The ANNALS of the AAPSS 660

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 2015: Volume 660

Residential Inequality in American Neighborhoods and Communities

Introduction

Residential Inequality: Orientation and Overview
Barrett A. Lee, Stephen A. Matthews, John Iceland, and Glenn Firebaugh

Racial and Ethnic Segregation
Creating the Black Ghetto: Black Residential Patterns before and during the Great Migration
John R. Logan, Weiwei Zhang, Richard Turner, and Allison Shertzer

Spatial Assimilation in U.S. Cities and Communities? Emerging Patterns of Hispanic Segregation from Blacks and Whites
Daniel T. Lichter, Domenico Parisi, and Michael C. Taquino

Desvinculado y Desigual: Is Segregation Harmful to Latinos?
Justin Steil, Jorge De la Roca, and Ingrid Gould Ellen

The Income Divide

Neighborhood Income Composition by Household Race and Income, 1990–2009
Sean F. Reardon, Lindsay Fox, and Joseph Townsend

Assisted Housing and Income Segregation among Neighborhoods in U.S. Metropolitan Areas
Ann Owens

Housing Unit Turnover and the Socioeconomic Mix of Low-Income Neighborhoods
Brett Theodos, Claudia J. Coulton, and Rob Pitingolo

Contested Space: Design Principles and Regulatory Regimes in Mixed-Income Communities in Chicago
Robert J. Chaskin and Mark L. Joseph

Locational Attainment and Housing Insecurity

Achieving the Middle Ground in an Age of Concentrated Extremes: Mixed Middle-Income Neighborhoods and Emerging Adulthood
Robert J. Sampson, Robert D. Mare, and Kristin L. Perkins

Immigrant Context and Opportunity: New Destinations and Socioeconomic Attainment among Asians in the United States
Chenoa Flippen and Eunbi Kim

The Great Risk Shift and Precarity in the U.S. Housing Market
Rachel E. Dwyer and Lora A. Phillips Lassus

Variations in Housing Foreclosures by Race and Place, 2005–2012
Matthew Hall, Kyle Crowder, and Amy Spring

Understanding Residential Moves

A Comparison of Traditional and Discrete-Choice Approaches to the Analysis of Residential Mobility and Locational Attainment
Lincoln Quillian

Community Attraction and Avoidance in Chicago: What’s Race Got to Do with It?
Michael D. M. Bader and Maria Krysan

Arab American Housing Discrimination, Ethnic Competition, and the Contact Hypothesis
S. Michael Gaddis and Raj Ghoshal

Neighborhood Change

White Entry into Black Neighborhoods: Advent of a New Era?
Lance Freeman and Tiancheng Cai

Gentrification in Changing Cities: Immigration, New Diversity, and Racial Inequality in Neighborhood Renewal
Jackelyn Hwang

Violence and Neighborhood Disadvantage after the Crime Decline
Michael Friedson and Patrick Sharkey

Conclusion

Residential Inequality: Significant Findings and Policy Implications
Glenn Firebaugh, John Iceland, Stephen A. Matthews, and Barrett A. Lee

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 52(4)

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, July 2015: Volume 52, Issue 4

Special Issue: Reimagining Broken Windows: From Theory to Policy

Reimagining Broken Windows: From Theory to Policy
Brandon C. Welsh, Anthony A. Braga, and Gerben J. N. Bruinsma

This article serves as a substantive introduction and guiding post for the journal’s special issue on “Reimagining Broken Windows: From Theory to Policy.” It describes the core concepts of the broken windows perspective, examines its theoretical underpinnings, and sets out priorities for future research and policy development. Important advancements have been made in the intellectual development and programmatic application of the broken windows perspective over the last 30 years. Some of these advancements include the measurement of disorder and experimentation of community and problem-solving strategies for policing disorder. There are also many challenges, including the need for a more consistent operationalization of disorder, a better understanding of potential mechanisms, and concerns about policy overreach in the name of broken windows. We predict that the broken windows perspective will be around for many more decades to come—its enduring qualities far exceed a smartly coined phrase.

Disorder and Decline: The State of Research
Wesley Skogan

Objectives: A significant and diverse body of research has built up during the 30+ years since the publication of Wilson and Kelling’s seminal “broken windows” article. They affected research, policy, and politics around the world. This article summarizes some of the main strands of research that have since sprung up around these and other claims. Objectives: “Broken windows” theory is an influential model of neighborhood change, but there is disagreement over whether public disorder leads to more serious crime. This article distinguishes between public and private disorder, arguing that large-scale administrative data provide new opportunities to examine broken windows theory and alternative models of neighborhood change. Method: We apply an ecometric methodology to two databases from Boston: 1,000,000+ 911 dispatches and indicators of physical disorder from 200,000+ requests for nonemergency services. Both distinguish between disorder in public and private spaces. A cross-lag longitudinal analysis was conducted using two full years of data (2011–2012). Results: The two databases provided six dimensions of physical and social disorder and crime. The cross-lag model revealed eight pathways by which one form of disorder or crime in 2011 predicted a significant increase in another in 2012. Although traditional interpretations of broken windows emphasize the role of public disorder, private conflict most strongly predicted future crime. Conclusions: Our results describe a social escalation model where future disorder and crime emerge not from public cues but from private disorder within the community, demonstrating how “big data” from administrative records, when properly measured and interpreted, represent a growing resource for studying neighborhood change.Results: This article discusses approaches to conceptualizing and measuring disorder and weighs the strengths and weaknesses of various measurement modalities. It summarizes what this research has revealed about the apparent causes and effects of disorder. Conclusion: Research documents that disorder has broad implications for public health and safety and that it is deeply implicated in the dynamics of neighborhood stability and change. Further, there is evidence that—directly and via its impact on other features of community life—disorder stimulates conventional crime.

Public and Private Spheres of Neighborhood Disorder: Assessing Pathways to Violence Using Large-scale Digital Records
Daniel Tumminelli O’Brien and Robert J. Sampson

Objectives: “Broken windows” theory is an influential model of neighborhood change, but there is disagreement over whether public disorder leads to more serious crime. This article distinguishes between public and private disorder, arguing that large-scale administrative data provide new opportunities to examine broken windows theory and alternative models of neighborhood change. Method: We apply an ecometric methodology to two databases from Boston: 1,000,000+ 911 dispatches and indicators of physical disorder from 200,000+ requests for nonemergency services. Both distinguish between disorder in public and private spaces. A cross-lag longitudinal analysis was conducted using two full years of data (2011–2012). Results: The two databases provided six dimensions of physical and social disorder and crime. The cross-lag model revealed eight pathways by which one form of disorder or crime in 2011 predicted a significant increase in another in 2012. Although traditional interpretations of broken windows emphasize the role of public disorder, private conflict most strongly predicted future crime. Conclusions: Our results describe a social escalation model where future disorder and crime emerge not from public cues but from private disorder within the community, demonstrating how “big data” from administrative records, when properly measured and interpreted, represent a growing resource for studying neighborhood change.

Where Broken Windows Should Be Fixed: Toward Identification of Areas at the Tipping Point
Wouter Steenbeek and Christian Kreis

Objectives: Introduce a systematic method to identify areas with similar levels of disorder (from serene, to “tipping,” to crime-ridden) which is crucial for a valid empirical test of Broken Windows Theory (BWT). Methods: Systematic social observation data are used of almost 2,000 locations in the city of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Spatially constrained hierarchical agglomerative clustering is used to aggregate individual observation locations to form homogeneous areas. Davies–Bouldin index and intraclass correlation coefficient are used to objectively identify the optimum number of clusters. Results: The newly identified areas differ from administrative neighborhoods as well as hot spots of disorder. The regionalization method provides a tentative solution to both the “zonation” and “aggregation” problems of the modifiable areal unit problem liable to affect empirical studies of BWT. Conclusions: Hot spot analysis fails to identify areas with moderate levels of disorder, which impedes testing the basic precept of BWT. Our results may partly explain why the evidence on the effectiveness of order maintenance policing remains inconclusive. We suggest that randomized controlled trials of order maintenance policing should be performed on these new areas rather than in hot spots of disorder.

