Social Science Research最新文献

Despite the growing attention on teachers' grading practices in educational research, less attention has been dedicated to understanding the consequences of teachers' grading standards, especially in early stages of their scholastic career, on later students' educational outcomes. This paper aims at filling this gap, analyzing the impact of teacher's severity in grading on students' competences development and academic track enrollment, and how it varies according to students' gender and socio-economic background. The analysis relies on Italian INVALSI-SNV data: information on 5th graders and their teachers are linked, and pupils are followed up to 8th and 10th grade, in which their competences and school track are recorded. Results show that being exposed to stricter grading in 5th grade leads to higher students' competences later, and to higher probability to enroll in the most prestigious academic track, with no notable heterogeneous effects across students with different sociodemographic characteristics.

Drawing on ten studies from PIRLS, PISA and TIMSS, we study social inequalities in school belonging in the context of early tracking. We investigate whether a) there are social inequalities in school belonging b) early tracking has an effect on levels of school belonging c) tracking exacerbates social inequalities with respect to school belonging. We constructed a large database which covers a wide range of countries and representative student populations in both primary and secondary schools. We exploit that no country tracks their students in primary school and use a difference-in-differences approach to study the effect of tracking. Our findings show a positive association between students’ socioeconomic status and school belonging but no effect for tracking. Likewise, we found no evidence that tracking exacerbates social inequalities in school belonging. Multiverse analysis underlines the general robustness of these findings.

In recent decades, women have made historic gains in educational attainment, now outpacing men in terms of college enrollment and degree completion. Yet, despite the ubiquity of policies and programs aimed at advancing women in work organizations, women's educational gains have not yet translated into greater representation in elite corporate roles. The current study seeks to address this puzzle by analyzing the conditions under which women's educational attainment and credentials enable them to overcome gendered barriers to entry into executive positions. Specifically, we analyze the conditions under which women's educational attainment and credentials facilitate entry into executive roles and provide access to network ties necessary for gaining entrance into male-dominated positions. To answer our research questions we analyze a unique, author-constructed dataset that includes all top executives of the S&P 500 over a 5-year period. We use ordered logistic regression to analyze both the educational attainment and educational networks of executives. Findings suggest that key differences between women and men executives' networks and credentials exist, which contribute to disparities in access to organizational leadership opportunities.

Despite the expansive literature on U.S. ethnoracial relations, issues such as reliance on observational data and inconsistent measures of skin color limit the research on skin color stratification and cross-ethnoracial relationships. These issues hinder researchers’ capacity to disentangle the causal effect of colorism in perpetuating discrepancies within intergroup relationships, specifically within the context of online dating, a popular form of modern dating. In May–June 2021, I fielded a survey experiment that features online dating profiles of Black daters in which skin tone is the treatment. While the multivariate analyses show no statistically significant differences between light- and medium-toned daters, profiles featuring dark-skinned daters consistently receive a penalty in comparison to profiles of light- and medium-skinned people. The results suggest that colorism can have a direct impact on how dark-skinned Black people navigate their romantic lives, independent of other influential factors (e.g., socioeconomic status, social networks, etc.).

Leading theories on parenting in the United States suggest that parenting varies widely by socioeconomic status, with middle-class parents practicing “concerted cultivation”—marked by parents' intensive efforts to foster their children's development—and working-class parents engaging in the “accomplishment of natural growth”—with children given more freedom to manage their own time. While frequently inferred that these parenting practices reflect different cultural logics of parenting, such logics are inherently hard to measure. Our paper proposes a new inductive way to study parenting logics using computational text analysis applied to a nationally representative survey where respondents provided parenting advice across three hypothetical parenting situations. Analyzing this advice using Biterm Topic Modeling we find that nearly all parenting logics reflect some form of intensive parenting, but within that are multiple nuanced versions varying across two dimensions: (1) assertive vs negotiated parenting, and (2) pedagogic vs pragmatic parenting. Using fractional multinomial logistic regression, we find little difference in how parenting logics vary by race/ethnicity, education, and income, suggesting more similarity across groups and more variability within groups than commonly understood. These findings also demonstrate how computational techniques may provide complementary tools to enrich the study of long-standing questions in social science research, at times offering an analytical naïveté that human coding cannot offer.

Extant research reveals an inconclusive relationship between higher education and religiosity, which might be due to the selection effect, or to the different religiosity measures used. To address this, we analyze data of a cohort of adolescents from the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth to investigate the association between religion and education. First, we assess the relationship between the child's religious environment and their likelihood of attending college. Second, we investigate how college attendance and completion affect subsequent changes in religiosity as they age into young adulthood. Results suggest that adolescent religious environment significantly predicts subsequent college enrollment. Completing college is associated with subsequent decline in private religiosity index, after accounting for adolescent religious influence, peer influence, and early family formation; suggesting robustness against selection effects. Enrollment or completion of college has a complicated association with subsequent religious attendance. Fundamentalist Christians do not experience the same declines in religious attendance as other religious traditions after enrolling in college, but additional research is needed to confirm the robustness of this finding. Our study contributes to the nuanced understanding of the relationship between higher education and religion by adopting a life course perspective that reveals the heterogeneity of the relationship by religious affiliations and the socio-cultural norms associated with them.

Social support makes a vital contribution to health and life outcomes, particularly during the transition to motherhood in young adulthood, an often-challenging experience. Women should have the right not only to bear children but also to raise them in a secure environment, which is often aided by support. This study gives attention to how pregnancy intendedness contributes to pregnant women's receipt of support. Using novel data from a weekly survey of 18- to 22-year-old women over two and a half years, I investigate how intendedness is associated with the receipt of support and how support types vary throughout pregnancy. This study reveals new insight into the beginning trajectories of young mothers and highlights variation in the provision of support within social networks. Women with intended pregnancies are less likely to receive social support during pregnancy compared to those with unintended pregnancies. A lack of support may impact the health of both mother and child.

People are influenced by members of high-status groups and members of their ingroup. These principles of “status orientation” and “ingroup orientation” can imply opposing forces for people of lower status. Are lower-status individuals more influenced by members of higher-status outgroups or by members of their lower-status ingroup? Engaging status characteristics theory and self-categorization theory, we predict that status orientation is relatively stronger on questions about facts, which have an objectively correct answer, whereas ingroup orientation is stronger when it comes to ‘opinion questions’ that have no objectively correct answer. Results of an online survey experiment confirm that on factual questions, less-educated individuals are more strongly influenced by highly-educated outgroup individuals than by less-educated ingroup individuals. On opinion questions, we observe relatively weaker status orientation, with status orientation and ingroup orientation being about equally strong. These findings suggest that it is harder to reach societal consensus on opinion questions than on factual questions.