September 2008, Volume 87, Number 1

Racial, Educational and Religious Endogamy in the United States:

A Comparative Historical Perspective
Michael J. Rosenfeld, Stanford University

This article compares marriage patterns by race, education and religion in the United States during the 20th century, using a variety of data sources. The comparative approach allows several general conclusions. First, racial endogamy has declined sharply over the 20th century, but race is still the most powerful division in the marriage market. Second, higher education has little effect on racial endogamy for blacks and whites. Third, the division between Jews and Christians is still strong, but the division between Catholics and Protestants in the marriage market has been relatively weak since the early 1900s. Fourth, educational endogamy has been relatively stable over time.

Movement of Movements:
Culture Moves in the Long Civil Rights Struggle
Larry Isaac, Vanderbilt University

In what way do movements move? What do we mean by the movement of movements? While still a rather unconventional stance, I advance the argument that social movements are, at root, culture production agents. Regardless of whatever else they may accomplish, movements produce new cultural forms in the course of struggle; they often change and augment cultural stock in the process, and sometimes live on for generations in collective memory. My answer to the query follows a movement-centered production and circulation of culture template organized around several major moments of culture moves: moving across space, moving emotions, moving social-cultural conditions and moving through memory. I illustrate culture moves in these four moments using sociological and historical studies of the long civil rights movement, suggesting a variety of research agendas along the way.

Black Voting During the Civil Rights Movement:
A Micro-level Analysis
Kraig Beyerlein, University of Arizona
Kenneth T. Andrews, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This article examines why some black Southerners but not others were politically active during the early stages of the civil rights movement. Using a survey of more than 600 black Southerners in 1961, we investigate whether perceptions about opportunity or threat, politicized social capital and individual orientations toward social change shaped voting in the 1960 Presidential election. Perceptions of solidarity in the black community and repression against politically active blacks encourage voting, while the perception of white support for integration does not. Participating in civic and religious organizations and discussing politics with friends and co-workers (but not family members) increase the likelihood of voting. Our findings extend political opportunity and social capital theories in important ways while offering new insights into this historically important case of civic engagement.

 
Who is Headed South?
U.S. Migration Trends in Black and White, 1970-2000
Larry L. Hunt, University of Maryland
Matthew O. Hunt, Northeastern University
William W. Falk, University of Maryland

This research examines inter-regional migration patterns in the United States by native-born whites and blacks over the final four decades of the 20^th century. Our primary research question is whether regional changes in the United States have made the South a more favorable destination than it once was, especially for blacks. Using samples of census data from 1970 to 2000, we analyze white/black differences in primary (an original move) and return migration to the South, as well as in the selectivity of migration. We observe increasing rates of black (compared to white) migration to the South. Additionally, patterns of selectivity within this growing black migration stream suggest that younger, more educated black women are an important component of this regional population shift.

Post-secondary Educational Attainment of Immigrant and Native Youth
Ursula Keller, Florida State University
Kathryn Harker Tillman, Florida State University 

We examine immigrant generation differences in college attendance and college type among youth ages 18 through 26 who have graduated from a U.S. high school. Results indicate that first- and second-generation immigrants are significantly more likely to attend college than their third-plus generation counterparts of similar race/ethnicity, socioeconomic and family background characteristics. While parental behaviors and expectations for college attendance do not significantly mediate these generational differences, these factors appear to indirectly affect college-going behavior through their impact on students’ verbal ability and academic achievement during high school. Interaction models including race/ethnicity and generation status reveal that the second-generation effects on college attendance are largely driven by Chinese youth, whereas the first-generation effects on college attendance are largely driven by black immigrant students.

