Social Science Research最新文献

Black-White disparities in low birth weight (LBW) rise with maternal age. Why? The “weathering hypothesis” holds that the increasing disparity is due to the accumulation of adverse exposures leading to accelerated aging among Black compared to White mothers. Using US birth certificate data covering millions of births to successive cohorts of US women, this paper finds two sets of results that complicate this theory. Descriptively, I find that Black-White LBW disparities increase with age for some cohorts but not others. More causally, analyses exploiting a plausibly exogenous policy shock show that the effects of reducing adverse exposures were larger for older compared to younger mothers. This evidence points toward an alternative or complementary hypothesis: that LBW risks are more responsive to adverse exposures at older maternal ages than at younger ages. Emphasizing this pathway -- what I call “responsiveness” -- as opposed to accumulation has important implications for both research and policy.

The study of intergenerational income mobility has witnessed more visibility in academic and public policy circles in light of the new estimates generated by Chetty and colleagues. The distribution of race-based estimates of intergenerational income mobility demonstrates strong spatial patterning, such that the success of a child's traversal to the top income quintile in the United States is spatially conditioned and dependent on locality. However, research drawing on the new estimates of intergenerational income mobility has largely taken an aspatial approach. This study is the first attempt to develop an explicitly spatial model, demonstrating that the determinants of place-based mobility vary both geographically and across racial groups. By systematically accounting for spatial autocorrelation and heterogeneity, we identify the race- and region-specific determinants of intergenerational income mobility across counties in the United States.

The debate surrounding the role of cousin marriage in women's autonomy, household status, and labor supply is longstanding and marked by contradictory viewpoints. Some studies suggest that cousin marriage enhances women's situation in the household, while others argue it restricts their freedoms and economic prospects. Despite this ongoing debate, quantitative investigations are limited. This study uses a sample of 15,068 married women from the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2017-18 to examine the link between cousin marriage and women's labor supply patterns. The findings suggest a modest correlation between cousin marriage and reduced paid work. However, cousin marriage appears to have a more pronounced connection with women's work at home, potentially channeling them toward unpaid work for kin. Women in cousin marriages are unlikely to experience improved status within the household compared to women in non-cousin marriages. They are also more likely to rationalize acts of spousal violence in favor of patriarchal familial roles. In this regard, cousin marriage could potentially perpetuate patriarchal gender roles by penalizing women who deviate from conventional norms.

Students with “invisible” disabilities—including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit disorder (ADD/ADHD), learning disorders, and mental health conditions—make up an increasingly large share of college students in the United States. Despite these gains in access, students with invisible disabilities remain disadvantaged relative to their neurotypical and non-disabled peers in many parts of the college experience, including academically. Researchers have hypothesized that inequalities in pre-college academic preparation, barriers to social integration, and lower levels of engagement on college campuses may be at least partially to blame. We test this hypothesis using newly available survey data on college students in the state of Indiana (n = 2728). Based on a series of decompositions, we show that students with invisible disabilities face a series of interrelated challenges, beginning with their academic preparation and extending into their social and academic experiences on college campuses. That these disadvantages feed into one another suggests the presence of a cumulative advantage/disadvantage process, in which early advantages and disadvantages compound as disabled and non-disabled students move through the educational system.

Little is known about preservice depressive symptoms, their linkages to subsequent depressive symptoms, and the role of sociodemographic factors in shaping depressive symptoms of those who serve in the military. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (n = 18,910), we modeled depressive symptom trajectories from baseline (M_age = 15.67) through midlife and compared differences in depressive symptoms between participants who did and did not enter military service. Those who served in the military went on to develop lower levels of depressive symptoms than civilians during their prime military service years, even after accounting for sociodemographic factors that shape pathways into military service. Differences in depressive symptoms by military affiliation were no longer significant by their mid-30s. Results provided a more complete account of depressive symptom patterns associated with military service by including data on individuals before and during military service.