Do We “See” the Same Thing? An Experimental Look into the Black Box of Disorder Perception
Sue-Ming Yang and Chih-Chao Pao

Objectives: We examine the process of disorder perception to test whether different people perceive social and physical phenomenon the same way. Methods: We use laboratory experimental methods to collect information from 361 respondents (120 police officers and 241 students). One hundred photos with various social and physical attributes were shown during the experiment to test how they affect individuals’ judgments. Specifically, we test the effects of physical signs and social traits such as the race and dress styles of social actors on disorder perception. Results: The presence of physical disorder, such as trash and graffiti, increases respondents’ ratings of disorderliness. Moreover, race and dress style had significant impacts on how respondents perceived social and physical environments. Conclusions: We challenge the perception invariant assumption behind the broken windows thesis. When only physical disorder is present, the consistency of ratings is high. When both social and physical cues are present, agreement among respondents drops to about 50 percent. Moreover, places with lower-class foreign groups are more likely to be viewed as disorderly. Thus, we caution the validity of broken windows-based policies. Future research needs to replicate the research in a more diverse society to verify the generalizability of the findings.

Can Policing Disorder Reduce Crime? A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
Anthony A. Braga, Brandon C. Welsh, and Cory Schnell

Objective: Crime policy scholars and practitioners have argued for years that when police address social and physical disorder in neighborhoods they can prevent serious crime, yet evaluations of the crime control effectiveness of disorder policing strategies yield conflicting results. This article reports on the results of the first systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of disorder policing on crime. Methods: Systematic review protocols and conventions of the Campbell Collaboration were followed, and meta-analytic techniques were used to assess the impact of disorder policing on crime and investigate the influence of moderating variables. Results: We identified 30 randomized experimental and quasi-experimental tests of disorder policing. Our meta-analysis suggests that policing disorder strategies are associated with an overall statistically significant, modest crime reduction effect. The strongest program effect sizes were generated by community and problem-solving interventions designed to change social and physical disorder conditions at particular places. Conversely, aggressive order maintenance strategies that target individual disorderly behaviors do not generate significant crime reductions. Conclusion: The types of strategies used by police departments to control disorder seem to matter, and this holds important implications for police–community relations, justice, and crime prevention. Further research is needed to understand the key programmatic elements that maximize the capacity of these strategies to prevent crime.

Understanding the Mechanisms Underlying Broken Windows Policing: The Need for Evaluation Evidence
David Weisburd, Joshua C. Hinkle, Anthony A. Braga, and Alese Wooditch

Objectives: We argue that the model underlying broken windows policing requires a developmental sequence involving reductions in fear of crime and eventual enhancement of community social controls. We investigate whether existing evaluation studies provide evidence on these mechanisms. Methods: Drawing from a larger systematic review of disorder policing, we identify six eligible studies. We use narrative review and meta-analytic methods to summarize the impacts of these interventions on fear of crime and collective efficacy (a proxy for community social controls). Findings: Disorder policing strategies do not have a significant impact on fear of crime in a meta-analysis of six studies. In the one study measuring collective efficacy, there is also not a significant outcome. Conclusions: Existing broken windows policing programs do not show evidence of influencing the key mechanisms of the broken windows model of crime prevention, though evidence is currently not persuasive. We outline four key directions for improving research in this area, namely, (1) explore the mechanisms underlying the model, not just test crime outcomes; (2) use measures of disorder distinct from crime; (3) employ longitudinal designs to better fit the developmental nature of the mechanism; and (4) include observational analyses to examine the complex nature of feedback mechanisms.

Broken Windows, Neighborhoods, and the Legitimacy of Law Enforcement or Why I Fell in and out of Love with Zimbardo
Tracey Meares

Objective: Wilson and Kelling (1982) introduced Zimbardo’s “broken windows” into the lexicon a little over 30 years ago. This article explores broken windows from a legal policy perspective, with the aim of putting forth a framework for integrating what we know (or think we know) about the potential effects of broken windows policing into our goals for improving high-crime neighborhoods. Methods: A narrative review was carried out of key social science research on the broken windows perspective. Results: The first part of the article explains the appeal of broken windows to legal theorists interested in challenging criminal law policy based on a law and economics approach. The second part reviews maturing broken windows research and evaluations of broken windows policing. The third part explains the contours of an analysis that addresses the value of broken windows policing from a legal policy perspective. Conclusion: While I remain a tentative fan of broken windows policing, I argue that the modest outcomes of broken windows policing do not justify the problems these policies create from a procedural justice context. The policy literature ignores this trade-off, and a curriculum framework that emphasizes how the criminal justice system educates citizens may offer a promising alternative.

An Author’s Brief History of an Idea
George Kelling

British Journal of Criminology 55(4)

British Journal of Criminology, July 2015: Volume 55, Issue 4

Let Sleeping Lawyers Lie: Organized Crime, Lawyers and the Regulation of Legal Services
David Middleton and Michael Levi

The study examines the range of crimes in which solicitors become involved as primary offenders (mainly fraud) or on behalf of others (criminal planning and money laundering) and critically reviews the factors in their personal and working environment that may promote or inhibit such crimes and the ways that criminologists and socio-legal scholars have accounted for deviance and the regulation of the profession. It ends by discussing trends in contemporary lawyering and its regulation—ethics, discipline, ownership and surveillance—that could plausibly affect rates of crime by solicitors, focusing on England and Wales but also giving some comparative context with the United States.

‘Police Culture’ at Work: Making Sense of Police Oversight

Holly Campeau

Within police studies, ‘police culture’ is often depicted according to a series of values (e.g. conservatism, solidarity, suspicion, etc.). This article argues in favour of an alternative conceptualization of police ‘culture’, which draws on concepts from the sociology of culture. Police culture is viewed as a resource, which actors deploy within particular institutional constraints. Drawing on 100 interviews and participant observation in a police department, the analysis examines how officers negotiate meaning in an unsettled occupational environment prompted by heightened levels of police oversight. Two culture indicators are examined: solidarity and mission. This article represents an explicit attempt to theorize police culture sociologically and invoke an adaptive framework for uncovering how actors use culture within a definable set of structuring conditions.

The Pluralization of High Policing: Convergence and Divergence at the Public–Private Interface
Conor O’Reilly

High policing has long been associated with the preservation and augmentation of state interests by the intelligence community. However, this paradigm can neither be examined, nor theorized, within an exclusively ‘public’ framework; a host of ‘private’ actors must now be acknowledged on this conceptual terrain. Moving beyond well-acknowledged patterns of outsourcing intelligence, this paper brings sharper research attention to transnational security consultancies as well as the more shadowy realms of boutique intelligence firms, private detectives and freelance covert operatives. By examining these new private categories of high policing, this paper considers the complex patterns of convergence and divergence that characterize the public–private interface. Specific attention is devoted to resources of symbolic power and how these impact the capacity for coercive action.

Police Innovations, ‘Secret Squirrels’ and Accountability: Empirically Studying Intelligence-led Policing in Canada

Carrie B. Sanders, Crystal Weston, and Nicole Schott

In an environment of fiscal constraint and growing fear of catastrophic events, police services are turning to intelligence and analytic technologies to conduct aggressive information gathering and risk analysis. The present study uses 86 in-depth interviews and participant observation to explore the integration and utilization of intelligence-led policing (ILP) in a Canadian context. From this analysis, we identify how police cultures, organizational context and situational pace of policing constrain an intelligence-led framework. Further, we illustrate how police services have rhetorically adopted ILP and translated it to mean accountability in a time of austerity. By translating ILP, Canadian police services have been able to redefine success within their services without necessarily attending to the outcomes of their practices.

