Sunday, July 21, 2013

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 50(3)

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, August 2013: Volume 50, Issue 3

"A Good Man Always Knows His Limitations": The Role of Overconfidence in Criminal Offending
Thomas A. Loughran, Raymond Paternoster, Alex R. Piquero, and Jeffrey Fagan
Objectives: This study examines the prevalence of overconfidence in the perceived risk of committing crime and whether such overconfidence is related to criminal behavior. Methods: Two samples were used—a sample of high school students who committed minor offenses and a sample of serious juvenile offenders most with felony arrests. Overconfidence in risk was estimated as the difference between the perceived risk of arrest for one’s self and for a generalized other. The proportion of over- and underconfident persons were estimated in both samples, while pooled and random effects logit models were used to estimate the effect of risk on both self-reported offending and arrest within the sample of serious offenders. Results: A large proportion of youth were found to be overconfident with respect to their perceived risk, with a higher prevalence in the conventional high school sample. Within the sample of serious juvenile offenders, being overconfident about one’s own risk was found to be related to both self-reported offending and arrest, net of a base rate measure of others’ risk. Conclusions: We outline a theory of the relationship between overconfidence and crime that links overconfidence with a self-attribution bias and biased updating of perceived risk with new information.

A Longitudinal Assessment of the Impact of Foreclosure on Neighborhood Crime
Charles M. Katz, Danielle Wallace, and E. C. Hedberg
Objectives: To examine possible effects of housing foreclosure on neighborhood levels of crime and to assess temporal lags in the impact of foreclosure on neighborhood levels of crime. Methods: Longitudinal data from Glendale, Arizona, a city at the epicenter of the nation’s foreclosure problem. The authors rely on four data sources: (1) foreclosure data, (2) computer-aided dispatch (CAD)/police records management system (RMS) data, (3) U.S. census and census estimate data, and (4) land use data. Results: Foreclosure has a short-term impact, typically no more than 3 months, on total crime, property crime, and violent crime, and no more than 4 months for drug crime. Conclusions: Foreclosures do not have a long-term effect on crime in general, and have different, though modest effects on different types of crime. The relationship between foreclosure and crime is not linear in nature but rather is characterized by a temporal, short-term flux in crime.

Individual Offending, Routine Activities, and Activity Settings: Revisiting the Routine Activity Theory of General Deviance
Joel Miller
Objectives: To examine whether a diverse range of both structured and unstructured routine activities is associated with offending, and whether activities have crime-specific effects. Method: Data on 15-year-olds from the fourth wave of the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime were analyzed (minimum n = 3,064). Principal components analyses identified core routine activities. Random intercepts logistic regression models examined their associations with assault, fare evasion, shoplifting, vandalism, and drug use. Results: Core routine activities identified were hanging around with friends locally, hanging around away from home, nightlife, cultural and consumer activities, and involvement in youth clubs and sports. All had associations with offending, though effects varied by offense. For example, involvement in youth clubs and sports was positively associated with assault and fare evasion; involvement in nightlife was positively associated with assault and drug use; and hanging out with friends locally was positively associated with assault, shoplifting, and vandalism. Conclusions: It is theorized that the varied targets and facilitators present in different activity settings help account for study results. Findings are limited by the cross-sectional character of data analyzed and may be influenced by selection effects. They would benefit from further testing with longitudinal data.

Here and Gone: Anticipation and Separation Effects of Prison Visits on Inmate Infractions
Sonja E. Siennick, Daniel P. Mears, and William D. Bales
Objectives: This study examines the effect of prison visitation on the probability of inmate misconduct. Method: Our sample is an admissions cohort of over 7,000 inmates admitted to Florida correctional facilities between 2000 and 2002. The authors conducted multilevel analyses of the week-to-week association between officially recorded disciplinary infractions and prison visits, including spousal, significant other, parental, relative, and friend visits. Results: The probability of an in-prison infraction declines in anticipation of visits, increases immediately following visits, and then gradually declines to average levels. This pattern is relatively consistent across visitors and infraction types but is strongest for spousal visits and contraband infractions. More frequent visits are associated with a more rapid postvisit decline. Conclusions: If visits reduce the pains of imprisonment or increase social control, then these effects may be too short-lived to create lasting improvements in the behavior of individuals while incarcerated. Future research should attempt to replicate and explain these findings and examine the longer term effects of visitation on inmate adjustment during and after incarceration.

