Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 52(3)

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, May 2015: Volume 52, Issue 3

The Mediating Role of Heart Rate on the Social Adversity-Antisocial Behavior Relationship: A Social Neurocriminology Perspective
Olivia Choy, Adrian Raine, Jill Portnoy, Anna Rudo-Hutt, Yu Gao, and Liana Soyfer

Objectives: Tests the hypothesis that the social adversity-antisocial behavior relationship is partly mediated by a biological mechanism, low heart rate. Method: 18 indicators of social adversity and heart rate measured at rest and in anticipation of a speech stressor were assessed alongside nine measures of antisocial behavior including delinquency (Youth Self-Report [YSR] and Child Behavior Checklist [CBCL]), conduct disorder (Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder Questionnaire), and child psychopathy (Antisocial Process Screening Device [APSD]) in a community sample of 388 children aged 11 to 12 years. PROCESS was used to test mediation models. Results: Low heart rate was a partial mediator of the adversity-antisocial behavior relationship, explaining 20.35 percent and 15.40 percent of the effect of social adversity on delinquency and overall antisocial behavior, respectively. Conclusions: Findings are, to the authors’ knowledge, one of the first to establish any biological risk factor as a mediator of the social adversity-antisocial behavior relationship and suggest that social processes alter autonomic functioning in a way to predispose to antisocial behavior. While not definitive, results give rise to a social neurocriminology theory that argues that the social environment influences biological risk factors in a way to predispose to antisocial and criminal behavior.

Developmental Trajectories of Individuals’ Code of the Street Beliefs through Emerging Adulthood
Richard K. Moule, Jr, Callie H. Burt, Eric A. Stewart, and Ronald L. Simons

Objectives: This study seeks to contribute to research on the patterning and stability of code of the street beliefs. We describe trajectories of street code beliefs from late childhood to emerging adulthood and investigate social factors that influence membership in and distinguish between trajectories. Methods: Using six waves of panel data from the Family and Community Health Study, group-based trajectory models were estimated to describe developmental patterns of street code beliefs from age 10 to 26. Correlates of street code beliefs, including racial discrimination, parenting practices, and neighborhood crime, were used to predict trajectory membership. Results: Analyses identified five distinct trajectories of street code beliefs. Four trajectories were largely stable across the study period; however, one group, comprised of 12 percent of the sample, dramatically declined in beliefs. Being male and experiencing racial discrimination significantly distinguish between all of the trajectories. Parental monitoring and perceptions of neighborhood crime differentiate between the declining trajectory and the stable trajectories. Conclusions: Findings provide insights into the developmental patterns and correlates, of street code beliefs. Results suggest beliefs are malleable but remain largely stable and underscore the need for more nuanced, longitudinal approaches to the code of the street.

Configural Behavior Settings of Crime Event Locations: Toward an Alternative Conceptualization of Criminogenic Microenvironments
Timothy C. Hart and Terance D. Miethe

Objectives: The utility of configural behavior settings is explored as an alternative unit of analysis for place-based criminological research. Four research questions are addressed: (1) How do robberies cluster within certain behavior settings? (2) How are conclusions about robbery’s behavior settings influenced by the distance interval used to measure the proximate environment? (3) Are dominant behavior settings homogeneous across patrol districts? and (4) Is there temporal variability among dominant behavior settings? Method: Conjunctive analysis of case configurations is used to construct configural behavior settings around 453 robbery locations in Henderson, Nevada, between 2007 and 2009. Results: The major findings of this study are that (1) the majority of personal robberies occur within a small number of dominant configural behavior settings and (2) the composition of behavior settings and the proportion of incidents for which they account varies by the distance interval used to measure the proximate environment, patrol district, and time of day. Conclusions: Configural behavior settings provide an alternative unit of analysis that can be used in future place-based research to improve our understanding of criminogenic microenvironments. Replication of this study in other cities that vary in urban design would further demonstrate the merits of this approach.

Kids, Groups, and Crime: In Defense of Conventional Wisdom
Franklin E. Zimring and Hannah Laqueur

Objectives: The objective of this analysis is to address the data and conclusions of Lisa Stolzenberg and Stewart D’Alessio in their article “Co-offending and the Age-crime Curve,” published in The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency in 2008. The authors analyze National Incident–based Reporting System (NIBRS) 2002 arrests from seven states and conclude that most arrests at all ages involve only one offender, and therefore group offending is of little etiological significance. Methods: To test their claims, we conduct offense-specific analyses of single and multiple arrests using the full 2002 NIBRS arrest data set. Results: After disaggregating the data by type of offense, we find group involvement among young offenders dominates the arrest statistics for all serious crimes other than rape and aggravated assault. Conclusions: Contrary to the conclusions of Stolzenberg and D’Alessio, co-offending does appear to have a substantial impact on young offenders. The extent of adolescent crime as group behavior may be a cliché in criminological circles, but this is because the empirical evidence for it is substantial.

