Stories tagged sociology
Beats me. But sociologists from Northwestern University are hard on the case: interviewing and testing singles, recording them as they meet, and interviewing them after they go on dates. All in the name of science.
Tags : Nothing we didn’t already know, but it’s nice to have scientific confirmation: women prefer men who are slightly sociopathic. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Sociologists have found that Brazilians who watch soap operas, or novellas, have a significantly lower birth rate than those who do not, even after controlling for other factors. They theorize that the glamorous fictional characters in the shows have small families, and their fans, consciously or subconsciously, are following suit.
Nothing to worry about: the minimum wage is happy where it is!
Courtesy kandyjaxxOh, man, there are some funny jokes to make here about how conservatives are happy because, um, they…
I can’t do it. Conservatives don’t deserve to be made fun of. Or maybe they do? I can’t think of a good reason either way.
Ugh. I’m so tired out, you know? I just want to take a nap forever.
A recent study, funded by the National Science Foundation, seems to indicate that conservatives are generally happier people than liberals. The research supports a 2006 study in which 47 percent of “conservative Republicans” described themselves as “very happy,” compared to only 28 percent of “liberal democrats.” These new finds claim to pinpoint the specific reason for the disparity: conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.
The study found that conservatives were reported greater life-satisfaction and well-being than liberals, regardless of marital status, income, or church attendance. Conservatives also scored much higher on measures of rationalization, which “gauge a person’s tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.”
Statements such as “It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others,” and “This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are.” The idea of meritocracy, for instance, is often used to justify economic inequalities; people deserve their “social class attainment.”
However, if one’s beliefs are unable to justify gaps in status, one is generally left “frustrated and disheartened.” Like, why are more conservative people happier than me? I try to be happy. I try very hard to be happy. But here I am, just… just sitting, and and
My keyboard is filthy. It should be better than this.
I think I have asthma.
“Liberals,” states the report in the journal Psychological Science, “lack the ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light.”
That might be true. I’m no scientist, though. That’s probably true.
The authors of the study believe that a similar logic lies behind other forms of inequality. For example, research has shown that egalitarian women are less happy in their marriages compared to their “more traditional counterparts,” because they are more bothered by disparities in domestic labor.
I don’t know. It just doesn’t…
Sometimes I feel like liberals are lonely more too.
How obesity is spread: Just kidding, obesity my not be physically contagious but could your friends play a role in your weight?
Photo courtesy Henry LiA new study that looked at 32 years of data shows that your chubby pals might be making you fat. No seriously, researchers looked at a long term heart disease study that tracked people's weight as well as their friends and family members. By analyzing connections in people's social network they found that when one person gained weight, their friends were more likely to gain weight as well. Interestingly the effect was stronger with friends than it was with families.
The article above features more formal speculation by the scientists about the reasons for this correlation. However, in my unprofessional opinion this makes tons of sense. I mean acceptable body size and eating habits seem heavily affected by the people you hang out with. Eating is almost always social for me and as a result there is social pressure to eat in similar ways to everyone else I know. I mean I sure don't take the ladies on dates to Burger King, but then again when I am hangin' with some more "shlubby" of my "dude" pals I am more likely to strap on the feed bag at the OCB. But for the most part my friends eat healthy and in moderation and as result so do I...most of the time.
I've even experienced social pressure to reign in bad eating habits. I am a bit of a candy addict...that's probably an understatement. You know when you find your self at Super America at 3am buying a creamy long john, nerd rope, 32oz. of Coke, and a pack of Chewey Runts, well you have a problem. But, I digress. Since these habits fall outside of the norm for my social group I regularly feel pressured not to engage in this obviously detrimental behavior. Which, trust me, isn't a bad thing.
I would love to see more studies looking at the social aspects of the obesity epidemic. And I especially would love to hear your ideas on this subject.
James Loewen, a professor at the University of Vermont, has published a disturbing new book. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism tells the story of American cities and towns which kept out – and often drove out – all non-white residents. (The title comes from the signs which were often posted at the entrance to town, saying “N*****, Be Out Of Town By Sundown.”)
Researching this topic proved to be very difficult. A few towns actually had laws and ordinances prohibiting non-whites from living in the city. But most achieved their all-white status through unofficial means – violence, harassment, and unspoken agreements not to rent or sell to minorities. (Most sundown towns excluded blacks and/or Jews, though many in the West excluded Chinese, Mexicans and/or American Indians.) Very few towns ever discussed this aspect of their history in the newspaper or in official town histories. So, Loewen was faced with a challenge: how to prove racism without official evidence?