Explaining Temporary and Permanent Motor Vehicle Theft Rates in the United States A Crime-Specific Approach
Aki Roberts and Steven Block
Objectives: To apply crime-specific models based on differing potential offender pools and opportunity structures to temporary and permanent motor vehicle theft (MVT). Method: Using 310 U.S. cities with 50,000 or more residents, the current study developed and examined crime-specific multivariate models for temporary and permanent MVT rates. To evaluate the distinctiveness of crime-specific variables’ associations with each MVT type, the study also predicted each MVT rate via measures theoretically specific to the other. Results: Among temporary-specific variables, young male population and the percentage of households without a vehicle were positively associated with temporary MVT. Permanent-specific measures of adult male property offender pool size, percentage of households with high disposable income, unemployment, U.S.-Mexico border proximity, and auto-related businesses were associated with permanent MVT (though in an unexpected direction for disposable income). Some variables were associated with both types of MVT, but young male population was uniquely associated with temporary MVT while unemployment rate, distance to U.S.-Mexico border and number of auto-related businesses were specific to permanent MVT.Conclusions: Findings suggest that specific prevention approaches are  needed for each type of MVT. Shortcomings of the research include potential misclassification of temporary and permanent MVT and lack of some potentially important opportunity variables.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Theory and Society 42(4)

Theory and Society, July 2013: Volume 42, Issue 4

Transforming collective memory: mnemonic opportunity structures and the outcomes of racial violence memory movements
Raj Andrew Ghoshal
While some research on collective memory has addressed the creation of memory projects such as memorials and historical commissions, less attention has been paid to explaining variation in these projects’ success. America’s troubled history of lynchings and race riots is one topic increasingly addressed by commemorative projects. This article evaluates factors shaping efforts to imprint past racial violence into broader collective memory. Building on research on constraints imposed by actual pasts and environmental conditions, I argue that structural influences on collective memory, or mnemonic opportunity structures, powerfully affect the success of commemorative initiatives. I identify three major dimensions of mnemonic opportunity structures: (1) an environment’s present-day commemorative capacity, a past incident’s (2) ascribed significance, and (3) the moral valence of key characters at the time it occurred. Qualitative data from multiple case studies and 90 interviews, along with supplementary quantitative and qualitative comparative analyses (QCAs) of all recent projects marking segregation-era racial violence, illustrate the utility of the framework.

Bird in hand: How experience makes nature
Hillary Angelo
It is almost a truism that nature is social, but by what means is nature made social at the level of the interactional encounter? While the transformation of society/nature relationships is often approached through the problematic of distance, and at the scale of macro-historical transformation, this article uses a conflict between American birdwatchers and ornithologists over scientific “collecting” (literally, the killing of birds) to examine the processes through which individuals come to know nature, and come to know it so differently. With John Dewey’s (1958 [1925]) “experience” as the unit of analysis, I trace changes in each group’s experience with birds over the past century; the phenomenology of the resulting encounters; and the understanding that emerges from each in order to understand (1) how, empirically, these two very different loves of birds are formed, and (2) knowledge of nature as an affective sensibility shaped by experiences of closeness.

Struggle and solidarity: civic republican elements in Pierre Bourdieu’s political sociology
Chad Alan Goldberg
Pierre Bourdieu developed a theory of democratic politics that is at least as indebted to civic republicanism as to Marxism. He was familiar with the civic republican tradition, and it increasingly influenced both his political interventions and sociological work, especially late in his career. Bourdieu drew above all on Niccolò Machiavelli’s version of republicanism, though the French republican tradition also influenced him via Durkheimian social theory. Three elements of Bourdieu’s work in particular—his concept of field autonomy, his view of interests and universalism, and his understanding of how solidarity is generated and sustained—may be understood, at least in part, as sociological reformulations of republican ideas. By drawing attention to these republican influences, the article aims to show that the conceptual resources which some critics, including Jeffrey C. Alexander, consider indispensable to an adequate theory of democracy are not entirely absent in Bourdieu’s work. On the basis of this reassessment, the article concludes that Bourdieu and Alexander are not as opposed in their thinking about democratic politics as it might first appear.