Simmel, the Police Form and the Limits of Democratic Policing

Diarmaid Harkin

I argue that the social theory of Georg Simmel can be used to illustrate certain limitations to the potential of democratic policing. Simmel makes a number of claims about trust, secrecy and accountability that are shown to have immediate relevance to my empirical case study of police–public consultation forums in Edinburgh, Scotland. Two particular aspects of the ‘form’ of the police–public relationship—the police’s command of non-negotiable force and inequality in the reciprocity of information—play a key role in limiting some of the principal aspirations of democratic policing theory. There are permanent barriers to improving the democratic credentials of the police I argue, yet positive and progressive change is still achievable.

Cultural and Institutional Adaptation and Change in Europe: A Test of Institutional Anomie Theory Using Time Series Modelling of Homicide Data
Diana S. Dolliver

This study examined whether geographic differences in intentional homicide rates in Europe were a function of societies that exhibit Anomic cultural tendencies and an institutional imbalance, as guided by Institutional Anomie Theory. This research is temporally sensitive, taking into account these differences over a 15-year time period. Additionally, separate operations of the theory within developed and transitioning countries were tested, and various cultural–institutional configurations were uncovered that led to increases or decreases in homicide rates. While still restricted by a lack of guidance from Messner and Rosenfeld and inconsistency in past research on how to operationalize key concepts of Institutional Anomie Theory, this study significantly contributes to the literature by assessing core theoretical questions of the theory while employing appropriate measurement strategies.

First Nations Peoples and Judicial Sentencing: Main Effects and the Impact of Contextual Variability
Krystal Lockwood, Timothy C. Hart, and Anna Stewart

Over-representation of First Nations peoples throughout criminal justice systems is an ongoing critical public policy issue. Judicial sentencing is a pivotal process, which has complex relationships with legal and extra-legal factors. In this study, we use data of serious offences from Queensland’s lower and higher courts from 2009 to 2010. First, logistic regression is used to consider the main effect of Indigenous status on the decision to imprison. Second, conjunctive analyses are used to determine whether contextual variability can illustrate when sentencing disparities occur. Results show the main effect of Indigenous status remained statistically significant in both court levels after controlling for variables. However, contextual variability influenced both the magnitude and direction of the effect of Indigenous status on sentencing.

Feeling Unsafe in a Multicultural Neighbourhood: Indigenous Inhabitants’ Perspectives
Thaddeus Müller and Tamar Fischer

Feeling unsafe in a multicultural neighbourhood has been related—especially in the case of indigenous inhabitants—to the presence of groups of young immigrant men in public space. However, indigenous inhabitants differ in their response to the presence of immigrant men. Our goal is to examine (in a qualitative and quantitative way) whether interethnic social involvement has added value when it comes to explaining the experience of fear of crime, as compared to general social involvement. We conclude that our thesis regarding the relevance of interethnic social involvement for explaining the experience of safety is sustained by our material. Therefore, we advise that interethnic social involvement should be integrated in future studies on the fear of crime.

Narratives and Counternarratives: Somali-Canadians on Recruitment as Foreign Fighters to Al-Shabaab

Paul Joosse, Sandra M. Bucerius, and Sara K. Thompson

Recently, the Somali diaspora has found itself at the centre of heightened security concerns surrounding the proliferation of international terrorist networks and their recruitment strategies. These concerns have reached new levels since the absorption of al-Shabaab into al-Qaeda in 2012. Based on a qualitative analysis of interviews with 118 members of Canada’s largest Somali community, this article draws upon narrative criminology to reverse the ‘why they joined’ question that serves as the predicate for much recent radicalization scholarship, and instead explores, ‘why they would never join’. We encounter Somali-Canadians equipping themselves with sophisticated counternarratives that vitiate the enticements of al-Shabaab. Particularly, notions of ‘coolness’, ‘trickery’ and ‘religious perversion’ mediate participants’ perceptions of al-Shabaab and enable a self-empowering rejection of its recruitment narratives. In particular, we find resonances between the narratives of non-recruits and ‘bogeyman’ narratives that exist commonly in many cultures. The efficacy of these narratives for resilience is three-fold, positioning the recruiters as odious agents, recruits as weak-minded dupes and our participants as knowledgeable storytellers who can forewarn others against recruitment to al-Shabaab.

Journal of Criminal Justice 43(3)

Journal of Criminal Justice, May 2015: Volume 43, Issue 3

Racial (in)variance in prison rule breaking

Benjamin Steiner, John Wooldredge

Purpose: Sampson and Wilson (1995) argued that the sources of crime are invariant across race, and are instead rooted in the structural differences between communities. This study involved an examination of the applicability of this thesis to incarcerated individuals. Methods: Random samples totaling 2,388 blacks and 3,118 whites were drawn from 46 prisons in Ohio and Kentucky. Race-specific and pooled bi-level models of violent and nonviolent rule violations were estimated. Differences between race-specific models in the magnitude of regression coefficients for the same predictors and outcomes were compared. Results: Findings revealed that individual and environmental effects were very similar between black and white inmates, although rates of violent and nonviolent rule breaking were higher for blacks. Within prisons, black inmates were also more likely than white inmates to engage in rule breaking. The individual-level relationship between race and violence was stronger in prisons with a lower ratio of black to white inmates and in prisons where inmates were more cynical towards legal authority. Conclusions: Findings seemingly refute the applicability of the racial invariance hypothesis to an incarcerated population.

Metropolitan local crime clusters: Structural concentration effects and the systemic model

Lallen T. Johnson, Ralph B. Taylor, Elizabeth R. Groff

Purpose: Using community structure and the racial-spatial divide as a framework, this study examines whether geographic sub-regions of violent crime exist in a large metropolitan area, and if the systemic model of crime can predict them. In addition, surrounding social structure measures are included to determine whether they demonstrate the same violent crime links seen in recent work on concentration impacts. Methods: A LISA analysis is used to identify violent crime clusters for 355 jurisdictions in the Philadelphia (PA)-Camden (NJ) primary metropolitan area over a 9-year period. Multinomial logit hierarchical/mixed effects models are used to predict cluster classification using focal and lagged structural covariates. Results: Models confirmed links of focal jurisdiction socioeconomic status and residential stability with sub-region classification. Models with spatially lagged predictors show powerful impacts of spatially lagged racial composition. Conclusions: Findings extend work on racial concentration effects and the basic systemic model to metropolitan sub-regions. Implications for shifting spatial inequalities in metropolitan structure and questions about responsible dynamics merit attention.

On the general relationship between victimization and offending: Examining cultural contingencies

Chad Posick, Laurie A. Gould

Culture has been implicated in a wide range of individual behaviors. However, empirical investigation of how culture impacts violent behavior is limited. In particular, the well-established finding that there is an overlap between offenders and victims has not been examined in a culturally comparative context - limiting the ability to generalize current findings across cultures. Purpose: This study uses data from the second International Self-Report Delinquency Study (ISRD-II), a large school-based sample of adolescents in grades 7-9, and three measures from the Hofstede Dimensions of National Culture dataset to investigate how culture might moderate the relationship between victimization and offending. Methods: A series of multivariate, multilevel models are run examining variation in the victim-offender overlap across contexts and attempting to explain why variations exist. Results: The results indicate that victimization remains a salient predictor of offending across contexts with overall consistency in its effect on offending. Some cultural indicators were shown to slightly moderate this relationship. Conclusions: While consistency in the victim-offender overlap was clear, individualism was a cultural-level variable that displayed a weak but statistically significant moderation effect on the victim-offender relationship suggesting that culture should not be altogether ignored in studies on violence.