Recent scholarship has identified a growing mental health crisis among scientists and those in academia more generally. This study draws from nationally representative survey data collected from physicists and biologists working in four countries—the United Kingdom, the United States, India, and Italy (N = 3442)—and examines how religion/spirituality relates to their physical and mental well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic and the potential mediating role of dispositional awe, which involves transcendent experience. In the current age, science and religion are generally perceived to be in conflict, but recent evidence suggests they might be more complementary than was previously thought, especially in that they both evoke aesthetic experiences. Results from our regression and mediation analyses suggest that academic scientists who rated religion/spirituality as “very important” in their lives had higher overall flourishing scores, lower psychological distress, and were less likely to report that their mental and physical health had worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings present a strong and consistent case for the explanatory role of a sense of awe in these associations. Taken together, our research invites academic and scientific institutions to recognize and value the personal and spiritual dimensions that scientists may bring to their work.

Social science research has shown that interethnic contact reduces prejudiced attitudes. It has been also proven to successfully intervene in several mechanisms of prejudice formation such as when feelings of threat arise. However, there are few studies that examine the potential of interethnic contact in the reduction of prejudice transmission. Using data from PISA 2018, this article examines the impact that anti-immigrant attitudes from three socializing contexts (parents, school and country) have on young people's attitudes, as well as the capacity of interethnic contact to have a buffering effect against them. The results obtained from multilevel regression models show that the attitudes of parents, school and the broader social context of the country exert a notable influence on young people's attitudes. Our results also show that interethnic contact (friendships) lead to a reduction in anti-immigrant attitudes. However, such contact is only able to counteract contextual countrywide attitudes (not those of parents or school).

Men and women's diverging fields of study choices contribute to the gender wage gap among highly educated workers in several countries, yet systematic cross-national comparisons are rare. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, the German Microcensus, and Statistics Finland this study explores whether fields of study shape the gender wage gap differently in Germany than in Finland; two countries that display strong linkages between education and employment, but differ in the generosity of family policies. The results show that fields of study are an important source of gender wage disparities in both countries. In Germany, associations between characteristics of fields and wages do not seem to differ between the genders. In Finland, the findings suggest that women profit more than men from fields with strong linkages to occupations. Our findings highlight that research analyzing the association between fields of study and gender inequality needs to consider institutional features and gender-specific patterns.

Individuals' fertility behaviors are likely to be associated with their siblings' due to social influence mechanisms and uncertainties involved in making fertility transitions. Such cross-sibling effects were shown to be stronger when siblings have similar demographic traits. While being a proxy for sibling relationship quality, no study has directly investigated the association between sibling closeness and their fertility transitions. Using four waves of data from the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study, this study adopted a dynamic design where the outcome is whether siblings had children in the same period between panel waves: “jumping together or not” and estimated multilevel binary and multinomial logistic models (N dyad-waves = 6314). We found that siblings with higher relationship quality were more inclined to have children simultaneously, compared to the other categories. In contrast to a sibling having a fertility transition alone, sibling conflict was positively linked to both not having children. In conclusion, sibling closeness is important for siblings’ fertility alignment, including both having and not having children simultaneously.

Attitudinal scholarship on values related to merit often identifies three key dimensions that include: attitudes towards hard work, attitudes towards skill, and attitudes towards social connections. In this paper, we examine how individuals evaluate the importance of these three dimensions simultaneously and from a multidimensional framework. We apply Latent Class Analysis (LCAs) on data from round 9 of the European Social Survey (ESS). We find three distinct clusters with the largest, exhibiting multidimensionality in beliefs, specifically on the dimension related to the importance of social connections. Individuals in this cluster identify the importance of hard work and skill, but also the importance of social connections in employment. Moreover, cluster membership is also related to class status with individuals from higher class backgrounds more likely to be associated with clusters that adhere to standard meritocratic values on all three dimensions.