Tag Archives: social class

The sport of hockey has a sociology department?

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Here is a quick look at recent happenings of sociological import within the sport of hockey:

Hockey’s sociology department is really having a hell of a year. There was the banana thrown at Wayne Simmonds of the Philadelphia Flyers, a black player, during a pre-season game in London. Ont.; there was Simmonds caught on camera calling Sean Avery of the New York Rangers a “faggot” a couple days later. If you wanted to go further, there is the visor debate, which boils down to a sort of libertarian approach to personal safety, much as, say, seatbelts did. We all know how that one turned out.

And then Sunday, there was Raffi Torres and Paul Bissonnette. Bissonnette, the Phoenix Coyotes forward who has become a Twitter celebrity as @BizNasty2point0, who has over 150,000 followers, put a picture of his Coyotes teammate and his wife in their Halloween costumes as Jay-Z and Beyoncé. They had coloured their skin to appear black…

Hockey is a closed society, in a lot of ways. Diversity exists – Russians, Finns, Swedes, Czechs, etc. – but racially, it remains the least diverse major sports league, unless you get into NASCAR, tennis, or golf. That’s demographics as much as anything, and it is slowly changing. Bissonnette’s mother is half-black, but Canada has no notable tradition of blackface, and it is not exactly taught in our schools. For many Canadians, how would we know?…

Some jokes never get funny. Here’s one more chance to learn.

It sounds like some hockey players could benefit from a social education. Also, they might want to discuss what exactly they do in public or voluntarily post online.

I wonder how much all of the major sports do this kind of training. I know some have increased training for rookies and young players in recent years but how much involves social issues such as race, social class, and gender?

In discussion of Occupy Wall Street, McMansions seen as part of the culture war

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As part of a larger fascinating discussion about who the members of Occupy Wall Street actually are (the almost-elite versus the elite?), Megan McArdle suggests McMansions are part of the larger culture war in the United States:

Orwell goes on to point out that it is the anxious lower-upper-middle-class who have the most venom towards those below them–precisely because to preserve their status, they have to keep themselves sharply apart from the workers and tradesmen. And I think that that does apply here as well, at least to some extent. One of the interesting things about going back to my business school reunion earlier in the month was simply the absence of the sort of cutting remarks about flyover country that I have grown used to hearing in any large gathering of people. I didn’t notice it until after the events were over, because it was a slow accumulation of all the jokes and rants I hadn’t heard about NASCAR, McMansions, megachurches, reality television, and all the other cultural signifiers that make up a small but steady undercurrent of my current social milieu, the way Polish jokes did when I was in sixth grade.

Some of my former classmates now live in flyover country, of course, but mostly, I think, they just didn’t care. No one seemed very interested in the culture war.

So why does that same culture war seem so important to so many of the people that I know in New York and DC? (“The intellectuals”, as one of my classmates laughingly called us, when I started dropping statistics in the middle of cocktail chitchat, and then lamely explained that this is kind of what passes for fascinating small talk in DC.)

It’s not entirely crazy to suspect, as Orwell did, that this has something to do with money. Specifically, you sneer at the customs of the people you might be mistaken for. For aside from a few very stuffy conservatives, no white people I know sneer at hip-hop music, telenovelas, Tyler Perry films, or any of the other things often consumed by people of modest incomes who don’t look like them. They save it for Thomas Kinkade paintings, “Cozy cottage” style home decoration, collectibles, child beauty pageants, large pickup trucks***, and so forth.

It is fascinating to think about the comments that McArdle describes: in some circles, there is a different set of profane objects while such objects barely rate as topics among “average” people in middle America. Being in academia also leads to hearing more of such comments. I would add Walmart in as another significant “cultural signifier” in these conversations.

McMansions is an interesting addition to this group. There is often quite a bit of scorn intended when using this term. Of course, most people in flyover country don’t own McMansions (though perhaps they aspire to own them) but many communities allow them. I have found that the use of the term McMansion is often tied to sprawl, another issue that can separate the big cities from flyover country. McMansions are often seen as a part of the larger package of sprawl which includes an emphasis on cars, big houses, a waste of natural resources, and a lack of beauty and quality.

