Socius最新文献

Using the National Survey of American Life: Coping with Stress in the 21st Century, this study is guided by the following question: To what extent do family relationships (i.e., frequency of contact with, closeness to, and negative interactions with family) shape racial and ethnic identity among U.S.-born and foreign-born Afro-Caribbeans? The authors operationalize identity as closeness to Black Americans, closeness to Caribbean Blacks, and identity preference. The results indicate that closeness to family was associated with feeling close to Black Americans for U.S.- and foreign-born Caribbean Blacks. Second, closeness to family was associated with higher odds of closeness to other Caribbean Blacks, but only among foreign-born Afro-Caribbeans. Last, negative interactions with family was associated with adopting an ethnic identity instead of a racial identity for U.S.-born Caribbeans. For foreign-born Afro-Caribbeans, negative interactions with family was associated with lower likelihood of adopting an ethnic identity relative to an "other" identity. This study demonstrates the role of family relationships in understanding identity processes among U.S.- and foreign-born Afro-Caribbeans.

Since the turn of the century, sociologists and other scholars concerned about digital inequality have most often been concerned about disparities in the quality of internet use, not necessarily the availability of internet access itself. However, the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the fact that the internet's potential benefits to mitigating the spread of the virus were only available to those with internet access. In this visualization, I use household-level data from the American Community Survey from 2013 - 2023 (N = 10,713,204 households) to estimate a linear probability model predicting internet access by race/ethnicity, household educational attainment, and poverty status. Results suggest that household internet access has increased over the past decade, but disparities still exist on all three dimensions.

Gender scholars have debated whether the recent movement toward a more equal division of domestic labor is stalling. Using a differential convergence perspective, the authors argue that examining which domestic tasks undergo gender convergence, whose changes narrow the gap, and why changes happen is critical for understanding gender inequalities in unpaid labor time. Using data from the 2003-2023 American Time Use Survey, the authors examine trends in total housework (including core and occasional housework), shopping, and childcare time. Results for married individuals indicate that the historically large gender gap in total housework time narrowed further this century, from a women-to-men ratio of 1.8:1 in 2003-2005 to 1.6:1 in 2022-2023. This shrinking of the gender gap was concentrated in traditionally feminine core housework (decreasing by 40 percent, from 4.2:1 to 2.5:1), particularly housecleaning and laundry. The gender difference in shopping time also narrowed, nearing parity. For childcare time, the gender gap shrunk from 2:1 to 1.8:1, though this change was not statistically significant. Decomposition analyses indicate that women's reduced housework time was explained mainly by population compositional shifts, whereas men's increased core housework time likely reflected behavioral or normative changes. With men taking on more female-typed domestic activities, the gendered norms associated with different forms of unpaid labor may be becoming redefined.

Geographic disparities in Alzheimer's disease are often attributed to sociodemographic differences across communities or unequal access to opportunity structures whose use serves as protective mechanisms. Yet limited research considers the social dynamics between residents that are enabled by these opportunity structures. The authors adopt a population-level approach to evaluate how ethnoracial diversity and opportunity structures function jointly to facilitate the development of bridging social capital (i.e., mixing of dissimilar people) which is hypothesized to predict Alzhiemer's disease mortality rates. Upon analyzing Alzheimer's disease mortality records from 2,469 U.S. counties, the authors find that counties whose sociodemographic composition and opportunity structures combine to encourage bridging capital potential exhibit lower mortality rates than counties with fewer such opportunities. These findings consistently appear in environments whose composition and structure are conducive to social mixing (i.e., workhoods and civic organizations) but inconsistently in environments that are less conducive to social mixing (i.e., residential neighborhoods). The findings highlight the importance of structural factors that create opportunities for social capital.

Despite initial declines in fertility since the onset of the pandemic, less is known about how fertility intentions are related to pandemic-based stressors in the United States. The authors examine the following two questions. First, how are pandemic stressors associated with short-term fertility intentions? Second, among those delaying fertility, what are the rationales for doing so, and how are pandemic stressors related to these rationales? The authors draw on the National Couples' Health and Time Study, a nationally representative sample of 20- to 50-year-olds in the United States who were married or cohabiting and interviewed between September 2020 and April 2021. Among those desiring or remaining open to having (more) children, experiencing pandemic-related stressors was associated with delays in fertility plans; those whose lives were most disrupted and those who experienced relationship stress were less likely to intend to have children in the next year. The most common rationale for not intending to have children in the next year was economic worries, followed by health worries and concerns about an uncertain future. Economic and health stress were linked to these rationales, net of objective indicators. A comprehensive assessment of fertility intentions and underlying rationale for intentions on the basis of subjective factors is critical for understanding fertility patterns.