How Knowledge is Power:
Education and the Sense of Control
Scott Schieman, University of Toronto
Gabriele Plickert, University of Toronto

Using data from a 2005 nationally representative survey of working adults residing in the United States, we show that education is associated positively with a sense of personal control. The well-educated have higher status occupations which include higher levels of schedule control, challenging, interesting and enriching work, greater economic rewards and security, and a higher level of trust. Collectively, these patterns contribute substantially to the association between education and sense of control. We also observe that demanding work has a negative effect on sense of control, but this emerges only after adjusting for other higher status work conditions that correspond with demands. Our observations inform the integration of theoretical perspectives to describe education’s benefits for personal and social functioning.

Job Loss at Mid-life:
Managers and Executives Face the “New Risk Economy”
Ruby Mendenhall, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ariel Kalil, University of Chicago
Laurel J. Spindel, University of Chicago
Cassandra M.D. Hart, Northwestern University

We use a life course framework to examine how the “new risk economy” has left middle-age professionals, managers and executives more vulnerable to job loss and unemployment despite high levels of human capital. Using in-depth qualitative data from 77 recently-unemployed white-collar workers, we examine perceptions of macro-economic forces and their implications for respondents’ career-recovery plans and expectations for their own and their children’s future career pathways. We find that most respondents attributed their job loss to factors associated with globalization and used coping strategies that involved adapting a “free-agent” mentality in the face of declining employer loyalty and deprofessionalization to manage perceptions of age bias. Respondents also make mastering the “new risk economy” a developmental goal for themselves and their children.

 
Job Displacement and Social Participation over the Lifecourse:
Findings for a Cohort of Joiners
Jennie E. Brand, Universityof California, Los Angeles
Sarah A. Burgard, University of Michigan

We examine the effects of job displacement, an involuntary event associated with socioeconomic and psychological decline, on social participation. Using more than 45 years of panel data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, we find that job displacement is associated with significant, long-term lower probabilities of subsequent involvement with various forms of social participation for workers displaced during their prime earnings years; displacement is not associated with lower probabilities of involvement for workers displaced in the years approaching retirement. We also find that post-displacement socioeconomic and psychological decline explain very little of the negative effect of job displacement on social participation, and that a single displacement event, rather than a series of multiple displacement events, is most strongly associated with lower probabilities of social involvement.

 
Time for Children, Spouse and Self among Parents Who Work Nonstandard Hours
Vanessa R. Wight, University of Maryland, College Park
Sara B. Raley, McDaniel College
Suzanne M. Bianchi, University of Maryland, College Park

Using data from the 2003 and 2004 American Time Use Surveys, this article examines nonstandard work hours and their relationship to parents’ family, leisure and personal care time – informing the discussion of the costs and benefits of working nonstandard hours. The results suggest that parents who work nonstandard evening hours spend less time in some child-related activities than their counterparts who work standard daytime hours, but spend more time and more time alone with children. Married parents who work nonstandard hours spend less time with a spouse, and all parents with nonstandard hours get less sleep and watch less television than parents with standard work days.

 

Gender Differences in Providing Urgent Childcare among Dual-earner Parents
David J. Maume, University of Cincinnati

 
It may be premature to think that contemporary families are egalitarian because wives are working more and fathers are more involved with children. This research contends that egalitarianism is reflected in gender similarity in missing work to attend to children's needs. Drawing from two national surveys of dual-earner parents, familial factors (especially children and spouse's work hours) exceeded job-related factors in determining women's sole provision of urgent childcare. Although men's egalitarian ideology was positively associated with urgent-childcare provision, men as a whole were less likely than women to adapt their work efforts to familial demands. These findings suggest more persistent traditionalism than progress toward egalitarianism in work-family role performance. The implications of these results for future research were briefly discussed.

 
Changing Attitudes toward the Male Breadwinner, Female Homemaker Model: Influences of Women’s Employment and Education over the Lifecourse
Mick Cunningham, Western Washington University 

Declines in support for the male breadwinner, female homemaker family model in recent decades have been thoroughly documented, but research into the way such attitudes change over the life course remains limited. Drawing on panel data and latent growth curve modeling techniques, the study identifies patterns and predictors of attitude change from 1977 through 1993. Women's support for gender specialization in marriage declined rapidly from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, but this was followed by an interval of stability until the mid-1990s. Education is negatively associated with support for the male breadwinner model, but there was educational convergence in attitudes between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. The results highlight the critical role of women’s employment for explaining the pattern of attitude change across the life course.