Absent Fathers or Absent Variables? A New Look at Paternal Incarceration and Delinquency
Lauren C. Porter and Ryan D. King

Objectives: This research examines the association between paternal incarceration and children’s delinquency. Prior research suggests an association, although omitted variable bias is an enduring issue. Methods: To help address issues related to unobserved heterogeneity, we employ a method uncommonly used in criminological research. Rather than comparing the children of incarcerated fathers to respondents who have never had a father incarcerated, we exploit the longitudinal nature of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to generate a strategic comparison group: respondents who will have a father incarcerated in the future. We also examine two types of delinquency, expressive and instrumental, to infer plausible mechanisms linking paternal incarceration and delinquency. Results: When using “futures” as comparison cases, results differ from much prior work and suggest a spurious association between paternal incarceration and instrumental delinquency (e.g., theft). Paternal incarceration retains a significant effect on expressive delinquency, which is partly mediated by reduced attachment to fathers. Conclusions: The association between paternal incarceration and expressive (but not instrumental) crime supports Agnew’s strain theory and elements of control theory. Our comparison group also offers important advantages in terms of addressing unobserved heterogeneity, and we think this approach would prove useful for other topics in criminology.

Theory and Society 44(2)

Theory and Society, March 2015: Volume 44, Issue 2

Protecting citizens in hard times: citizenship and repatriation pressures in the United States and France during the 1930s
Matthew J. Baltz

Economic crises have historically left immigrants vulnerable due to their insecure positions in the labor market and tenuous social and political ties to host country populations. During the Great Depression, citizenship status also emerged as a key factor determining the rights and protections offered to foreign-born populations in the two main receiving states of the interwar period: the United States and France. This article investigates the ways in which citizenship began to intrude into areas of social and political life where it previously held little relevance. To explain this phenomenon, it draws upon and supplements theories on the relationship between the formation of states and the making of modern national communities, focusing on the expanding powers of nation states within and across international borders after World War I. In both France and the United States, there were notable expansions in their power to control migration and fund social assistance programs. Similarly, sending states were also expanding their power to provide “remote protections” for their citizens abroad through bilateral labor treaties or expanded consular support. As states began to do more things with greater capacity, new and firmer boundaries were forged between citizens and noncitizens as well as between sending and receiving states. A key consequence of this was unprecedented pressure to repatriate. Contrary to much of the previous scholarship on this subject, this article stresses the evolving powers of both sending and receiving states and the corresponding elevation of citizenship status as key enablers of repatriation.

Conceptualizing “unrecognized cultural currency”: Bourdieu and everyday resistance among the dominated
Ming-Cheng Miriam Lo

Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is important for understanding the cultural processes of domination but less helpful in understanding the agency and creativity of the dominated. This article develops the concept of “unrecognized cultural currency” (UCC) to theorize how certain cultural competencies specific to the dominated can facilitate in their everyday resistance. I theorize UCC as cultural resources that have little symbolic value but that nonetheless may be used by the dominated to acquire other valuable resources and push back, to some extent, forces of domination. A case study of low-income LEP (limited English proficiency) immigrant patients concretizes this theoretical argument, highlighting the contrast between practices of “covert maneuvering,” which are enabled by UCC, and practices of “passivity or withdrawal,” which characterize most patient behaviors in situations where UCC is unavailable. The concept of UCC supplements Bourdieu’s framework of cultural capital with further explanations for intra-class stratification among dominated groups. Meanwhile, this article also helps advance recent discussions about everyday resistance.

Choosing health: embodied neoliberalism, postfeminism, and the “do-diet”
Kate Cairns, Josée Johnston

Feminist scholars have long demonstrated how women are constrained through dieting discourse. Today’s scholars wrestle with similar themes, but confront a thornier question: how do we make sense of a food discourse that frames food choices through a lens of empowerment and health, rather than vanity and restriction? This article addresses this question, drawing from interviews and focus groups with women (N = 100), as well as health-focused food writing. These data allow us to document a postfeminist food discourse that we term the do-diet. The do-diet reframes dietary restrictions as positive choices, while maintaining an emphasis on body discipline, expert knowledge, and self-control. Our analysis demonstrates how the do-diet remediates a tension at the heart of neoliberal consumer culture: namely, the tension between embodying discipline through dietary control and expressing freedom through consumer choice. With respect to theory, our analysis demonstrates how the embodied dimensions of neoliberalism find gendered expression through postfeminism. We conclude that the do-diet heightens the challenge of developing feminist critiques of gendered body ideals and corporeal surveillance, as it promises a way of eating that is both morally responsible and personally empowering.