Amid the proliferation of state-level bans on race-based affirmative action in higher education, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on June 29, 2023, dismantled race-conscious college admission policies, intensifying concerns about the persistence and potential increase of racial inequality in higher education. The authors analyze four restricted-use national survey datasets to investigate racial disparities in college attendance outcomes from the 1980s through the 2010s. Although college entrance rates increased for all racial groups, Black and Hispanic youth became increasingly less likely than their White peers to attend four-year selective colleges. In the 2010s cohort, Black and Hispanic youth were 8 and 7 percentage points, respectively, less likely than their White counterparts to secure admission to four-year selective colleges, even after controlling for parents' income, education, and other family background variables. The findings underscore the urgent need for proactive policy interventions to address the widening racial inequality in attending selective postsecondary institutions.

Contemporary sociological research emphasizes the need to analyze inequality beyond nominal categories. While research has grown in this regard at the individual level, little research has pursued this approach with neighborhoods. This paper explores how names can serve as a measure of the perceived typicality associated with race, and how names are associated with neighborhood characteristics. Analyses on data with the names of over 300 million Americans demonstrate that name-based racial composition more fully explains socioeconomic disparities among neighborhoods than conventional survey-based racial composition metrics. Neighborhoods with the most Black-sounding names demonstrate greater socioeconomic disadvantage than neighborhoods with the most individuals self-identifying as Black. Additionally, naming patterns explain variation in socioeconomic inequality within both predominately-nominally Black and predominately-nominally white neighborhoods-where little nominal racial variation exists. This research suggests that infracategorical measures of race can provide additional predictive power to nominal measures of racial composition when analyzing neighborhood inequalities.

Smoking declines are uneven around the world, and we have few studies on the correlates of youth smoking in contexts like Saudi Arabia, where declines have been slowest. Using a broadly socio-ecological framework and network data, we report on one of the few studies to simultaneously examine peer, family, and school features associated with smoking in the Saudi context. We find strong and consistent peer and family associations with both occasional and regular smoking via direct modeling (level of peers/family that also smoke) and substantive interactions (lying to parents in the family domain, engaging in unsupervised youth-centric activities, or seeking popularity in the peer domain). Although our design precludes causal claims, our results are consistent with smoking initiation being driven by occasional use surrounding attempts to gain youth social status, whereas regular use depends on implicit family and peer acceptance.

Sociologists have long been puzzled by whether attitudes inform behaviors or vice versa. Accurately assessing both possibilities requires panel data collected at relatively short intervals. In this study, I leverage intensive panel data from the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life Study to assess the case of young women's premarital sexual attitudes and behavior. Through a series of descriptive analyses and cross-lagged panel models, I show that opposition to premarital sex in young adulthood is only sometimes associated with subsequent sexual behavior and that premarital sex is negatively associated with later opposition to premarital sex. Young women are especially likely to reduce their opposition following first sex relative to sex reported at any time. Thus, initial behavioral experiences may result in outsized shocks to attitudes, following an active updating model. That subsequent sex is associated with less attitudinal change suggests that young women initially update their attitudes before settling into them. This study nuances long-standing debates on the malleability of attitudes within a person over time and with respect to behavior and has implications for how people approach behavior according to their attitudes across a wide spectrum of social phenomena.

Work, a segregated social context in the United States, may be an important source of differential exposure to stress by race/ethnicity, but existing research does not systematically describe variation in exposure to occupational stress by race/ethnicity. Using work history data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study and occupational-level measures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Occupational Information Network, the authors document the extent to which the race/ethnicity and gender composition of occupational categories varies by level of occupational strain and how life-course exposure to occupational strain differs by race/ethnicity and gender. Black and Latino workers are overrepresented in high-strain jobs at many ages, compared with other groups. Exposure to job strain across working ages shows more variation in exposure by gender and race/ethnicity groups than static measures. These findings point to potential bias in research using a single, cross-sectional measure of job stress.