 
Poor People, Poor Places and Access to Health Care in the United States
James B. Kirby, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Research suggests that community-level poverty is associated with access to health care net of individual-level characteristics, but no research investigates whether this association differs by individual-level income. Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Health Resource and Services Administration, I find that the negative relationship between the prevalence of poverty in communities and access to health care is much stronger for middle- and high-income individuals than for those in lower-income groups. I suggest that individuals may benefit from living among those in similar economic circumstances because they face similar obstacles to obtaining medical are. For poor individuals, the collective knowledge and experience embedded in poor communities may compensate for the otherwise negative influence of community-level poverty.

 
Defending Turf:
Racial Demographics and Hate Crime Against Blacks and Whites
Christopher J. Lyons, University of New Mexico

This study explores how racial composition, in-migration and community identity influence the distribution of antiblack and antiwhite hate crimes. Drawing on six years of Chicago Police Department reports, two decades of census data and community survey data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, the paper evaluates hypotheses derived from racial threat, macrostructural opportunity and defended community perspectives. Negative binomial models controlling for spatial dependence reveal different patterns for antiblack and antiwhite hate crimes across Chicago communities. Consistent with a defended communities model, antiblack hate crimes are most common in homogenous white communities with strong community identities undergoing recent black in-migration. In contrast, antiwhite hate crimes are most numerous in communities where blacks and white comprise near equal proportions, supporting macrostructural opportunity perspectives.

 
Why Organizational Ties Matter for Neighborhood Effects:
Resource Access through Childcare Centers
Mario Luis Small, University of Chicago
Erin M. Jacobs, MDRC
Rebekah Peeples Massengill, Princeton University 

How does neighborhood poverty affect the poor's ability to access resources such as health care and job information? Most studies have focused on individuals or neighborhoods; we focus on organizations – specifically, whether organizations are less connected if located in poor neighborhoods.  Our case study is childcare centers. We ask whether centers' organizational ties provide parents access to important resources, and whether neighborhood poverty affects this capacity. Based on qualitative fieldwork in 23 New York City centers, we develop hypotheses about this process. We test them on a representative sample of 293 centers. Findings uncover that centers provide important resource-access through their ties and that neighborhood poverty does not undermine this capacity. 

We suggest that organizational ties may help explain the inconsistent results of the neighborhood effects literature.

 
Inter-neighborhood Migration and Spatial Assimilation in a Multi-ethnic World:
Comparing Latinos, Blacks and Anglos
Scott J. South, University at Albany, SUNY
Kyle Crowder, Western Washington University
Jeremy Pais, University at Albany, SUNY

Longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics are used to examine patterns and determinants of migration into neighborhoods of varying racial and ethnic composition. Consistent with spatial assimilation theory, higher income and education facilitate moving into neighborhoods containing proportionally more non-Hispanic whites and, among Latinos, the native-born move to “more Anglo” neighborhoods than immigrants. Consistent with place stratification theory, blacks move to neighborhoods with significantly fewer Anglos than do comparable Latinos, and the effect of income on migration into more Anglo neighborhoods is stronger for most minority groups than for Anglos. Latinos differ only slightly from Anglos in their migration into neighborhoods with large black populations, and blacks do not differ from Anglos in their migration into neighborhoods with large Latino populations.

 
Too Cool for School?
Violence, Peer Status and High School Dropout
Jeremy Staff, Pennsylvania State University
Derek A. Kreager, Pennsylvania State University

Research shows that peer status in adolescence is positively associated with school achievement and adjustment. However, subculture theories of juvenile delinquency and school-based ethnographies suggest that (1. disadvantaged boys are often able to gain some forms of peer status through violence and (2. membership in violent groups undermines educational attainment. Building on these ideas, we use peer network data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine whether peer status within highly violent groups increases male risks of high school dropout. Consistent with the subcultural argument, we find that disadvantaged boys with high status in violent groups are at much greater risks of high school dropout than other students.
 