Gifts, donations, and loose coupling: responses to changes in academic entrepreneurship among bioscientists in Japan
Nahoko Kameo

This article delineates how local actors accomplish the adaptation of a global structure and how the social relations in which actors are embedded affect their negotiation of new practices. Specifically, the article draws on interviews and archival research to examine legal and institutional change regarding academic entrepreneurship in Japanese bioscience. In the late 1990s, Japan began to imitate the United States’ method of promoting academic entrepreneurship. New legislation regulating university-industry ties constrained and even prohibited university scientists’ previous practices of informal collaboration with firms. This article shows how Japanese scientists reappropriated the new rules to continue working with firms in ways that would keep established relationships and work arrangements intact. Previously, Japanese scientists maintained informal, trust-based relationships with firms: scientists received “donations” from firms and, in return, provided the “favor” of intellectual property rights. After the introduction of formal rules, scientists tried to avoid breaching their gift-exchange-like relationships with collaborating firms by neglecting, partially following, or working around the new rules to keep giving favors to firms. By tracing the ways Japanese bio-scientists worked around the new system, I thus show how the social ties and practices that local actors are embedded in affect how they think about their work and their relationships: how previous practices and relationships “pull” loosely-coupled practices.

Critical Criminology 23(2)

Critical Criminology, May 2015, Volume 23, Issue 2

Remembering Jock Young: Some Sociological and Personal Reflections
Walter S. DeKeseredy

Jock Young intellectually, politically, and personally touched the lives of many people. Thus, it is not surprising that his departure from this world on November 16, 2013 generated much shock, disbelief, and sadness. This article offers some personal and sociological reflections on Jock’s many contributions to critical criminology.

Jock Young and the Development of Left Realist Criminology
John Lea

This article traces Jock Young’s contribution to the development of Left Realist criminology beginning with the political interventions of the mid 1980s progressing through the development of the ‘square of crime’ as the conceptual framework for a Left Realist research programme to some of the final formulations in his later works. The emphasis of the article is less on critical receptions of Left Realism by the wider criminological community than on demonstrating the consistency of Jock’s commitment to following through the implications of the Left Realist paradigm.

Jock Young, Left Realism and Critical Victimology
Sandra Walklate

In this paper I reflect upon the legacy of the work of Jock Young for the development of a critical criminology. In doing this I also endeavour to offer a contribution to an internal history of both criminology and victimology but from a very particular, and personal, position. The paper falls into four parts. In the first I consider the time period from 1980–1997 and academic, political and policy debates therein. I have called this a time of ‘emergent optimism’. The second part considers the years from 1997–2007 in which this optimism was subjected to challenge. The third part considers 2007 to date and the challenges that remain for both criminology and victimology in the absence of the voice of Jock Young.

Opening Up the Imagination: On Being Mentored by Jock Young
Albert de la Tierra

The ANNALS of the AAPSS 659

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 2015: Volume 659

Perspectives on Computational Social Science

From Big Data to Knowledge in the Social Sciences
Bradford W. Hesse, Richard P. Moser, and William T. Riley

On Building Better Mousetraps and Understanding the Human Condition: Reflections on Big Data in the Social Sciences
Jimmy Lin

Building Better Models: Prediction, Replication, and Machine Learning in the Social Sciences
Matthew Hindman

Is Bigger Always Better? Potential Biases of Big Data Derived from Social Network Sites
Eszter Hargittai

Computer Coding of Content and Sentiment

Data-Driven Content Analysis of Social Media: A Systematic Overview of Automated Methods
H. Andrew Schwartz and Lyle H. Ungar

Signals of Public Opinion in Online Communication: A Comparison of Methods and Data Sources
Sandra González-Bailón and Georgios Paltoglou

Bad News or Mad News? Sentiment Scoring of Negativity, Fear, and Anger in News Content
Stuart Soroka, Lori Young, and Meital Balmas

Using Supervised Machine Learning to Code Policy Issues: Can Classifiers Generalize across Contexts?
Bjorn Burscher, Rens Vliegenthart, and Claes H. De Vreese

Mapping Online Clusters and Networks

Searching and Clustering Methodologies: Connecting Political Communication Content across Platforms
Kevin Driscoll and Kjerstin Thorson

Candidate Networks, Citizen Clusters, and Political Expression: Strategic Hashtag Use in the 2010 Midterms
Leticia Bode, Alexander Hanna, Junghwan Yang, and Dhavan V. Shah

Online Fragmentation in Wartime: A Longitudinal Analysis of Tweets about Syria, 2011–2013
Deen Freelon, Marc Lynch, and Sean Aday

Individual Motivations and Network Effects: A Multilevel Analysis of the Structure of Online Social Relationships
Brooke Foucault Welles and Noshir Contractor

Examining Social Media Influence

What Social Media Data We Are Missing and How to Get It
Paul Resnick, Eytan Adar, and Cliff Lampe

The Dynamics of Issue Frame Competition in Traditional and Social Media
Lauren Guggenheim, S. Mo Jang, Soo Young Bae, and W. Russell Neuman