Gender and Arrests for Larceny, Fraud, Forgery, and Embezzlement: Conventional or Occupational Property Crime Offenders?

Darrell Steffensmeier, Casey T. Harris, Noah Painter-Davis

Purpose: Our goal is to address a major debate within criminology – among scholars and practitioners interested in white collar/corporate crime and the gender-crime relationship in particular – regarding the types of offenses and offenders represented within the Uniform Crime Report categories of larceny, fraud, forgery, and embezzlement (LFFE). In particular, we examine whether female versus male arrests are serious, employment-situated offenses or instead represent minor, conventional property crime. Methods: We utilize detailed offense and incident information from the National Incident-Based Reporting System and New York Crime Reporting Program to disaggregate female and male LFFE arrests into occupational and non-occupational offenses, as well as establish the severity for each specific type of crime. Results: We find most LFFE offending is non-occupational, especially for females whose arrests are disproportionately for shoplifting, bad checks, and welfare/benefit fraud as compared to male arrests for theft from motor vehicles, transportation fraud, and counterfeiting. For both males and females, most arrests involve small financial loss and misdemeanors or low-level felony charges. Conclusions: Providing a current profile of female and male property crime, we conclude that arrestees within the summary categories of larceny, fraud, and forgery overwhelmingly represent minor, conventional property crime offenders.

Cost of crime: A systematic review

Nyantara Wickramasekera, Judy Wright, Helen Elsey, Jenni Murray, Sandy Tubeuf

Purpose: This study aims to systematically search and review all the relevant studies that have estimated the cost of crime of adult offenders. Methods: Fifteen databases were searched for published studies and grey literature. We included studies that estimated the cost of crime of adult offenders. Due to high heterogeneity results were synthesised descriptively. Results: Twenty-one studies estimated the cost of crime. There was considerable variance in the estimated total costs of crime and studies from the United States consistently reported the highest total costs. All the studies consistently included robbery and burglary in the total cost estimate. Homicide was ranked as the most costly offence and accounted on average for 31% of the total cost of crime, followed by drug offence (21%) and fraud (17%). Crime categories that involved violence to a person were associated with large intangible costs. Conclusions: While it is difficult to precisely determine what caused the large variance in the total cost estimates, we think that it could be due to changes in unit costs, changes in crime trends, and variations in the methods used to estimate costs. The findings from this systematic review highlight the need for more up-to-date studies with better reporting standards.

The Relationship between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) and Juvenile Offending Trajectories in a Juvenile Offender Sample

Michael T. Baglivio, Kevin T. Wolff, Alex R. Piquero, Nathan Epps

Purpose: Adverse childhood experiences have been identified as a key risk factor for offending and victimization, respectively. At the same time, the extent to which such experiences distinguish between unique groups of offenders who vary in their longitudinal offending patterns remains an open question, one that is pertinent to both theoretical and policy-related issues. This study examines the relationship between adverse childhood experiences for distinguishing offending patterns through late adolescence in a large sample of adjudicated juvenile offenders. Methods: The current study uses data from 64,000 adjudicated juvenile offenders in the State of Florida. We use Semi-Parametric Group-Based Method (SPGM) to identify different latent groups of official offending trajectories based on individual variation over time from ages 7 to 17. Multinomial logistic regression was used to examine which measures, including the ACE score, distinguished between trajectory groups. Results: Findings indicate five latent trajectory offending groups of offending through age 17 and that increased exposure to multiple Adverse Childhood Experiences distinguishes early-onset and chronic offending from other patterns of offending, net of several controls across demographic, individual risk, familial risk, and personal history domains. Conclusions: Childhood maltreatment as measured by the cumulative stressor Adverse Childhood Experiences score influences official offending trajectories.

Responding to probation and parole violations: Are jail sanctions more effective than community-based graduated sanctions?

Eric J. Wodahl, John H. Boman IV, Brett E. Garland

Purpose: In response to escalating revocation rates in community supervision, many jurisdictions have adopted graduated sanction policies. Research on graduated sanctions has shown promising results. However, most studies focus exclusively on jail sanctions and have largely ignored the possibility that community-based graduated sanctions such as written assignments, increased treatment participation, or community service hours may be as effective, or more effective, than jail sanctions. Extending this research, the current study examines whether community-based sanctions are as effective in increasing offender compliance as spending time in jail. Methods: Using data from over 800 violations committed by a random sample of probationers and parolees on intensive supervision probation, multilevel models are estimated that examine whether jail sanctions are more effective than community sanctions in 1) extending time to the offender’s next violation event, 2) reducing the number of future violations, and 3) successfully completing the probation program. Results: Results consistently indicate that jail sanctions do not outperform community-based sanctions. Conclusion: Due to the financial, social, and potentially criminogenic effects of jail, the lack of significant differences between jail sanctions and community-based sanctions calls into question the use of jail as a means of punishing persons on community supervision.

Social Psychology Quarterly 78(2)

Social Psychology Quarterly, June 2015: Volume 78, Issue 2

Interreligious Contact, Perceived Group Threat, and Perceived Discrimination: Predicting Negative Attitudes among Religious Minorities and Majorities in Indonesia
Agnieszka Kanas, Peer Scheepers, and Carl Sterkens

Understanding the Selection Bias: Social Network Processes and the Effect of Prejudice on the Avoidance of Outgroup Friends
Tobias H. Stark

Resolving Negative Affect and Restoring Meaning: Responses to Deflection Produced by Unwanted Sexual Experiences
Kaitlin M. Boyle and Ashleigh E. McKinzie

Stopping the Drama: Gendered Influence in a Network Field Experiment
Hana Shepherd and Elizabeth Levy Paluck

American Sociological Review 80(3)

American Sociological Review, June 2015: Volume 80, Issue 3

Her Support, His Support: Money, Masculinity, and Marital Infidelity
Christin L. Munsch

Recent years have seen great interest in the relationship between relative earnings and marital outcomes. Using data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I examine the effect of relative earnings on infidelity, a marital outcome that has received little attention. Theories of social exchange predict that the greater one’s relative income, the more likely one will be to engage in infidelity. Yet, emerging literature raises questions about the utility of gender-neutral exchange approaches, particularly when men are economically dependent and women are breadwinners. I find that, for men, breadwinning increases infidelity. For women, breadwinning decreases infidelity. I argue that by remaining faithful, breadwinning women neutralize their gender deviance and keep potentially strained relationships intact. I also find that, for both men and women, economic dependency is associated with a higher likelihood of engaging in infidelity; but, the influence of dependency on men’s infidelity is greater than the influence of dependency on women’s infidelity. For economically dependent persons, infidelity may be an attempt to restore relationship equity; however, for men, dependence may be particularly threatening. Infidelity may allow economically dependent men to engage in compensatory behavior while simultaneously distancing themselves from breadwinning spouses.

Ideals as Anchors for Relationship Experiences
Margaret Frye and Jenny Trinitapoli

Research on young-adult sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa typically conceptualizes sex as an individual-level risk behavior. We introduce a new approach that connects the conditions surrounding the initiation of sex with subsequent relationship well-being, examines relationships as sequences of interdependent events, and indexes relationship experiences to individually held ideals. New card-sort data from southern Malawi capture young women’s relationship experiences and their ideals in a sequential framework. Using optimal matching, we measure the distance between ideal and experienced relationship sequences to (1) assess the associations between ideological congruence and perceived relationship well-being, (2) compare this ideal-based approach to other experience-based alternatives, and (3) identify individual- and couple-level correlates of congruence between ideals and experiences in the romantic realm. We show that congruence between ideals and experiences conveys relationship well-being along four dimensions: expressions of love and support, robust communication habits, perceived biological safety, and perceived relationship stability. We further show that congruence is patterned by socioeconomic status and supported by shared ideals within romantic dyads. We argue that conceiving of ideals as anchors for how sexual experiences are manifest advances current understandings of romantic relationships, and we suggest that this approach has applications for other domains of life.