I don’t know if she knows it but it sounds like McArdle is making Bourdieu’s argument: those with more education look at aesthetics and a deeper understanding of objects while those with more money purchase for functionality. Take a McMansion: someone with more education might note its lack of quality, its contribution to sprawl, and wish for an architect-designed home. Someone with more money might note that you can have eight family members easily fit in the home and each can have their own bedroom, bathroom space, and play space.

A side note: I did have to laugh when McArdle suggests that dropping statistics into conversation is also a signifier. If so, I am guilty…

(A caveat: these sorts of flyover country/big city or red vs. blue state dichotomies are always more complex than they are commonly presented in public discourse. But just because they are broad terms describes tens of millions of people doesn’t mean that there isn’t necessarily some truth to them.)

A new way to do the college search process: one comprehensive website to match students to colleges

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The policy director of an education think tank writes in Washington Monthly, itself a purveyor of college rankings, that the future of college admissions will come in the form of a single, comprehensive website that will match prospective students and colleges:

This is the future of college admissions. The market for matching colleges and students is about to undergo a wholesale transformation to electronic form. When the time comes for Jameel to apply to colleges, ConnectEDU will take all of the information it has gathered and use sophisticated algorithms to find the best colleges likely to accept him—to find a match for Jameel in the same way that Amazon uses millions of sales records to advise customers about what books they might like to buy and Match.com helps the lovelorn find a compatible date. At the same time, on the other side of the looking glass, college admissions officers will be peering into ConnectEDU’s trove of data to search for the right mix of students.

This won’t just help the brightest, most driven kids. Bad matching is a problem throughout higher education, from top to bottom. Among all students who enroll in college, most will either transfer or drop out. For African American students and those whose parents never went to college, the transfer/dropout rate is closer to two-thirds. Most students don’t live in the resource-rich, intensely college-focused environment that upper-middle-class students take for granted. So they often default to whatever college is cheapest and closest to home. Tools like ConnectEDU will give them a way to find something better.

We can think of getting into college like this: students need to be slotted into the appropriate school. At this point, students can do certain things to improve their fit and colleges use certain information (though it often comes in a form of a narrative about students that admissions officers construct – I highly recommend Creating a Class). Our current system is highly dependent on students doing the initial legwork in searching out colleges that might fit them but as this article suggests, there are a number of students, particularly poorer students, who don’t do well in this system.

If this website idea catches on, wouldn’t it create more competition within the college market for students? If so, would middle- and upper-class students start complaining?

Also, while the article suggests a website like this is the answer to helping kids who can’t currently play the college game, doesn’t it rest on the idea that (1) people have equal access to this website and (2) that users have the ability or “cultural capital” to sort through the information the website presents? Neither of these might necessarily be true.

h/t Instapundit

Georgetown sociology course on Jay-Z

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If there are sociology courses on Lady Gaga, why not one on Jay-Z?

Noted educator and author, Michael Eric Dyson, has taken a new spin on generic education. He is now teaching a class at the prominent Georgetown University, based solely on Jay Z. The course, “Sociology of Hip-Hop: Jay-Z” is a 3 credit course offered this semester…

While some speak negatively about hip-hop’s vulgarity and rawness, Dyson sees no point in going against this phenomenon and clearly supports including rap in the cannon of education. “Speaking out against rap music is useless, and it’s futile. The reality is there’s criticism for everything, but Jay-Z is one of the most remarkable artists of our time of any genre, and as a hip-hop artist he carries the weight of that art form with such splendor and grace and genius,” he said. “I admire the way in which he carries himself and the incredible craft that he displays every time he steps up to the microphone.”

The course covers Jay-Z’s book “Decoded,” Adam Bradley’s “Book of Rhymes,” Zack O’Malley Greenburg’s “Empire State of Mind,” as well as other articles and films about hip-hop in general. “We look at his incredible body of work, we look at his own understanding of his work, we look at others who reflect upon him, and then we ask the students to engage in critical analysis of Jay-Z himself,” Dyson explained.

Dr. Dyson reiterated that hip-hop is an important subject that people should take seriously and learn about, and the interest level at Georgetown is very high. “Well you know if you have an average size class of 30-40, and then you got 140 students signed up that tells you right there there’s an extraordinary interest,” he said, “I think that’s why it’s important for young people to see that the rhetorical invention of African American culture needs to be taken seriously with one of its greatest artist.”

I suppose it is appropriate that this is being reported on by MTV.