The Power of Television Images in a Social Media Age: Linking Biobehavioral and Computational Approaches via the Second Screen
Dhavan V. Shah, Alex Hanna, Erik P. Bucy, Chris Wells, and Vidal Quevedo

The Network of Celebrity Politics: Political Implications of Celebrity Following on Twitter
Sungjin Park, Jihye Lee, Seungjin Ryu, and Kyu S. Hahn

Innovations in Computational Social Science

Automating Open Science for Big Data
Mercè Crosas, Gary King, James Honaker, and Latanya Sweeney

Big Data under the Microscope and Brains in Social Context: Integrating Methods from Computational Social Science and Neuroscience
Matthew Brook O’Donnell and Emily B. Falk

Constructing Recommendation Systems for Effective Health Messages Using Content, Collaborative, and Hybrid Algorithms
Joseph N. Cappella, Sijia Yang, and Sungkyoung Lee

Content Analysis and the Algorithmic Coder: What Computational Social Science Means for Traditional Modes of Media Analysis
Rodrigo Zamith and Seth C. Lewis

Crime & Delinquency 61(4)

Crime & Delinquency, May 2015: Volume 61, Issue 4

Arab Americans’ Confidence in Police
Ivan Y. Sun and Yuning Wu

Although the September 11 attacks have drawn much law enforcement attention to Arab Americans, research on Arab Americans’ perceptions of police is almost nonexistent. Using survey data collected from 850 Arab Americans who resided in the Detroit metropolitan area, this study empirically examined the effects of demographic characteristics, personal experience, social attitudes and values, and social trust, of confidence in local police. The results indicated that the majority of Arab Americans had a great deal or a lot of confidence in police. Arab Americans’ confidence in police was significantly related to their social attitudes and trust, such as conservative outlook, confidence in the legal system, respect for authority, and trust in neighbors. Arab Americans’ background characteristics and experience had a weak effect on their confidence in police. More empirical research is warranted to assess Arab Americans’ evaluations of local police along more indicators of police performance.

Explaining Leniency: Organizational Predictors of the Differential Treatment of Men and Women in Traffic Stops
Amy Farrell

Scholars have devoted significant attention to measuring the degree to which a driver’s personal characteristics affect police decisions to stop and sanction motorists. Following the pattern of research on gender and enforcement practices more broadly, traffic stop studies show that female drivers are less likely to receive formal sanctions such as a citation following routine traffic stops. Despite the consistency of these findings across places and times, we know little about the conditions under which female traffic violators are granted leniency. This article extends research on the effect of driver and stop characteristics on gender disparities in traffic enforcement decisions by examining 149,888 stops from across 37 communities in Rhode Island with different local needs and variation in police organizational culture and structure. The findings confirm that although women are less likely to be cited than men, community-level variation in police agency culture and structure, particularly the proportion of female officers in an agency, moderates the effect of driver sex on stop outcomes.

Substance Use, Personality, and Inhibitors: Testing Hirschi’s Predictions About the Reconceptualization of Self-Control
Shayne Jones, Donald R. Lynam, and Alex R. Piquero

Hirschi argues that self-control has not been properly measured or conceptualized in previous research. He insists that personality-based notions of self-control should be replaced with inhibitors/social bonds as the key construct, which in turn influence whether an individual considers the full range of costs associated with an antisocial behavior. This analysis supplements a small literature exploring this new conceptualization of self-control, specifically by examining substance use. The findings indicate that inhibitors/bonds do exert an effect on substance use but are not mediated by perceived costs. Furthermore, different variants of impulsivity continue to exert independent influences, with some mediated by perceived costs. Finally, perceived rewards not only influenced substance use directly but were also the most consistent mediator of inhibitors/bonds and impulsivity.

The Benefits of Keeping Idle Hands Busy: An Outcome Evaluation of a Prisoner Reentry Employment Program
Grant Duwe

This study evaluated the effectiveness of EMPLOY, a prisoner reentry employment program, by examining recidivism and postrelease employment outcomes among 464 offenders released from Minnesota prisons between 2006 and 2008. As outcome data were collected on the 464 offenders through the end of June 2010, the average follow-up period was 28 months. Observable selection bias was minimized by using propensity score matching to create a comparison group of 232 nonparticipants who were not significantly different from the 232 EMPLOY offenders. Results from the Cox regression analyses revealed that participating in EMPLOY reduced the hazard ratio for recidivism by 32% to 63%. The findings further showed that EMPLOY increased the odds of gaining postrelease employment by 72%. Although EMPLOY did not have a significant impact on hourly wage, the overall postrelease wages for program participants were significantly higher because they worked a greater number of hours. The study concludes by discussing the implications of these findings.