Neighborhood Foreclosures, Racial/Ethnic Transitions, and Residential Segregation
Matthew Hall, Kyle Crowder, and Amy Spring

In this article, we use data on virtually all foreclosure events between 2005 and 2009 to calculate neighborhood foreclosure rates for nearly all block groups in the United States to assess the impact of housing foreclosures on neighborhood racial/ethnic change and on broader patterns of racial residential segregation. We find that the foreclosure crisis was patterned strongly along racial lines: black, Latino, and racially integrated neighborhoods had exceptionally high foreclosure rates. Multilevel models of racial/ethnic change reveal that foreclosure concentrations were linked to declining shares of whites and expanding shares of black and Latino residents. Results further suggest that these compositional shifts were driven by both white population loss and minority growth, especially from racially mixed settings with high foreclosure rates. To explore the impact of these racially selective migration streams on patterns of residential segregation, we simulate racial segregation assuming that foreclosure rates remained at their 2005 levels throughout the crisis period. Our simulations suggest that the foreclosure crisis increased racial segregation between blacks and whites by 1.1 dissimilarity points, and between Latinos and whites by 2.2 dissimilarity points.

Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust: Evidence from the Micro-Context
Peter Thisted Dinesen and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov

We argue that residential exposure to ethnic diversity reduces social trust. Previous within-country analyses of the relationship between contextual ethnic diversity and trust have been conducted at higher levels of aggregation, thus ignoring substantial variation in actual exposure to ethnic diversity. In contrast, we analyze how ethnic diversity of the immediate micro-context—where interethnic exposure is inevitable—affects trust. We do this using Danish survey data linked with register-based data, which enables us to obtain precise measures of the ethnic diversity of each individual’s residential surroundings. We focus on contextual diversity within a radius of 80 meters of a given individual, but we also compare the effect in the micro-context to the impact of diversity in more aggregate contexts. Our results show that ethnic diversity in the micro-context affects trust negatively, whereas the effect vanishes in larger contextual units. This supports the conjecture that interethnic exposure underlies the negative relationship between ethnic diversity in residential contexts and social trust.

Ancestry Matters: Patrilineage Growth and Extinction
Xi Song, Cameron D. Campbell, and James Z. Lee

Patrilineality, the organization of kinship, inheritance, and other key social processes based on patrilineal male descent, has been a salient feature of social organization in China and many other societies for centuries. Because patrilineage continuity or growth was the central focus of reproductive strategies in such societies, we introduce the number of patrilineal male descendants generations later as a stratification outcome. By reconstructing and analyzing 20,000 patrilineages in two prospective, multi-generational population databases from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China, we show that patrilineages founded by high-status males had higher growth rates for the next 150 years. The elevated growth rate of these patrilineages was due more to their having a lower probability of extinction at each point in time than to surviving patrilineal male descendants having larger numbers of sons on average. As a result, male descendants of high-status males account for a disproportionately large share of the male population in later generations. In China and elsewhere, patrilineal kin network characteristics influence individuals’ life chances; effects of a male founder’s characteristics on patrilineage size many generations later thus represent an indirect channel of status transmission that has not been considered previously.

Historical Sociology’s Puzzle of the Missing Transitions: A Case Study of Early Modern Japan
Mark Cohen

Prominent accounts of the transition to capitalism have a far too limited understanding of pre-capitalist agrarian economies’ potential for dynamism. Recent research shows that conditions earlier accounts identify as triggers for a transition to capitalism could be present without a transition occurring. I expand on implications of these cases of “missing transitions” for theorizing the dynamics of pre-capitalist agrarian economies. I present a theoretical framework that shows how phenomena previously associated with the transition to capitalism—such as flexible property rights in land and labor, extensive markets, and accumulation of industrial and mercantile wealth—emerged in pre-capitalist societies without leading to capitalist development. I illustrate the analytic upshot of this framework by considering the case study of Japan in the Tokugawa era (1603 to 1868). For historical sociologists, early modern Japan has long been seen as an anomalous case, puzzlingly mixing developments thought to represent early signs of capitalism with evidence of the durable survival of the feudal social order. In light of a more accurate account of the forces for and limits of dynamism in pre-capitalist agrarian economies, Tokugawa-era Japan is no longer a puzzling anomaly.

Collective Labor Rights and Income Inequality
Jasmine Kerrissey

This article examines the relationship between income inequality and collective labor rights, conceptualized as workers’ legal and practical ability to engage in collective activity. Although worker organization is central to explaining income inequality in industrialized democracies, worldwide comparative studies have neglected the role of class-based actors. I argue that the repression of labor rights reduces the capacity of worker organizations to effectively challenge income inequality through market and political processes in capitalist societies. Labor rights, however, are unlikely to have uniform effects across regions. This study uses unbalanced panel data for 100 developed and less developed countries from 1985 through 2002. Random- and fixed-effects models find that strong labor rights are tightly linked to lower inequality across a large range of countries, including in the Global South. Interactions between regions and labor rights suggest that the broader context in which class-based actors are embedded shapes worker organizations’ ability to reduce inequality. During the period of this study, labor rights were particularly important for mitigating inequality in the West but less so in Eastern Europe.

A Dynamic Process Model of Private Politics: Activist Targeting and Corporate Receptivity to Social Challenges
Mary-Hunter McDonnell, Brayden G King, and Sarah A. Soule

This project explores whether and how corporations become more receptive to social activist challenges over time. Drawing from social movement theory, we suggest a dynamic process through which contentious interactions lead to increased receptivity. We argue that when firms are chronically targeted by social activists, they respond defensively by adopting strategic management devices that help them better manage social issues and demonstrate their normative appropriateness. These defensive devices have the incidental effect of empowering independent monitors and increasing corporate accountability, which in turn increase a firm’s receptivity to future activist challenges. We test our theory using a unique longitudinal dataset that tracks contentious attacks and the adoption of social management devices among a population of 300 large firms from 1993 to 2009.

American Journal of Sociology 120(5)

American Journal of Sociology, March 2015: Volume 120, Issue 5

The Social Origins of Networks and Diffusion
Damon Centola

Recent research on social contagion has demonstrated significant effects of network topology on the dynamics of diffusion. However, network topologies are not given a priori. Rather, they are patterns of relations that emerge from individual and structural features of society, such as population composition, group heterogeneity, homophily, and social consolidation. Following Blau and Schwartz, the author develops a model of social network formation that explores how social and structural constraints on tie formation generate emergent social topologies and then explores the effectiveness of these social networks for the dynamics of social diffusion. Results show that, at one extreme, high levels of consolidation can create highly balkanized communities with poor integration of shared norms and practices. As suggested by Blau and Schwartz, reducing consolidation creates more crosscutting circles and significantly improves the dynamics of social diffusion across the population. However, the author finds that further reducing consolidation creates highly intersecting social networks that fail to support the widespread diffusion of norms and practices, indicating that successful social diffusion can depend on moderate to high levels of structural consolidation.

Go with Your Gut: Emotion and Evaluation in Job Interviews
Lauren A. Rivera

This article presents hiring as an emotional process rooted in interpersonal evaluation. Drawing from Randall Collins’s theory of interaction ritual, the author offers a qualitative case study of elite professional service firms to unpack how employers’ emotional reactions to applicants in job interviews affect hiring evaluations. She finds that employers use subjective feelings of excitement and enthusiasm toward candidates—akin to Collins’s concept of emotional energy—to evaluate applicants and make hiring decisions. With these data, she constructs an original theoretical framework of emotional energy development, which highlights the qualities that tend to produce or inhibit the subjective experience of emotional energy in job interviews. Additionally, she outlines the particular phases of an encounter where energy gains and losses are most consequential for influencing hiring outcomes and inequalities. She discusses the implications of these findings for research on hiring, labor market stratification, and interaction rituals.