I’m sure some will see the news about this class and say, “Can you believe what passes for a college education today?” But there are at least three defenses for this.

1. The topic is popular. Clearly, college students and others are listening to hip-hop and watching the behavior of its stars so why not address this in a college classroom? Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it is not worthy of study. In fact, taking an academic approach to a popular topic has the potential to hit college students in their everyday activities and tastes.

2. The class could touch on a bunch of interesting topics such as race, social class, city life, culture, lifecourse and generational change, and how hip-hop has evolved from its start in 1970s New York City and has spread far and wide. For example, we could ask how this has spread to the American suburbs – does listening to hip-hop now while driving down leafy suburban streets in a Honda Civic mean something different than when hip-hop emerged? In this argument, hip-hop is just the means by which students can enter the world of sociology.

3. Studying “American” music is important. While classical music might be the high culture standard, it began in Europe and was imported into the United States. Studying blues and jazz, the beginnings of rock music, and hip-hop provides insights into how American culture and experiences, particularly the African-American experience, is translated into music and performances.

A study showing the intersection of race and the status of particular jobs

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Sociologists have known (and measured) for decades that different jobs or fields can have very different levels of status (the more academic term: occupational prestige). A new study puts this social fact together with identifying people of different races and came to an interesting conclusion:

When it comes to determining the race of a stranger, our minds see more than skin color. That’s the conclusion of a study co-authored by UCI sociologist Andrew Penner, which was really quite simple when it came to the research. Viewers were shown images of the same man in business attire and a janitor’s uniform. Photos of a different man were added to the mix, as were those of women. Above the photos were boxes marked “white” and “black” so the viewers could assign the race of each person shown. You can imagine what the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation-funded research found.

Tracking the movements of each viewer’s mouse as it selected the race of the model, the researchers discovered that, initially, those in the business clothing were most often perceived to be white, while those in the janitor uniforms were usually ranked as black, despite the person in the respective photos being the same person of the same race.

Keep in mind that the person being tested may have ultimately chosen the correct race of the model. What the researchers were after was that initial assumption. The pattern grew more pronounced as faces became more racially ambiguous, the study concluded.

This is a reminder that there is a lot of interplay between race and social class. There are perceptions about people in certain jobs, represented in this study by particular clothing, that override our knowledge of the skin color of the person within the clothing. In Malcolm Gladwell Blink style, we make quick assumptions and then make more “rational” conclusions.

I wonder if the researchers looked at jobs where the perceptions about those workers might be similar. Would research subjects make such quick conclusions and if so, what would guide those snap judgments?

Sociology class at Brown has teams of students give away $15,000 dollars

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I’m guessing that it is a pretty unique sociology course at Brown that has students work in teams to give away $15,000:

Receiving $15,000 for a college class might sound like a laughable dream, but in SOC 1870A: “Investing in Social Change,” a course offered by the Department of Sociology in conjunction with the Swearer Center for Public Service, that is exactly what happens. There is, of course, a catch — students do not keep the $15,000, but instead work in teams of five to award the money in grants to one or more community organizations.

After reading about a philanthropy-based class at another school, Martin Granoff P’93 approached the Office of the Dean of the College about funding a similar class at the University. They brought the idea to Roger Nozaki MAT’89, director of the Swearer Center for Public Service and associate dean of the College for community and global engagement, who then approached Associate Professor of Sociology Ann Dill about co-teaching the class…

This past year there were 34 applicants for the 18 spots.

In addition to assigned readings, the class also features a number of speakers, a majority of whom are Brown alums who work for Rhode Island or Providence nonprofits.

Obviously, it takes a good amount of money to make a course like this happen but it sounds like an exciting opportunity.

I wonder if a class like this is best-suited for a wealthy school like Brown where students could easily end up in positions to give away corporate, government, or private money or for less-advantaged schools where being able to give away this amount would put students in a more unusual position.

Someone finally says it: the length of the school day doesn’t have a huge impact on student achievement

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There has been much debate about a longer school days in Chicago Public Schools. But a comparison between Chicago and suburban schools made by the Chicago Tribune hints at something: the length of the school day is not the key determinant of student outcomes.

The tongue-lashings Chicago Public Schools has endured in the last several weeks over its short school day — U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called it a “disgrace” — have overshadowed the fact that that many suburban students aren’t receiving much more instruction time than CPS.