A Test of the Routine Activities and Neighborhood Attachment Explanations for Bias in Disorder Perceptions
Danielle Wallace

“Neighborhood disorder” refers to how people perceive neighborhoods as unsafe and disorganized. However, certain disorder cues may indicate disorder to some residents but not to others. There are many explanations for disorder perception bias, though few have been tested. This article uses data on 4,721 residents in 100 neighborhoods in Seattle to assess two explanations for biases: neighborhood attachment and routine activities. Using fixed-effect models, this article shows that neighborhood attachment and routine activities provide additional insight into disorder perceptions. Hanging out with teens and engaging in protective neighborhood activities, like watching neighbors’ property, have a strong positive influence on disorder perceptions. This study concludes by discussing alternative explanations for disorder perception bias and their impact on disorder theory as a whole.

Trust in the Police: The Influence of Procedural Justice and Perceived Collective Efficacy
Justin Nix, Scott E. Wolfe, Jeff Rojek, and Robert J. Kaminski

Tyler’s process-based model of policing suggests that the police can enhance their perceived legitimacy and trustworthiness in the eyes of the public when they exercise their authority in a procedurally fair manner. To date, most process-based research has focused on the sources of legitimacy while largely overlooking trust in the police. The present study extends this line of literature by examining the sources of trust in the police. In particular, emerging research has revealed that neighborhood context influences attitudes toward the police but much less attention has been given to exploring the role individuals’ perceptions of their neighborhood play in shaping such evaluations. Therefore, the present study considers whether individuals’ perceptions of collective efficacy serve as a social-psychological cognitive orientation that influences levels of trust in the police. Using data from a recently conducted mail survey of a random sample of 1,681 residents from a metropolitan city, we find that procedural justice evaluations are a primary source of trust in the police. At the same time, however, level of perceived collective efficacy is positively associated with trust even after accounting for procedural justice. The findings suggest that police procedural fairness is vitally important to establishing trust from the public but peoples’ cognitive orientation toward their neighborhood context partially shapes the level of trustworthiness they afford to the police.

Sociological Theory 33(1)

Sociological Theory, March 2015: Volume 33, Issue 1

Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence
Rogers Brubaker

This paper seeks to develop a nuanced and qualified account of the distinctive ways in which religion can inform political conflict and violence. It seeks to transcend the opposition between particularizing stances, which see religiously informed political conflicts as sui generis and uniquely intractable, and generalizing stances, which assimilate religiously informed political conflicts to other forms of political conflict. The paper specifies the distinctively religious stakes of certain political conflicts, informed by distinctively religious understandings of right order, as well as the distinctiveness of religion as a rich matrix of interlocking modalities and mechanisms that—in certain contexts—can contribute to political conflict and violence even when the stakes are not distinctively religious. At the same time, the paper shows that many putatively religious conflicts are fundamentally similar to other conflicts over political power, economic resources, symbolic recognition, or cultural reproduction.

Repulsed by the “Other”: Integrating Theory with Method in the Study of Intergroup Association
Zbigniew Karpiński and John Skvoretz

We offer an integration of theory and method in the study of intergroup social associations. Specifically, we show that models for intergroup association tables developed using generic log-linear methods for categorical data analysis embody a general theoretical point of view on the driving force behind intergroup association, namely, as the outcome of a probabilistic process of repulsion from dissimilar others. We develop this argument and illustrate it with intermarriage data. We conclude by identifying the advantages that accrue to both theory and method when the theoretical assumptions underlying the application of a generic statistical methodology are clearly understood.

Beyond World Images: Belief as Embodied Action in the World
Michael Strand and Omar Lizardo

In this article, we outline the analytic limitations of action theories and interpretive schemes that conceive of beliefs as explicit mental representations linked to a desire-opportunity folk psychology. Drawing on pragmatism and practice theory, we recast the notion of belief as a species of habit, with pre-reflexive anticipation the primary mechanism accounting for both the formation of beliefs and their causal influence on action. We demonstrate the utility of this approach in three ways: first, by linking it with recent research on the cognitive and motor development of infants; second, by drawing out a typology of belief states that accounts for a range of different experiential traits; and third, by applying the new model to reinterpret two belief-based phenomena of broad sociological interest: “irrational” decision making and religious conversion.

Revising as Reframing: Original Submissions versus Published Papers in Administrative Science Quarterly, 2005 to 2009
David Strang and Kyle Siler

Peer review guides the intensive reworking of research reports, a key mechanism in the construction of social scientific knowledge and one that gives substantial creative agency to journal editors and reviewers. We conceptualize this process in terms of two types of challenges: evidentiary challenges that question a study’s methodology and interpretive challenges that question a study’s theoretical framing. A survey of authors recently published in Administrative Science Quarterly finds that their peer review experience was dominated by interpretive challenges: extensive criticisms, suggestions, and subsequent revision concerning conceptual and theoretical issues but limited attention to methodological and empirical aspects of the work. Salient differences between original submissions and published papers include intensive reworking of theory and discussion sections as well as growth and turnover in citations and hypotheses. We consider implications of the dominance of interpretive challenges in successful revision and possible sources of variation across scholarly fields.

