Socius最新文献

Using primary data from the Assessing the Social Consequences of COVID-19 study, the authors examined how the pandemic affected the stress levels of women with and without coresiding minor children (mothers vs. nonmothers), paying special attention to the moderating role of employment status. The ordinary least squares regression results show that following the pandemic outbreak, among full-time working women, mothers reported smaller stress increases than nonmothers. In contrast, among part-time and nonemployed women, mothers and nonmothers experienced similar stress increases. Also, full-time working mothers reported smaller stress increases than women with most other mothering and employment statuses. Changes in women's employment status, following pandemic onset, had limited impacts on the patterns of stress change. This study contributes to research on parenting and health by showing that during times of crisis, full-time employment may be protective of mothers' mental health but may not buffer the mental health deterioration of women not raising children.

Using the 2017-2018 American Time Use Survey, the authors investigate how a comprehensive set of temporal conditions of paid work affects parental child care time, with attention to gender and education. Temporal work conditions include access to leave, inflexible start and end times, short advance notice of work schedules, types of work shifts, and usual days worked. Among mothers, the only significant relationship is between usual days worked and routine care time. Among fathers, lacking access to paid leave and having inflexible start and end times are associated with reduced routine care time, and working on variable days of the week is related to less developmental care time. Temporal work conditions also shape the educational gap in parental child care time. Importantly, nonstandard shifts and working on weekends widen the educational gradient in mothers' developmental care time. The findings imply that temporal work conditions amplify gender inequality in work-family lives and families as agents of class reproduction.

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has disrupted lives and resulted in high levels of stress. Although the evidence at the societal level is clear, there have been no population-based studies of pandemic-based stress focusing on individuals who identify as sexual minorities. Drawing on representative data collected during the pandemic, National Couples' Health and Time Study, the authors find that partnered (cohabiting or married) individuals who identified as sexual minorities experienced higher levels of stress than individuals who identified as heterosexual. However, variation exists observed among sexual minority adults. Although economic resources, discrimination, social and community support, and health conditions are tied to reported stress levels, they do not explain differentials according to sexual identity. These results provide evidence that sexual minority adults faced greater stress during the pandemic and the importance of recognizing that sexual minorities are not a monolithic group with varying stress responses to the pandemic.

The authors provide the first age-standardized race/ethnicity-specific, state-specific vaccination rates for the United States. Data encompass all states reporting race/ethnicity-specific vaccinations and reflect vaccinations through mid-October 2021, just before eligibility expanded below age 12. Using indirect age standardization, the authors compare racial/ethnic state vaccination rates with national rates. The results show that white and Black state median vaccination rates are, respectively, 89 percent and 76 percent of what would be predicted on the basis of age; Hispanic and Native rates are almost identical to what would be predicted; and Asian American/Pacific Islander rates are 110 percent of what would be predicted. The authors also find that racial/ethnic vaccination rates are associated with state politics, as proxied by 2020 Trump vote share: for each percentage point increase in Trump vote share, vaccination rates decline by 1.08 percent of what would be predicted on the basis of age. This decline is sharpest for Native American vaccinations, although these are reported for relatively few states.

Prior to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, marriage and divorce had been in decline across the United States. As more data are released, evidence mounts that this pattern has persisted, and in some states been magnified, during the pandemic. The authors compared the change in yearly marriage and divorce counts prior to the beginning of the pandemic (change from 2018 to 2019) to estimate an expected number of marriages and divorces for 2020. By computing a P score on the basis of expected and observed marriages and divorces in 2020, the authors determined whether individual states experienced shortfalls or surpluses of marital events. Of the 20 states with available data on marriages, 18 experienced shortfalls (exceptions included Missouri and North Dakota), for an overall sample shortfall of nearly 11 percent. Regarding divorces, 31 of the 35 states with available data also experienced shortfalls (exceptions included Hawaii, Wyoming, Arizona, and Washington), for an overall sample shortfall of 12 percent.

This commentary brings immigration research to the conversation on sociology's possibilities to respond to inequality. It argues that legal status today has become an important dimension of inequality given its enduring impact across most areas of life and effects that extend laterally to all members of a family and across generations. The piece highlights the possibilities for sociologists to contribute to policy discussions but also the limitations of research in policy spaces given the antiscience resistance in the sociopolitical context today.

Although extreme and rising levels of U.S. wealth inequality have generated much public and scientific interest, building intuition on the shape and scale of today's wealth distribution remains difficult. Prior research tends to conceptualize and measure wealth inequality in one of two ways: As the concentration of assets among the superwealthy (i.e., wealth concentration among the top 1 percent or even top 0.1 percent) or as a population-wide phenomenon of distributional inequality (i.e., wealth inequality among the remaining 99 percent). Of course, both perspectives are valid and important; they simply focus on different slices of the overall wealth distribution, sometimes because of limitations of the data that are being used. Extreme concentration of wealth at the very top and very high levels of inequality within the remainder of the distribution thus coexist. Yet jointly visualizing both aspects and relating them to each other is challenging. This contribution addresses this challenge by providing an intuitive and interactive visualization of the distribution of U.S. wealth in 2019 that spans the full population, from households in net debt to multibillionaires.

This study examines how state policy contexts may have contributed to unfavorable adult health in recent decades. It merges individual-level data from the 1993-2016 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (n=2,166,835) with 15 state-level policy domains measured annually on a conservative to liberal continuum. We examined associations between policy domains and health among adults ages 45-64 years and assess how much of the associations is accounted by adults' socioeconomic, behavioral/lifestyle, and family factors. A more liberal version of the civil rights domain was associated with better health. It was disproportionately important for less-educated adults and women, and its association with adult health was partly accounted by educational attainment, employment, and income. Environment, gun safety, and marijuana policy domains were, to a lesser degree, predictors of health in some model specifications. In sum, health improvements require a greater focus on macro-level factors that shape the conditions in which people live.

The authors investigate whether net worth poverty (NWP) reduces children's well-being. NWP-having wealth (assets minus debts) less than one fourth of the federal poverty line-is both theoretically and empirically distinct from income poverty (IP) and is the modal form of poverty among children. Data come from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its Child Development Supplement on children ages 3 to 17 years observed between 2002 and 2019. The authors use linear mixed-effects models to investigate the associations among NWP, IP, and four cognitive and behavioral outcomes. NWP reduces children's cognitive scores and was associated with increases in both problem behavior scores. Negative associations for NWP are similar in magnitude to those found for IP. Much of the NWP effect operates through asset deprivation rather than high debt. The results illustrate the potential risks many children, previously overlooked in studies of IP, face because of wealth deprivation.

Using the stress process model, the authors investigate whether individuals in interracial relationships experience greater risk for past-year mood and anxiety disorder compared with their same-race relationship counterparts. The authors also assess interracial relationship status differences in external stressors (i.e., discrimination and negative interactions with family) and whether stress exposure explains mental disorder differences between individuals in interracial versus same-race romantic partnerships. Data are from the National Survey of American Life (2001-2003). Results show that individuals in interracial relationships are at greater risk for anxiety disorder (but not mood disorder) relative to those in same-race relationships. Interracially partnered individuals also report more discrimination from the public and greater negative interactions with family. External stressors partially explain the higher risk for anxiety disorder among individuals in interracial partnerships. This study addresses a void in the literature on discrimination, family relationships, and health for the growing population of individuals in interracial unions.