Affluent Glen Ellyn’s two elementary districts both offer five hours, 15 minutes of instruction daily, only seven minutes more than CPS reports…

With state data unreliable, the Tribune used class schedules from a handful of Chicago-area districts to highlight some of the discrepancies. So while seventh-graders in northwest suburban Elgin School District U-46 are getting less than five hours, 30 minutes of instruction on average, their counterparts in southwest suburban Plainfield District 202 are receiving about seven hours, according to state records.

That’s a big difference, but one that doesn’t necessarily translate into student performance, experts say. Indeed, at a time when urban and suburban districts across the U.S. are lengthening their school days in an effort to improve tests scores and student learning, no studies conclusively link more instruction time with higher achievement.

I can think of several reasons why there has been so much attention on the length of the school day in Chicago:

1. This seems like common sense: kids will learn more if they are in school longer. However, studies suggest it is more about how time is used rather than just have larger quantities of time. And if more time was really needed, why not have a serious conversation about shorter summer breaks and possible Saturday programs?

2. It is part of a larger back and forth with teachers. Thus far, the union has not been willing to lengthen the school day and Mayor Emanuel and his team has tried to split teachers on their stance. This is not the only source of disagreement between the District/the mayor and the teacher’s union but it has been very public.

3. The school day is one of the few things that the District can more easily control. Compared to other possible solutions like improving the skills of teachers or hiring better teachers, helping improve life in poorer neighborhoods, or getting parent’s involved, this looks like an easy target.

Next year, the Chicago Public Schools will have a longer school day in 2012-2013. While leaders may take credit for this, it will be interesting to see if there is any positive outcome (and then it is another question about whether this is due to the longer school day). Additionally, if they just stop at longer school days, not much will have changed.

This reminds me of the Coleman Report which had a few findings: “student background and socioeconomic status are much more important in determining educational outcomes than are measured differences in school resources (i.e. per pupil spending)” and “socially disadvantaged black students profited from schooling in racially-mixed classrooms.” But getting school districts and the general public to get ahead these ideas (think of the debate over busing in the late 1960s and early 1970s) is a very difficult task.

94% of American parents expect their kid to go to college

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Looking at the article “Is a college education worth the price?“, I was pointed to Pew survey data released in May 2011 about what Americans think about college. Among the findings:

Nearly every parent surveyed (94%) says they expect their child to attend college, but even as college enrollments have reached record levels, most young adults in this country still do not attend a four-year college. The main barrier is financial. Among adults ages 18 to 34 who are not in school and do not have a bachelor’s degree, two-thirds say a major reason for not continuing their education is the need to support a family. Also, 57% say they would prefer to work and make money; and 48% say they can’t afford to go to college.

These are pretty high aspirations that cut across income levels and backgrounds. Pew suggests the primary barrier to reaching these expectations is money: the need to support oneself and a family gets in the way.

But I wonder if there is another barrier that is partly due to finances and partly due to other factors: it can be difficult to translate aspirations into outcomes. In today’s world and particularly in America where parents have always desired great things for their children (I remember this coming out distinctly in the original Middletown study), what parent wouldn’t say that their kid will attend college? If one comes from a privileged background, a child can see how this path will logically play out: you go through the stages of school and naturally you will move from high school to college (with finances somehow being taken care of and parents socking away money for over a decade in a college fund). But, in lesser circumstances, where is this easy path? It may be doable but there are a lot of obstacles standing in the way.

This reminds me of Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods. While I can’t remember whether she specifically talks about college aspirations, the class-based styles of parenting she outlines could lead to different outcomes in achieving these parental aspirations.

More educated people attend church more

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One common idea is that people (or societies) that are more educated will move away from religious beliefs. However, several recent sociology studies suggest that more educated people are more likely to attend church:

While overall church attendance has declined slightly in the United States in recent decades, a new study says attendance at religious services among white Americans who did not go to college has fallen more than twice as quickly as it has among more highly educated whites.

The study, released Sunday by the American Sociological Association, draws on decades of data from the General Social Survey and the National Survey of Family Growth to conclude that “moderately educated whites,” defined as people with high school degrees, attended religious services in the 1970s at about the same rate as whites with degrees from four-year colleges. In the last decade, however, they attended much less frequently…

The research shares some conclusions with a recent study by a University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor whose findings contradicted the common myth that less-educated people are more religious. That study, released in early August, concluded that a college degree does not make a person less religious, but that more education does make people more accepting of the validity of religions other than their own. Both studies used data from the General Social Survey, which is an ongoing survey of American’ attitudes and behaviors that began in 1972.