British Journal of Criminology 55(3)

British Journal of Criminology, March 2015: Volume 55, Issue 3

Understanding Complainant Credibility in Rape Appeals: A Case Study of High Court Judgments and Judges’ Perspectives in India
Ravinder Barn and Ved Kumari

Despite the growing number of reported cases of rape and sexual assault against women in India, there is an insufficient understanding of the perspectives and responses of the Indian Criminal Justice System in general and the judiciary in particular. By employing a framework of ‘complainant credibility’, this paper examines High Court judgments and judges’ perspectives in rape appeals. In placing a robust and systematic focus on one aspect of the Indian jurisdiction, this paper sheds light on how competing realities are understood by the judiciary to inform decision making about complainant credibility and suspect’s guilt in affirming or overturning trial court decisions.

Gender, Pressure, Coercion and Pleasure: Untangling Motivations for Sexting Between Young People
Murray Lee and Thomas Crofts

What has been problematically termed ‘sexting’ has attracted considerable legal, political, public, media and academic attention. Concern has focused on sexting between young people who may experience emotional and reputational damage and are at risk of being charged with child abuse or pornography offences in many jurisdictions. Recent research has rightly highlighted sexting’s gendered dynamics. Accordingly, a discourse has developed that imagines the common sexting scenario involves girls feeling pressured into sending boys sexual images. This article develops an analytic framework of pressure and critically reviews research into sexting. It suggests that while such scenarios occur, they do not reflect the experiences expressed by the majority of girls who actually engage in sexting, who are more likely to express motivations associated with pleasure or desire.

State-directed Sterilizations in North Carolina: Victim-centredness and Reparations
Sarah Brightman, Emily Lenning, and Karen McElrath

Thirty-three states in the United States implemented eugenic sterilization laws during the 20th century, and an estimated 65,000 US residents underwent coerced sterilization via state policies. In North Carolina, 7,528 individuals were targeted for state-led sterilization between 1929 and 1974. The majority of these individuals were women, impoverished and officially classified as ‘feeble-minded’. We argue that the sterilizations constituted serious violations of human rights largely due to state exploitation of already marginalized people, lack of consent and limited due process that accompanied sterilization orders. In this article, we analyze textual data from state proceedings that focused on reparations, and find considerable power differentials that placed sterilization victims at the margins rather than at the centre of the reparation process.

Disjointed Service: An English Case Study of Multi-agency Provision in Tackling Child Trafficking
Jackie H. Harvey, Rob A. Hornsby, and Zeibeda Sattar

This article examines the issue of child trafficking in the United Kingdom and of multi-agency responses in tackling it. The United Kingdom, as a signatory to the recent trafficking protocols, is required to implement measures to identify and support potential victims of trafficking—via the National Referral Mechanism. Effective support for child victims is reliant on cooperation between agencies. Our regional case study contends that fragmented agency understandings of protocols and disjointed partnership approaches in service delivery means the trafficking of vulnerable children continues across the region. This article asserts that child trafficking in the United Kingdom, previously viewed as an isolated localized phenomenon, maybe far more widespread, revealing deficiencies in child protection services for vulnerable children.

Capote’s Ghosts: Violence, Media and the Spectre of Suspicion
Travis Linnemann

In 1959, on the Kansas high plains, two ex-convict drifters fell upon a defenseless farm family, slaying them ‘in cold blood’. As the subject of a book widely regarded as the first of the modern true crime genre—Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood— the murdered and murderers live on in the spectral, haunting the minds of the public as the horrors of random crimes and senseless violence. Paying close attention to the cultural production of both the present and absent, this paper considers how violence haunts commonplace geographies and the imaginations of everyday actors, through the lens of banal crime reporting and celebrated true crime novels. Doing so, it offers unique context and insight into the production of suspect identities and the social insecurities that underpin everyday life.

Earning a Score: An Exploration of the Nature and Roles of Heroin and Crack Cocaine ‘User-dealers’
Leah Moyle and Ross Coomber

Research consistently shows a strong correlation between heroin/crack cocaine use, acquisitive crime and income generation, through activities such as sex work and theft. Less is known however about alternative choices of income generation such as small-scale drug supply. Drawing on data from interviews with 30 heroin and crack cocaine user-dealers in a city in South West England, this article explores the motivations, practices and roles undertaken by small-scale addicted suppliers who distribute drugs to other addicted users for the purpose of reproducing their own supply. Findings suggest that addicted user-dealers’ motivations are commonly different to those of commercially motivated suppliers, while their activities are perceived as a less harmful and a more convenient way of funding their drug dependency than other acquisitive crimes.