Do Reputation Systems Undermine Trust? Divergent Effects of Enforcement Type on Generalized Trust and Trustworthiness
Ko Kuwabara

Research shows that enforcing cooperation using contracts or tangible sanctions can backfire, undermining people’s intrinsic motivation to cooperate: when the enforcement is removed, people are less trusting or trustworthy than when there is no enforcement to begin with. The author examines whether reputation systems have similar consequences for generalized trust and trustworthiness. Using a web-based experiment simulating online market transactions (studies 1 and 2), he shows that reputation systems can reinforce generalized trust and trustworthiness, unlike contractual enforcement or relational enforcement based on repeated interactions. In a survey experiment (study 3), he finds that recalling their eBay feedback scores made participants more trusting and trustworthy. These results are predicated on the diffuse nature of reputational enforcement to reinforce perceptions of trust and trustworthiness. These results have implications for understanding how different forms of governance affect generalized trust and trustworthiness.

Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead
Steven Hitlin and Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson

Empirical treatments of agency have not caught up with theoretical explication; empirical projects almost always focus on concurrent beliefs about one’s ability to act successfully without sufficiently attending to temporality. The authors suggest that understanding the modern life course necessitates a multidimensional understanding of subjective agency involving (a) perceived capacities and (b) perceived life chances, or expectations about what life holds in store. The authors also suggest that a proper understanding of agency’s potential power within a life course necessitates moving beyond the domain-specific expectations more typical of past sociological work. Using the Youth Development Study, the authors employ a scale of general life expectations in adolescence to explore the potential influence of a general sense of optimistic life expectations in addition to the traditional approach on a range of important outcomes.

Why Do Liberals Drink Lattes?
Michael Macy, Daniel DellaPosta, and Yongren Shi

Popular accounts of “lifestyle politics” and “culture wars” suggest that political and ideological divisions extend also to leisure activities, consumption, aesthetic taste, and personal morality. Drawing on a total of 22,572 pairwise correlations from the General Social Survey (1972–2010), the authors provide comprehensive empirical support for the anecdotal accounts. Moreover, most ideological differences in lifestyle cannot be explained by demographic covariates alone. The authors propose a surprisingly simple solution to the puzzle of lifestyle politics. Computational experiments show how the self-reinforcing dynamics of homophily and influence dramatically amplify even very small elective affinities between lifestyle and ideology, producing a stereotypical world of “latte liberals” and “bird-hunting conservatives” much like the one in which we live.

Stress and Hardship after Prison
Bruce Western, Anthony A. Braga, Jaclyn Davis, and Catherine Sirois

The historic increase in U.S. incarceration rates made the transition from prison to community common for poor, prime-age men and women. Leaving prison presents the challenge of social integration—of connecting with family and finding housing and a means of subsistence. The authors study variation in social integration in the first months after prison release with data from the Boston Reentry Study, a unique panel survey of 122 newly released prisoners. The data indicate severe material hardship immediately after incarceration. Over half of sample respondents were unemployed, two-thirds received public assistance, and many relied on female relatives for financial support and housing. Older respondents and those with histories of addiction and mental illness were the least socially integrated, with weak family ties, unstable housing, and low levels of employment. Qualitative interviews show that anxiety and feelings of isolation accompanied extreme material insecurity. Material insecurity combined with the adjustment to social life outside prison creates a stress of transition that burdens social relationships in high-incarceration communities.

Crime & Delinquency 61(5)

Crime & Delinquency, June 2015: Volume 61, Issue 5

Organizational-Level Police Discretion: An Application for Police Use of Lethal Force
Jeffrey S. Nowacki

Research on police behavior suggests that discretion is vital to police decision making. Although discretion can originate from many sources (e.g., officers, situations, structure), relatively few studies examine how organizational variables affect officer discretion. Of the studies that test whether organizational level influences shape discretion, even fewer examine their influence on lethal force. This oversight is notable in light of the overrepresentation of Blacks in lethal force incidents because organizational characteristics and policies may reduce racial disparities in the application of lethal force. Using administrative policy and police department size as proxies for organizational variables, this study tests for organizational effects and examines whether these effects vary by race. Using city-level data from 1980 to 1984, this research examines how organizational limits on discretion affect the volume of lethal force incidents. Negative binomial regression results indicate that administrative policy predicts lethal force incidents for total and Black-specific population models but not White-specific models, and department size predicts lethal force incidents for total and White-specific models but not Black-specific models. Organizational correlates of police discretion seem crucial for understanding officer behavior.

Unknown, Unloved? Public Opinion on and Knowledge of Suspended Sentences in the Netherlands
Jean-Louis van Gelder, Pauline Aarten, Willemijn Lamet, and Peter van der Laan

Public opinion research shows that the general public tends to perceive noncustodial sanctions, such as suspended sentences, as too lenient while being largely ignorant about their nature. In two studies among representative samples of the Dutch population, the authors examine public opinion about and knowledge of suspended sentences in the Netherlands. Findings suggest that knowledge of suspended sentences is positively related to their perceived punitiveness and beliefs in their effectiveness. Furthermore, opinions about suspended sentences are related to general penal attitudes. More punitive attitudes translate into less favorable opinions. Finally, providing information about suspended sentences can lead to more positive attitudes and greater belief in their effectiveness.

Abstainers in Adolescence and Adulthood: Exploring the Correlates of Abstention Using Moffitt’s Developmental Taxonomy
Jennifer Gatewood Owens and Lee Ann Slocum

Moffitt’s developmental taxonomy describes a small group of adolescents who abstain from all forms of delinquency because they are isolated from peer groups or because, unlike most adolescents, they lack the desire to engage in “adult-like” behaviors, such as drinking and smoking. Based on Moffitt’s work, this study examines the correlates of abstention for males and females, focusing on negative personal characteristics that may isolate youth from their peers. Using a sample followed from birth through adulthood, the authors found that although many prosocial characteristics are associated with abstention, individuals who refrain from delinquency are also more likely than offenders to possess undesirable personal characteristics. Still, abstainers are more likely than other youth to become successful, well-adjusted adults.

The Unintended Effects of Penal Reform: African American Presence, Incarceration, and the Abolition of Discretionary Parole in the United States
Andres F. Rengifo and Don Stemen

The authors use a pooled-time series design to examine the interplay between state incarceration rates, determinate sentencing, and the size of the African American population between 1978 and 2004. Consistent with prior research, findings show that larger Black populations are associated with higher incarceration rates but that this association has weakened over time. Results also indicate that determinate sentencing is associated with lower imprisonment rates. The interaction between a higher proportion of African American residents and determinate sentencing, however, is associated with higher incarceration rates, suggesting that in states with greater minority presence the abolition of discretionary parole amplifies the impact of punitive responses linked to racial threat. It is argued that this unintended effect reflects the fact that formal constraints on release decision making reduce the ability of justice systems to administer greater punishments to specific subpopulations.

Principles in Practice: A Multistate Study of Gender-Responsive Reforms in the Juvenile Justice System
Sarah Cusworth Walker, Ann Muno, and Cheryl Sullivan-Colglazier

There is currently widespread interest in gender-responsive programming within the juvenile justice system. The research literature currently provides critical information about the needs of girls and pathways into the justice system through epidemiology or program evaluation studies; however, the experience of practitioners implementing reforms is less represented. This perspective is essential given the nascent stage of research on gender-specific best practices and the widespread adoption of gender-specific principles. In this article, the authors review the policy and research literature relevant to the gender-responsive movement and present the results of their multistate study of how principles are being translated into practice, including how reforms are being initiated and sustained. They discuss these findings in light of their implications for practice and research.