Governing social practice
Jannis Kallinikos, Hans Hasselbladh & Attila Marton
In this article, we extend the concept of technology beyond the conventional understanding of systems and artifacts as embodiments of particular functionalities that are variously enacted in local settings. Technological artifacts or systems epitomize operational couplings that extend beyond the human-technology interface. Such couplings entail multiple, unobtrusive, back-staged links that evade human interpretation yet are critically involved in the reproduction and control of social relations. Cast in this light, technologies emerge as complex rationalized embodiments for structuring social relationships and, in this quality, complement and occasionally compete with institutional modes of governance. We explore these ideas in the empirical context of cultural memory organizations (e.g., libraries, archives, museums). As the outcome of the technological developments that have marked the field over the last two decades, the operations of memory institutions increasingly mingle with those of information aggregators and search engines. These developments reframe longstanding professional practices of memory organizations and, in this process, challenge their institutional mandate.

Journal of Marriage and Family 75(4)

Journal of Marriage and Family, August 2013: Volume 75, Issue 4

Relationship Processes

Gender Dynamics Predict Changes in Marital Love Among African American Couples
Christine E. Stanik, Susan M. McHale and Ann C. Crouter

“What Happens at Home Does Not Necessarily Stay at Home”: The Relationship of Observed Negative Couple Interaction With Physical Health, Mental Health, and Work Satisfaction
Jonathan G. Sandberg, James M. Harper, E. Jeffrey Hill, Richard B. Miller, Jeremy B. Yorgason and Randal D. Day

Age-Related Changes in Demand-Withdraw Communication Behaviors
Sarah R. Holley, Claudia M. Haase and Robert W. Levenson

Father–Child Relationships

Wrestling Proteus: Assessing the Varying Nature of Father Involvement Across Contexts
W. Justin Dyer, Randal D. Day and James M. Harper

Families Created by Donor Insemination: Father–Child Relationships at Age 7
Polly Casey, Vasanti Jadva, Lucy Blake and Susan Golombok

Overnight Custody Arrangements, Attachment, and Adjustment Among Very Young Children
Samantha L. Tornello, Robert Emery, Jenna Rowen, Daniel Potter, Bailey Ocker and Yishan Xu

Of General Interest

Wanting Mixed-Sex Children: Separate Spheres, Rational Choice, and Symbolic Capital Motivations
Colleen N. Nugent

Marital Quality, Socioeconomic Status, and Physical Health
Heejeong Choi and Nadine F. Marks

Early Adult Obesity and U.S. Women's Lifetime Childbearing Experiences
Michelle L. Frisco and Margaret Weden

Relationship Transitions Among Older Cohabitors: The Role of Health, Wealth, and Family Ties
Jonathan Vespa

Intergenerational Support and the Emotional Well-being of Older Jews and Arabs in Israel
Merril Silverstein, Ariela Lowenstein, Ruth Katz, Daphna Gans, Yu-Kang Fan and Petrice Oyama

Adolescents' Daily Assistance to the Family in Response to Maternal Need
Kim M. Tsai, Eva H. Telzer, Nancy A. Gonzales and Andrew J. Fuligni

Still the Favorite? Parents' Differential Treatment of Siblings Entering Young Adulthood
Sonja E. Siennick

Race/Ethnicity, Attitudes, and Living With Parents During Young Adulthood
Marcus L. Britton

Relieving the Time Squeeze? Effects of a White-Collar Workplace Change on Parents
Rachelle Hill, Eric Tranby, Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen

Exploring Parents' Experiences and Reactions to Adolescents' Hyperactivity, Impulsivity, and Attention Problems
Terese Glatz and Håkan Stattin