Social Structure and Bonhomie: Emotions in the Youth Street Gang
Kevin Moran

Scholars have overlooked the significance of emotion in motivating participation in deviant subcultures. Youth subcultures, particularly those of lower or working class provenance, emerge as an ongoing attempt to manage and mitigate structurally produced feelings of shame, by converting this sense of devaluation into pride. Using the youth street gang as a case study, this article gives greater precision to this emotional conversionary process, arguing that gangs transpose ambient parent culture of solidarity into subcultural emphasis on self and group affirming loyalty. Thus, espirit de corps, a central and vivifying value within youth street gangs, is magnified and maintained via group symbolic praxis and expressive violence. Moreover, youth street gang culture protects this emotional conversionary process from iatrogenic threats, i.e. injury, prison, the death of others, by subsuming potentially negative consequences within this subcultural system.

From Cybercrime to Cyborg Crime: Botnets as Hybrid Criminal Actor-Networks
Wytske van der Wagen and Wolter Pieters

Botnets, networks of infected computers controlled by a commander, increasingly play a role in a broad range of cybercrimes. Although often studied from technological perspectives, a criminological perspective could elucidate the organizational structure of botnets and how to counteract them. Botnets, however, pose new challenges for the rather anthropocentric theoretical repertoire of criminology, as they are neither fully human nor completely machine driven. We use Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to provide a symmetrical perspective on human and non-human agency in hybrid cybercriminal networks and analyze a botnet case from this perspective. We conclude that an ANT lens is particularly suitable for shedding light on the hybrid and intertwined offending, victimization and defending processes, leading to the new concept of ‘cyborg crime’.

A Crime Script Analysis of the Online Stolen Data Market
Alice Hutchings and Thomas J. Holt

The purpose of this study is to better understand the online black market economy, specifically relating to stolen data, using crime script analysis. Content analysis of 13 English- and Russian-speaking stolen data forums found that the different products and services offered enabled the commodification of stolen data. The marketplace offers a range of complementary products, from the supply of hardware and software to steal data, the sale of the stolen data itself, to the provision of services to turn data into money, such as drops, cashiers and money laundering. The crime script analysis provides some insight into how the actors in these forums interact, and the actions they perform, from setting up software to finalizing transactions and exiting the marketplace.

On the Relevance of Spatial and Temporal Dimensions in Assessing Computer Susceptibility to System Trespassing Incidents
David Maimon, Theodore Wilson, Wuling Ren, and Tamar Berenblum

We employ knowledge regarding the early phases of system trespassing events and develop a context-related, theoretically driven study that explores computer networks’ social vulnerabilities to remote system trespassing events. Drawing on the routine activities perspective, we raise hypotheses regarding the role of victim client computers in determining the geographical origins and temporal trends of (1) successful password cracking attempts and (2) system trespassing incidents. We test our hypotheses by analyzing data collected from large sets of target computers, built for the sole purpose of being attacked, that were deployed in two independent research sites (China and Israel). Our findings have significant implications for cyber-criminological theory and research.

American Sociological Review 80(2)

American Sociological Review, April 2015; Volume 80, Issue 2

Dignity and Dreams: What the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) Means to Low-Income Families
Jennifer Sykes, Katrin Križ, Kathryn Edin, and Sarah Halpern-Meekin

Money has meaning that shapes its uses and social significance, including the monies low-income families draw on for survival: wages, welfare, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). This study, based on in-depth interviews with 115 low-wage EITC recipients, reveals the EITC is an unusual type of government transfer. Recipients of the EITC say they value the debt relief this government benefit brings. However, they also perceive it as a just reward for work, which legitimizes a temporary increase in consumption. Furthermore, unlike other means-tested government transfers, the credit is seen as a springboard for upward mobility. Thus, by conferring dignity and spurring dreams, the EITC enhances feelings of citizenship and social inclusion.

Paradoxes of Social Policy: Welfare Transfers, Relative Poverty, and Redistribution Preferences
David Brady and Amie Bostic

Korpi and Palme’s (1998) classic “The Paradox of Redistribution and Strategies of Equality” claims that universal social policy better reduces poverty than social policies targeted at the poor. This article revisits Korpi and Palme’s classic, and in the process, explores and informs a set of enduring questions about social policy, politics, and social equality. Specifically, we investigate the relationships between three dimensions of welfare transfers—transfer share (the average share of household income from welfare transfers), low-income targeting, and universalism—and poverty and preferences for redistribution. We analyze rich democracies like Korpi and Palme, but we also generalize to a broader sample of developed and developing countries. Consistent with Korpi and Palme, we show (1) poverty is negatively associated with transfer share and universalism; (2) redistribution preferences are negatively associated with low-income targeting; and (3) universalism is positively associated with transfer share. Contrary to Korpi and Palme, redistribution preferences are not related to transfer share or universalism; and low-income targeting is neither positively associated with poverty nor negatively associated with transfer share. Therefore, instead of the “paradox of redistribution” we propose two new paradoxes of social policy: non-complementarity and undermining. The non-complementarity paradox entails a mismatch between the dimensions that matter to poverty and the dimension that matters to redistribution preferences. The undermining paradox emphasizes that the dimension (transfer share) that most reduces poverty tends to increase with the one dimension (low-income targeting) that reduces support for redistribution.