Social Forces 93(4)

Social Forces, June 2015: Volume 93, Issue 4

Work and Stratification

Cultural and Institutional Factors Shaping Mothers’ Employment and Working Hours in Postindustrial Countries
Irene Boeckmann, Joya Misra, Michelle J. Budig

Existing research shows that women’s employment patterns are not driven so much by gender as by motherhood, with childless people and fathers employed at substantially higher levels than mothers in most countries. We focus on the cross-national variation in the gap in employment participation and working hours between mothers and childless women. Controlling for individual- and household-level factors, we provide evidence that institutional and cultural contexts shape maternal employment. Well-paid leaves, publicly supported childcare services for very young children, and cultural support for maternal employment predict smaller differences in employment participation and working hours between mothers and childless women. Yet, extended leave, notably when unpaid, is associated with larger motherhood employment gaps.

Shareholder Value and Workforce Downsizing, 1981–2006
Jiwook Jung

This paper develops a theoretical account of the reconstruction of workforce downsizing as a shareholder-value strategy since the 1980s. This account has two components. First, building on resource-dependence theory, I suggest that growing corporate dependence on institutional investors makes firms susceptible to their demand for greater returns, especially when these institutional investors are blockholders and resistant to counter-pressure from managers. Second, building on Fligstein’s theory of conceptions of control, I suggest that the rise of shareholder value reorients managerial behavior, by changing the decision context in a way that induces managers to maximize shareholder value. Crucial to constructing this new decision context are a set of agency-theory prescriptions for reforming corporate governance. My analysis of downsizing announcements, drawing on a sample of 714 US firms between 1981 and 2006, shows that both the pressure from institutional investors and the new decision context encourage firms to downsize more frequently. By demonstrating how both pressure from investors and changed managerial decision contexts have contributed to the prevalence of workforce downsizing, this paper makes a strong case for the financialization of the American corporation, and contributes to the sociological research on growing job insecurity and income inequality over the past three decades.

The Impact of Work and Family Life Histories on Economic Well-Being at Older Ages
Andrew Halpern-Manners, John Robert Warren, James M. Raymo, D. Adam Nicholson

Motivated by theoretical and empirical research in life course sociology, we examine relationships between trajectories of work and family roles across the life course and four measures of economic well-being in later adulthood. Using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) and multiple trajectory-generating methods, we first identify latent trajectories of work and family roles between late adolescence and age 65. We then model economic well-being at age 65 as a function of these trajectories and contemporaneously measured indicators of older adults’ work, family, and health statuses. Our central finding is that trajectories of work and family experiences across the life course have direct effects on later-life economic well-being, as well as indirect effects that operate through more proximate measures of work, family, and other characteristics. We argue that these findings have important implications for how social scientists conceptualize and model the relationship between later-life economic outcomes and people’s work and family experiences across the life course.

Educational Expansion and Occupational Change: US Compulsory Schooling Laws and the Occupational Structure 1850–1930
Emily Rauscher

During the US Industrial Revolution, educational expansion may have created skilled jobs through innovation and skill upgrading or reduced skilled jobs by mechanizing production. Such arguments contradict classic sociological work that treats education as a sorting mechanism, allocating individuals to fixed occupations. I capitalize on state differences in the timing of compulsory school attendance laws to ask whether raising the minimum level of schooling: (1) increased school attendance rate; or (2) shifted state occupational distributions away from agricultural toward skilled and non-manual occupation categories. Using state-level panel data constructed from 1850–1930 censuses and state-year fixed effects models, I find that compulsory laws significantly increased school attendance rates, particularly among lower-class children, and shifted the categorical distribution toward skilled and non-manual occupations. Thus, rather than deskilling through mechanization, raising the minimum level of education seems to have created skilled jobs and raised the occupational distribution through skill-biased technological change. Results suggest that education was not merely a sorting mechanism, supporting the importance of education as an institution even around the turn of the century.

Race

Is Love (Color) Blind?: The Economy of Race among Gay and Straight Daters
Jennifer H. Lundquist, Ken-Hou Lin

A drawback to research on interracial couplings is that it almost exclusively studies heterosexual relationships. However, compelling new evidence from analyses using the Census shows that interracial relationships are significantly more common among the gay population. It is unclear how much of this reflects weaker racial preference or more limited dating markets. This paper examines the interactions of white gay and straight online daters who have access to a large market of potential partners by modeling dyadic messaging behaviors. Results show that racial preferences are highly gendered, and do not line up neatly by gay or straight identity. White lesbians and straight men show the weakest same-race preference, followed by gay men, while straight women show the strongest same-race preference. Put differently, minority men are discriminated to a greater degree than minority women in both same-sex and different-sex dating markets. These results suggest that white gay men’s higher rates of interracial cohabitation are driven more by constrained dating markets, while lesbians’ appear to be driven by more open racial preferences.

Discrimination in the Credential Society: An Audit Study of Race and College Selectivity in the Labor Market
S. Michael Gaddis

Racial inequality in economic outcomes, particularly among the college educated, persists throughout US society. Scholars debate whether this inequality stems from racial differences in human capital (e.g., college selectivity, GPA, college major) or employer discrimination against black job candidates. However, limited measures of human capital and the inherent difficulties in measuring discrimination using observational data make determining the cause of racial differences in labor-market outcomes a difficult endeavor. In this research, I examine employment opportunities for white and black graduates of elite top-ranked universities versus high-ranked but less selective institutions. Using an audit design, I create matched candidate pairs and apply for 1,008 jobs on a national job-search website. I also exploit existing birth-record data in selecting names to control for differences across social class within racialized names. The results show that although a credential from an elite university results in more employer responses for all candidates, black candidates from elite universities only do as well as white candidates from less selective universities. Moreover, race results in a double penalty: When employers respond to black candidates, it is for jobs with lower starting salaries and lower prestige than those of white peers. These racial differences suggest that a bachelor’s degree, even one from an elite institution, cannot fully counteract the importance of race in the labor market. Thus, both discrimination and differences in human capital contribute to racial economic inequality.

Homebuyer Neighborhood Attainment in Black and White: Housing Outcomes during the Housing Boom and Bust
Mary J. Fischer, Travis Scott Lowe

This paper examines the types of neighborhoods that black and white homebuyers have secured loans in during the recent housing boom and subsequent bust. We expand upon and refine previous research on locational attainment using loan-level data from the 1992–2010 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) combined with tract- and metropolitan-level data from the 1990, 2000, and 2010 Census and the American Community Survey. Multilevel models show that black homebuyers are moving into considerably more racially segregated neighborhoods than their white counterparts and that their access to “whiter” neighborhoods did not expand during the housing boom, even after controlling for the racial composition of the metropolitan area and other key ecological factors. Conversely, new white homebuyers have been moving into neighborhoods with greater percent black residents, which may be a contributing factor in observed declines in segregation during the past few decades. Additionally, black homebuyers in metropolitan areas with greater suburban growth were on average accessing homes in more integrated neighborhoods. Finally, the models explained considerably more of the variation in the neighborhood racial composition of whites compared to blacks. These findings are suggestive of a dual housing market, one in which the experiences of blacks are still systematically different than those of whites, despite expanded access to homeownership.

Political Sociology

Civil War and Trajectories of Change in Women’s Political Representation in Africa, 1985–2010
Melanie M. Hughes, Aili Mari Tripp

In recent decades, the expansion of women’s political representation in sub-Saharan Africa has been nothing short of remarkable. The number of women legislators in African parliaments tripled between 1990 and 2010, resulting in African countries having among the highest rates of women’s legislative representation in the world. The dominant explanations for this change have been institutional factors (namely, the adoption of gender quotas and presence of proportional representation systems) and democratization. We suggest that existing research has not gone far enough to evaluate the effects of one powerful structural change: the end of civil war. Using Latent Growth Curve modeling, we show that the end of long-standing armed conflict had large positive impacts on women’s political representation, above what can be explained by electoral institutions and democratization alone. However, post-conflict increases in women’s legislative representation materialize only after 2000, amid emerging international and regional norms of women’s political inclusion. In countries exiting armed conflict in these recent years, women’s movement into national legislatures follows a trajectory of social change that is much faster and more extensive than what we observe in other African countries.

