doesn’t mean that we can just throw out all news sources and say they don’t have something of value. What should be consistent across different sources are facts and then there can be disagreement about the interpretation of these facts. Of course, what is considered “fact” may be up for grabs as well – see the recent debate over Politifact’s “Lie of the Year.”

After case of fraud, researchers discuss others means of “misusing research data”

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The news that a prominent Dutch social psychologist published fraudulent work has pushed other researchers to talk about other forms of “misusing research data”:

Even before the Stapel case broke, a flurry of articles had begun appearing this fall that pointed to supposed systemic flaws in the way psychologists handle data. But one methodological expert, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, of the University of Amsterdam, added a sociological twist to the statistical debate: Psychology, he argued in a recent blog post and an interview, has become addicted to surprising, counterintuitive findings that catch the news media’s eye, and that trend is warping the field…

In September, in comments quoted by the statistician Andrew Gelman on his blog, Mr. Wagenmakers wrote: “The field of social psychology has become very competitive, and high-impact publications are only possible for results that are really surprising. Unfortunately, most surprising hypotheses are wrong. That is, unless you test them against data you’ve created yourself.”…

To show just how easy it is to get a nonsensical but “statistically significant” result, three scholars, in an article in November’s Psychological Science titled “False-Positive Psychology,” first showed that listening to a children’s song made test subjects feel older. Nothing too controversial there.

Then they “demonstrated” that listening to the Beatles’ “When I’m 64” made the test subjects literally younger, relative to when they listened to a control song. Crucially, the study followed all the rules for reporting on an experimental study. What the researchers omitted, as they went on to explain in the rest of the paper, was just how many variables they poked and prodded before sheer chance threw up a headline-making result—a clearly false headline-making result.

If the pressure is great to publish (and it certainly is), then there have to be some countermeasures to limit unethical research practices. Here are a few ideas:

1. Giving more people access to the data. In this way, people could check up on other people’s published findings. But if the fraudulent studies are already published, perhaps this is too late.

2. Having more people have oversight over the project along the way. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a bureaucratic board but only having one researcher looking at the data and doing the analysis (such as in the Stapel case) means that there is more opportunity for an individual to twist the data. This could be an argument for collaborative data.

3. Could there be more space within disciplines and journals to discuss the research project? While papers tend to have very formal hypotheses, there is a lot of messy work that goes into these but very little room to discuss how the researchers arrived at them.

4. Decrease the value of media attention. I don’t know how to deal with this one. What researcher doesn’t want to have more people read their research?

5. Have a better educated media so that they don’t report so many inconsequential and shocking studies. We need more people like Malcolm Gladwell who look at a broad swath of research and summarize it rather than dozens of reports grabbing onto small studies. This is the classic issue with nutrition reporting: eggs are great! A new study says they are terrible! A third says they are great for pregnant women and no one else! We rarely get overviews of this research or real questions about the value of all this research. We just get: “a study proved this oddity today…”

6. Resist data mining. Atheoretical correlations don’t help much. Let theories guide statistical models.

7. Have more space to publish negative findings. This would help researchers feel less pressure to come up with positive results.

Suburgatory nears first show; will it offer anything new?

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Yesterday, I ran into a full-page promotional ad for Suburgatory, a new ABC sitcom which first airs on September 28. Here is the ad (image from DisneyDreaming.com):

Suburgatory Full Page Advertisement

Watch the trailer here and also read ABC’s description of the show (these are separate paragraphs but I think they are meant to be two different descriptions):

Single father George only wants the best for his 16-year-old daughter, Tessa. So when he finds a box of condoms on her nightstand, he moves them out of their apartment in New York City to a house in the suburbs. But all Tessa sees is the horror of over-manicured lawns and plastic Franken-moms. Being in the ‘burbs can be hell, but it also may just bring Tessa and George closer than they’ve ever been.

Tessa (Jane Levy) and George (Jeremy Sisto) have been on their own ever since Tessa’s mom pulled a “Kramer vs. Kramer” before she was even potty trained. So far, George has done a pretty good job of raising Tessa without a maternal figure in their lives, but suddenly he’s feeling a little out of his league. So it’s goodbye New York City and hello suburbs. At first Tessa is horrified by the big-haired, fake-boobed mothers and their sugar-free Red Bull-chugging kids. But little by little she and her dad begin finding a way to survive on the clean streets of the ‘burbs. Sure, the neighbors might smother you with love while their kids stare daggers at your back, but underneath all that plastic and caffeine, they’re really not half bad. And they do make a tasty pot roast.

As I suggested back in March, this show at least appears that it may cover typical suburban territory: an innocent person moves to a nice-looking neighborhood but finds that the people aren’t what they seem and hijinks or unpleasant events ensue. The suburbs are full of fake people and I’m sure the show will have some commentary about striving for social status, “authentic” living in New York City, and perhaps even takes a shot or two at McMansions and SUVs. Perhaps this show’s twist is that the main characters are a teenage daughter and a single dad but hasn’t this also been tackled by other shows and movies? A new prediction: if it simply updates Desperate Housewives or Revolutionary Road for the teenage set, I don’t think it will last until the end of the first season.

Thinking about this show, it would be interesting to compile a database of television shows that really tackle suburban living. To do this, one would first have to distinguish between shows that take place in the suburbs (say Boy Meets World – not sure why this popped into my mind) versus ones that revolve around suburban themes and issues. I’ve thought about doing something similar for popular music songs in order to look for patterns. In both hypothetical databases, I suspect I would find a generally critical (or perhaps “satirical”) take on suburbs even as Americans have continued to move into these places.

I’ll be tracking the fate of this show and may also have to watch an episode for research purposes…

The sociology of Star Trek

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Occasionally, I run across more unusual sociology courses. Here is a summer class that examines Star Trek:

In order to understand more about why the Star Trek cannon has continued to be popular and respected since its creation in the 1960s, I took a class this summer at Portland State University entitled “The Sociology of Star Trek.”  I learned about how the Trekkian visions of the future offered a lens through which to examine the culture of its time and about the vision of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenbarry, who highlighted enlightenment ideals and ‘exploration without conquest.’  Additionally I learned about the obsession and culture surrounding the show.

One of our assignments was to review an event that occurs annually in Portland: Trek in the Park. At this event, a full-length original episode is performed by the Atomic Arts theater company. For one month a year, Portlanders gather to show their Trek Pride.

Big sociological themes that you could play with in such a course:

1. The social change of the 1960s and how this was reflected in popular culture.

2. American fascination with:

a. Technology and progress. Even in space, we can’t escape some basic problems.

b. Utopias or idealized communities. This could be tied to a number of utopian communities that were actually built or perhaps even the suburbs, the space where Americans seek the elusive American Dream.

3. The subcultures that form and are maintained based on objects in the popular culture.

4. Cultural narratives as displayed in television (all the versions of Star Trek) plus movies.

See a draft of the syllabus here and comments from the Internet public about what the class could include here. Apparently, you can cover all sorts of topics through the lens of Star Trek…

Are sociologists more likely than the general population to be Star Trek fans? And is the competition to Star Trek, the Star Wars franchise, too low-brow for sociologists?