First, he had to come up with a definition. He decided to define a sundown town as an incorporated entity of at least 1,000 people that excluded blacks for decades – that was at least 99.9% white, and was that way on purpose. “Incorporated entity” meant he wasn't going to look at sparsely populated rural areas. It also meant he was looking at an entire town that had driven out blacks completely – not simply divided itself into all-white and all-black neighborhoods. Similarly, “at least 1,000 people” limited his search and focused on towns that probably had to make an effort to exclude blacks.
Finding towns that were all-white required reading census statistics. Not just reading them, but also interpreting them. He found towns that had dozens of black families in the census of 1870, 1880, and 1890 – but, in 1900, 1910, or 1920, suddenly dropped to zero. This could be a sign that the blacks were driven out of town by mob violence – something he could often confirm by reading newspapers.
Some towns had black populations with very unusual characteristics. For example, the census might show a town had 1,508 blacks, all male, no children, and none counted as head of a household. It would turn out that each of these 1,508 were prisoners at a jail. Or the census might show 67 blacks, almost all female, few children, and again none head of a household. These he found were domestic servants. In a few towns, the census showed just one black family, decade after decade. It often turned out that, when the citizens drove out the blacks, they left the town barber alone. In all such cases, blacks may have been on the census, but they were certainly not free to live within the city, so he counted them as sundown towns.
(Some towns, especially suburbs, were established as all-white and just stayed that way, even after such laws were declared unconstitutional.)
The trickiest part was proving that towns were all-white on purpose. Few ever wrote their policies into law. Instead, he had to rely on oral history. He would interview the town's oldest residents. If several of them independently offered the same explanation, he would accept that as evidence that that's probably what happened. (Some scientists dispute his methods, but historians and sociologists have long accepted oral histories to fill in gaps in the official record.)
So, how many sundown towns did Loewen find? He has confirmed at least 1,000 towns were exclusionary at some point in their history, and suspects the total number could be as many as ten thousand across the US. Hundreds of counties were all-white. The entire state of Idaho, for a time, was all-white. Most of these towns were in the Midwest – Illinois alone had over 470 sundown towns in 1970, about 70% of all the towns in the state. Other concentrations were found in the northeast, the Ozarks, Appalachia, and Oregon. (Interestingly, the deep South had very few – Loewen could only find six in the entire state of Mississippi. But outside the South, more than half of the cities and towns in America were whites-only for some period of time.)
Are there any sundown towns left today? Hard to say. Surely, there are several hundred all-white communities in the US today. But are they all-white on purpose? Housing discrimination is illegal. Mob violence has thankfully become rare.
But low-level harassment, which is harder to document, still drives blacks out of some towns. No one will hire them, store owners won't sell them anything. Home owners and real estate agents may unofficially agree to only sell to whites. Police give them a hard time. Some towns still have “whites-only” laws on the books. Even though those laws are unenforceable, if the entire town believes they are legal, then they will act as if they are.
So, while sundown towns have been illegal since 1968, there are still hundreds of communities which still operate that way. There are reports as recent as 2004 of blacks having trouble moving into certain towns. There were still “No Blacks After Dark” signs in some areas in the 1990s. And one town in Illinois had a siren on the city water tower. They would blow it every night at 6:00 pm to tell the blacks it was time to get out of town.
They didn't stop blowing the whistle until 1999.
(To learn more about sundown towns, you can read an interview with Loewen here and a review of his book here.
A researcher in Chicago is making novel use of the Internet, according to this article in the Tribune. (Registration may be required, but it's free.) Emily Noelle Ignacio, a professor at Loyola University, studies the way people interact and form communities on-line. She focused her attention on the Filipino-American community.
Over 21 months, while working on her doctoral dissertation, Ignacio printed out and analyzed about 2,000 of the best postings from about 20,000 members of that Internet newsgroup, a forum of interest to Filipinos with a yearning for news and talk of their homeland.
"People really wanted to make it a virtual home, to go online, to hear what's going on, to talk with other Filipinos around the world," she said.
Unlike others in her trade who have gone to Samoa or the forests of Borneo to glean insights from those they were studying, Ignacio turned to her computer to show how Filipinos "have used subtle, cyber, but very real social connections to construct and reinforce a sense of ... identity with distant others."
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