When Do States Respond to Low Fertility?: Contexts of State Concern in Wealthier Countries, 1976–2011
Emily A. Marshall

Since the 1970s, expressions of state concern over low fertility have greatly increased among wealthier countries. This study asks to what extent this increase is explained by demographic factors, national-level economic and political factors, and processes of international diffusion and changing international norms. Analyses integrate the world polity literature on global policy diffusion with a social problems approach to examine international diffusion of state concern among more powerful members of the world polity, a process that can produce changes in international policy consensus. Comparisons of the characteristics of states that do and do not express concern over low fertility find that among wealthier “first-world” countries, state concern has become more responsive to fertility rates: fertility rates are not significantly associated with concern early in the study period, but are strongly associated with concern later in the study period. There is no evidence that integration into the world polity is associated with concern in these countries, and some evidence that less integrated countries are more likely to express concern, suggesting that processes shaping the diffusion of state concern may differ from those identified as shaping policy diffusion in the existing literature. Among “second-world” former Eastern bloc countries, different patterns of associations reflect different political histories: concern is associated only with demographic factors, with no significant change in this association over time.

Health

Work-Family Context and the Longevity Disadvantage of US Women
Jennifer Karas Montez, Pekka Martikainen, Hanna Remes, Mauricio Avendano

Female life expectancy is currently shorter in the United States than in most high-income countries. This study examines work-family context as a potential explanation. While work-family context changed similarly across high-income countries during the past half century, the United States has not implemented institutional supports, such as universally available childcare and family leave, to help Americans contend with these changes. We compare the United States to Finland—a country with similar trends in work-family life but generous institutional supports—and test two hypotheses to explain US women’s longevity disadvantage: (1) US women may be less likely than Finnish women to combine employment with childrearing; and (2) US women’s longevity may benefit less than Finnish women’s longevity from combining employment with childrearing. We used data from women aged 30–60 years during 1988–2006 in the US National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File and harmonized it with data from Finnish national registers. We found stronger support for hypothesis 1, especially among low-educated women. Contrary to hypothesis 2, combining employment and childrearing was not less beneficial for US women’s longevity. In a simulation exercise, more than 75 percent of US women’s longevity disadvantage was eliminated by raising their employment levels to Finnish levels and reducing mortality rates of non-married/non-employed US women to Finnish rates.

Disease and Dowry: Community Context, Gender, and Adult Health in India
Samuel Stroope

Despite growing research on health and residential contexts, relatively little is understood about gendered contexts that are differentially important for women’s and men’s physical health in low- and middle-income countries. This study advances the prior knowledge by examining whether the local frequency of a salient and gendered practice in India—dowry—is associated with gender differences in physical health (acute illness, illness length, and chronic illness). Analyses are conducted using multilevel logistic and negative binomial regression models and national data on men and women across India (N = 102,763). Results show that as dowry frequency increases in communities, not only do women have a greater likelihood of poor health across all three health outcomes, but men also have a greater likelihood of acute illness and illness length. Men, however, have a lower likelihood of chronic illness as the frequency of dowry increases in communities. In the case of all three health outcomes, results showed consistently wider health gaps between men and women in communities with a higher frequency of dowry.

Social Policy

Individual Troubles, Shared Troubles: The Multiplicative Effect of Individual and Country-Level Unemployment on Life Satisfaction in 95 Nations (1981–2009)
Esteban Calvo, Christine A. Mair, Natalia Sarkisian

Although the negative association between unemployment and life satisfaction is well documented, much theoretical and empirical controversy surrounds the question of how unemployment actually shapes life satisfaction. Previous studies suggest that unemployment may endanger subjective well-being through individual experiences, contextual influences, or a combination of both. Drawing on data from the World and European Values Surveys, National Accounts Official Country Data, Social Security Programs Throughout the World Reports, World Development Indicators, and World Income Inequality databases for 398,533 individuals in 95 nations (1981–2009), we use three-level hierarchical linear models to test four competing theory-based hypotheses—that unemployment shapes life satisfaction through individual, contextual, additive, or multiplicative effects. Our results support a multiplicative interaction between individual- and country-level unemployment. Unemployed individuals are less satisfied than other individuals, and when unemployment rates rise, their satisfaction drops even further below students, homemakers, and employed individuals; retirees, however, become more similar to the unemployed. We discuss these findings in light of previous theoretical models to argue for a model where individual unemployment is understood in the context of diverse labor force statuses and national unemployment rates. We conclude with policy suggestions aiming to address the negative consequences of unemployment through individualized and contextualized plans.

Social Policy and Perceived Immigrant Labor Market Competition in Europe: Is Prevention Better Than Cure?
Boris Heizmann

Previous research on attitudes toward immigrants has so far focused on composite outcome measures instead of dealing with more specific forms of perceived threat and prejudice. The present article approaches this gap by investigating the antecedents of the perception that immigrants take jobs away from the host-country population. This form of perceived economic competition is a fundamental feature of immigrant-native relations in many countries, and it is embedded in the institution of the labor market. Accordingly, the main interest of this study lies in the influence of two central aspects of labor market policy, employment protection legislation and unemployment benefit level. European Social Survey data are used in multilevel models that include individual-, regional-, and country-level factors. The results indicate that unemployment benefits abate perceived competition, and the impact is strong. This finding is robust against the inclusion of several other policy indicators, including integration policies, welfare regime types, and other structural factors such as unemployment rates and unionization figures. Employment protection affects perceived economic threat only indirectly by mitigating the impact of regional unemployment. Furthermore, it actually increases perceived competition for unemployed persons. These findings challenge the notion that prevention is always better than cure.

Social Networks

Streams of Thought: Knowledge Flows and Intellectual Cohesion in a Multidisciplinary Era
Craig M. Rawlings, Daniel A. McFarland, Linus Dahlander, Dan Wang

How has the recent shift toward multidisciplinary research affected intellectual cohesion in academia? We answer this question through an examination of collaborations and knowledge flows among researchers. We examine the relevant case of Stanford University during a period of intense investment in multidisciplinary research, using a novel measure of knowledge flows in the short-cycled movement of published references from one researcher to another. We describe intellectual cohesion and its trajectory among 1,007 faculty members between 1997 and 2006, and then examine the social-structural antecedents of dyadic knowledge flows that help explain macro-level patterns. Results show that university collaborations have grown denser and more integrated across faculty members and their institutional divisions. However, this integration is led by “star” researchers and is accompanied by a greater centralization of knowledge flows around these individuals. Results illustrate important shifts in the nature of academic research, and contribute to a dynamic view of intellectual cohesion.

Environment

Natural Hazards and Residential Mobility: General Patterns and Racially Unequal Outcomes in the United States
James R. Elliott

This study conducts a nationwide, locally comparative analysis of the extent to which natural hazards contribute to residential mobility in the United States and how this influence varies for racial and ethnic minorities. Analyses combine census data on households with data from thousands of recorded natural hazards during the late 1990s. Findings affirm that natural hazards are common throughout the country; that associated property damage correlates positively with increases in residential mobility for all groups; that these increases are particularly noticeable among racial and ethnic minorities because of preexisting inequalities in mobility; and that areas with more costly damage tend to pull as well as push migrants, especially Latinos and Asians. Implications for existing theory, methods, and policy are discussed.