Movements, Countermovements and Policy Adoption:
The Case of Right-to-Work Activism
Marc Dixon, Dartmouth College

Research on social movements and public policy has expanded tremendously in recent years, yet little of this work considers the role of movement opponents in the political process or how the movement-countermovement dynamic is influential in contests over policy. This historical study begins to fill this void by analyzing the contestation between employers and labor movement actors in relation to two critical right-to-work campaigns in the industrial Midwest in the 1950s. I find that actors who balance formal, professionalized organization with a more localized presence on the ground are in a better position to pursue multiple mechanisms of influence and to shape policy, while internal divisions severely limit their prospects. Event structure analyses of right-to-work campaigns advance this discussion, revealing how social movement organizational characteristics matter to the extent that they enable opposing movements to counter each other’s actions in unfolding political processes. I conclude by discussing the implications of the findings for perspectives on social movements and politics, and for research dealing specifically with the U.S. labor movement.

 
Transforming Symbolic Law into Organizational Action:
Hate Crime Policy and Law Enforcement Practice
Ryken Grattet, University of California, Davis
Valerie Jenness, University of California, Irvine

For decades sociologists, criminologists, political scientists and socio-legal scholars alike have focused on the symbolic and instrumental dimensions of law in examinations of the effects of social reform and policy implementation. Following in this tradition, we focus on the relationship between hate crime policy and hate crime reporting to identify the conditions under which a symbolic law is accompanied by instrumental effects at the initial phase of the law enforcement process – the official recording of a hate crime event. Using data on California police and sheriff’s agencies we estimate hierarchical Poisson models to determine how agency-level enforcement efforts, chiefly the creation of a formal policy on hate crime, affect official hate crime reporting. We also examine how community and agency attributes influence the effects of policy on the reporting of hate crime. We find that agency characteristics, in this case measures of the integration of the local agency within the community, shape the degree to which agency policies affect the official reporting of hate crime. Our findings reveal that while symbolic law is not intrinsically incapable of producing changes in enforcement patterns such effects are contingent upon agency and community processes. Thus, we conclude by conceptualizing the varied enforcement contexts within which a body of symbolic law is rendered instrumental.  

 
Globalization, Foreign Investment Dependence and Agriculture Production:
Pesticide and Fertilizer Use in Less-developed Countries, 1990-2000
Andrew K. Jorgenson, North Carolina State University
Kennon A. Kuykendall, North Carolina State University

Bridging the areas of political-economic sociology, the sociology of agriculture and environmental sociology, this study tests two hypotheses derived from a refined theory of foreign investment dependence. The hypotheses state that pesticide and fertilizer use intensity in less-developed countries are both positively associated with foreign investment dependence in the primary sector. The use of such inputs in agriculture production is known to contribute to a variety of human health and environmental problems. Findings for random effects and static score panel regression analyses of 35 less-developed countries confirm the hypotheses, and point to the sociological relevance in assessing the potential social and environmental impacts of both the transnational organization and the relative scale of production in different sectors.

 
Status, Endorsement and the Legitimacy of Deviance
C. Wesley Younts, University of Connecticut

This research investigates one process through which deviance becomes legitimate and therefore expected of individuals within a group. On the one hand, the status of an individual initially suggesting deviance affects others’ personal beliefs that deviance is proper, and in turn the likelihood that they will enact and transmit deviance to new group members. On the other hand, endorsement of deviance by peers is sufficient to legitimate the behavior. As a result, individuals are more likely to enact and transmit endorsed deviance regardless of propriety. Results of a laboratory experiment, in which a confederate suggests that participants should cheat on a task, indicate that endorsement and status independently affect the likelihood participants cheated and suggested cheating to a new group, but that they do not interact.