Intermarriage and Social Support Among Canadians in Middle and Later Life
Margaret Penning and Zheng Wu

American Journal of Sociology 118(6)

American Journal of Sociology, May 2013: Volume 118, Issue 6

The Power of Instability: Unraveling the Microfoundations of Bargained Authoritarianism in China
Ching Kwan Lee and Yonghong Zhang
This article develops an interactive and relational conception of infrastructural state power for studying the capacity of authoritarian regimes to absorb popular protests. Based on an ethnography of the grassroots state in moments of unrest in China, the authors identify three microfoundations of Chinese authoritarianism: protest bargaining, legal-bureaucratic absorption, and patron-clientelism. Adopting, respectively, the logics of market exchange, rule-bound games, and interpersonal bonds, these mechanisms have the effect of depoliticizing social unrest and constitute a lived experience of authoritarian domination as a non-zero-sum situation, totalizing and transparent yet permissive of room for maneuvering and bargaining. This heuristic framework calls for bringing the subjective experience of subordination back into the theorizing of state domination.

The Demography of Social Mobility: Black-White Differences in the Process of Educational Reproduction
Vida Maralani
Increases in women’s education represent one of the most wide-reaching socioeconomic changes of recent decades. But how much will future generations benefit from these gains, and will black and white Americans benefit equally? Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this study examines differences in the process of educational reproduction for black and white Americans. The approach considers the implication of race and education differences in marriage, assortative mating, and fertility in the parent generation on the distribution of schooling in the next generation. The analyses use a dynamic, multidimensional model that allows for intergenerational pathways at the individual, family, and population levels. The results show that these demographic mechanisms play an important role in explaining race differences in educational reproduction. Ignoring these pathways underestimates intergenerational effects for whites and overestimates them for blacks.

Understanding Latin American Beliefs about Racial Inequality
Edward Telles and Stanley Bailey
Scholars argue that Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, or racial mixing, mask ethnoracial discrimination. We examine popular explanations for indigenous or Afrodescendant disadvantage in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru using the 2010 AmericasBarometer survey. Findings show that numerical majorities across all countries endorse structural-disadvantage explanations and reject victim-blaming stances; in seven of eight countries, they specifically recognize discrimination against ethnoracial minorities. Brazilians most point to structural causes, while Bolivians are least likely to recognize discrimination. While educational status differences tend to be sizable, dominant and minority explanations are similar. Both are comparable to African-American views and contrast with those of U.S. whites.

Making the Connection: Social Bonding in Courtship Situations
Daniel A. McFarland, Dan Jurafsky, and Craig Rawlings
Sociologists have long argued that the force of a social bond resides in a sense of interpersonal connection. This is especially true for initial courtship encounters when pairs report a sense of interpersonal chemistry. The authors explore the process of romantic bonding by applying interaction ritual theory, extended and integrated with methods from computational linguistics, to the study of courtship encounters and, specifically, heterosexual speed dating. The authors find that the assortment of interpersonal moves associated with a sense of connection characterizes a conventionalized form of initial courtship activity. The game is successfully played when females are the point of focus and engaged in the conversation and males demonstrate alignment with and understanding of the female. In short, initial heterosexual courtship encounters are associated with a sense of bonding when they reflect a reciprocal asymmetrical performance in which differentiated roles are mutually coordinated.

Interethnic Friendship, Trust, and Tolerance: Findings from Two North Iraqi Cities
Jens Rydgren, Dana Sofi, and Martin Hällsten
This article examines correlates of social trust and tolerance within a high-violence context. The authors study first the extent to which friendship ties that cross ethnic boundaries are associated with specific interaction spaces (neighborhoods, workplaces, civil society organizations, and political parties) and, second, the extent to which interethnic friendships are associated with trust and tolerance. Using individual-level data (N = 2,264) on interethnic contacts collected in 2006 in the two northern Iraqi cities of Erbil and Kirkuk, the authors show that people who spend time within ethnically heterogeneous interaction spaces are considerably more likely to have friendship ties that cross ethnic group boundaries and, in turn, also to express general social trust, interethnic trust, and tolerance toward outgroups.