This is a reminder that social class, made up of influential factors like education, impacts religious life, an area that some believe should be more of a private matter.

This fits with some thoughts I heard at the ASA meetings in Las Vegas that there seems to be two trajectories in American life: a middle/upper class life built upon education and a working/lower class life built upon traditional values.

I wonder how this would look from the religious congregation side: have more congregations been deliberately seeking more educated members who have more resources and are more open-minded? This makes pragmatic sense but not religious sense.

A final thought: how much of this is driven by increasing education levels of conservative religious group that in the past were less educated (evangelicals, fundamentalists, etc.)?

Friday Night Lights (TV version) missed chances to deeply explore issues of race and social class

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The TV series Friday Night Lights recently came to a close after five seasons. I have read the original book, seen the movie, and watched all the episodes of the TV show. While the book was one that gained some popularity as an Intro to Sociology text, I think the TV series missed opportunities to tackle two subjects rarely tackled in mainstream movies and TV: race and social class.

Even as critics lauded the show for more honest portrayals of family life and teenage relationships (and football faded into the background), the show only hinted at these two issues. There are clearly some people who were more wealthy than others: some of the main characters, like Matt Saracen, Tim Riggins, and Becky Sproles come from humble and/or troubled backgrounds while others, like Jason Street, Lyla Garrity, and JD McCoy have more privileged backgrounds. But these issues, which surely would have affected interpersonal relationships, were usually downplayed in favor of football issues. Take JD McCoy for example: he lives in a big house and his dad has lots of money. But it’s not their relative wealth that matters much but rather their arrogance and interest in taking over the Dillon football program that makes them the villain. We do see characters struggling to work and get ahead: Billy Riggin’s wife works in a strip club, Smash Williams sees a football scholarship as the way out of his family’s circumstances, and Jess Merriweather has to work hard at her father’s restaurant and as the football manager. Race wasn’t addressed directly though it simmered under the surface, particularly after the split into the East and West Dillion football programs. The East Dillon Lions were clearly on the wrong side of the tracks because of race and relative wealth. Particularly as Coach Taylor moved away from the relatively opulence of the Panthers program to East Dillon, the us vs. them mentality was developed but it was a package deal revolving around beating the other side of town in football.

One key feature missing out of the book is the Latino population. Odessa, the town in which the original book was based, was 48% Latino in the 2000 Census. The TV show made Dillon out to be split between blacks and whites with little to no Latino characters. Perhaps this was because it is easier to work on the contrasts between two groups but the book’s depth was enhanced by these relationships. I would have enjoyed seeing the show tackle this as many areas of the country, such as Texas, are now adjusting to a growing Latino population.

A second issue involves the future lives of these high school students. A number of the main characters are portrayed as being fairly successful, particularly Jason Street who quickly transforms into an agent or Tyra Collette who goes to UT-Austin, while the less successful characters simply fade away. Perhaps this is a good illustration of what happens after life in high school football: the students who were once stars often fade into the sunset. But, on the other hand, the show could have found a way to follow these characters through the ups and downs after football. Tim Riggins is the main character we get to follow as he drops out of college and his football scholarship, ends up in jail, and then hopes to start a new life. We could have seen more of this and how one’s background in high school and before affected one’s life chances in the adult world in and out of Dillon. This is yet another show that suggests high school life is a peak and life afterwards is of lesser interest.

A third issue: how much interaction was there between the players and their families outside of school? We see gatherings for football but little else. Were there other institutions in the community, such as churches, that either bridged some of these divides or reinforced gaps between groups? In the end, should we think that high school football was the one and only institution in the community that was able to bring people together?

Perhaps the show should be applauded for even hinting at these issues but at the same time, it could have really explored these important concerns and how they affect high school, football, and community life. Instead, the show settled into more comfortable high school drama territory with a revolving set of relationships with a background of winning football teams. Like most shows, the series was about the lives of the individual characters, not about the town of Dillon or the impact of high school football in the community. I still the enjoyed the show but it could have taken some clues from the book and been that rare TV show that is able to entertain and address difficult social issues.