Executive Compensation, Fat Cats, and Best Athletes
Jerry W. Kim, Bruce Kogut, and Jae-Suk Yang

Income gains in the top 1 percent are the primary cause for the rapid growth in U.S. inequality since the late 1970s. Managers and executives of firms account for a large proportion of these top earners. Chief executive officers (CEOs), in particular, have seen their compensation increase faster than the growth in firm size. We propose that changes in the macro patterns of the distribution of CEO compensation resulted from a process of diffusion within localized networks, propagating higher pay among corporate executives. We compare three possible explanations for diffusion: director board interlocks, peer groups, and educational networks. The statistical results indicate that corporate director networks facilitate social comparisons that generate the observed pay patterns. Peer and education network effects do not survive a novel endogeneity test that we execute. A key implication is that local diffusion through executive network structures partially explains the changes in macro patterns of income distribution found in the inequality data.

Do Women Suffer from Network Closure? The Moderating Effect of Social Capital on Gender Inequality in a Project-Based Labor Market, 1929 to 2010
Mark Lutte

That social capital matters is an established fact in the social sciences. Less clear, however, is how different forms of social capital affect gender disadvantages in career advancement. Focusing on a project-based type of labor market, namely the U.S. film industry, this study argues that women suffer a “closure penalty” and face severe career disadvantages when collaborating in cohesive teams. At the same time, gender disadvantages are reduced for women who build social capital in open networks with higher degrees of diversity and information flow. Using large-scale longitudinal data on career profiles of about one million performances by 97,657 film actors in 369,099 film productions between the years 1929 and 2010, I analyze career survival models and interaction effects between gender and different measures of social capital and information openness. Findings reveal that female actors have a higher risk of career failure than do their male colleagues when affiliated in cohesive networks, but women have better survival chances when embedded in open, diverse structures. This study contributes to the understanding of how and what type of social capital can be either a beneficial resource for otherwise disadvantaged groups or a constraining mechanism that intensifies gender differences in career advancement.

International Human Rights and Domestic Income Inequality: A Difficult Case of Compliance in World Society
Wade M. Cole

Much research finds that human rights treaties fail to improve domestic practices unless governments are held accountable in some fashion. The implication is that noncompliance can be attributed to insincere commitments and willful disobedience. I challenge this claim for a core but overlooked treaty: the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Few analysts have studied the ICESCR because its terms are difficult to implement and suitable measures for judging compliance are hard to find. I analyze its association with income inequality, using data for more than 100 countries (1981 to 2005) and methods that account for the possibility of reverse causality. ICESCR membership reduces inequality in both developed and developing countries, although the relationship is stronger for developed countries—precisely those with the greatest capacity to implement their obligations. Other key determinants of income inequality and treaty compliance—left partisanship, union density, workers’ rights, and democracy—do not systematically condition the effects of ICESCR membership. The ICESCR is therefore quite effective in reducing inequality, an outcome likely explained by renewed global attention to socioeconomic rights during the neoliberal era.

The Dynamics of Opportunity and Insurgent Practice: How Black Anti-colonialists Compelled Truman to Advocate Civil Rights
Joshua Bloom

Political opportunity theory has proven extremely generative, highlighting the importance of macro-structural shifts in making established authorities vulnerable to insurgent challenge. But as critics point out, political opportunity theory flattens both culture and agency, and has fared poorly in explaining the timing of insurgency. Re-theorizing opportunity as leveraged by particular practices, rather than independently conferring to groups, redresses these limits, revealing the proximate causes of mobilization and influence. For a strategic test, this article revisits the forging ground of opportunity theory. Why did President Harry S. Truman, initially an apologist for the slow pace of racial reform in 1945–46, suddenly become an avid advocate of civil rights? Opportunity scholars argue that macro-structural forces caused Truman to advocate civil rights, generating the opportunity for insurgency by blacks as a group. But event structure analysis reveals how Black Anti-colonialist practices leveraged opportunities afforded by the earlier Progressive Challenge to compel Truman to adopt civil rights advocacy. Civil rights advocacy, in turn, allowed Truman to repress Black Anti-colonialist practices, even while setting the stage for the Civil Rights Movement to come. Different forms of insurgent practice leveraged opportunities created by different institutional cleavages; the same opportunities did not advantage all insurgency by a social group.

Protest Campaigns and Movement Success: Desegregating the U.S. South in the Early 1960s
Michael Biggs and Kenneth T. Andrews

Can protest bring about social change? Although scholarship on the consequences of social movements has grown dramatically, our understanding of protest influence is limited; several recent studies have failed to detect any positive effect. We investigate sit-in protest by black college students in the U.S. South in 1960, which targeted segregated lunch counters. An original dataset of 334 cities enables us to assess the effect of protest while considering the factors that generate protest itself—including local movement infrastructure, supportive political environments, and favorable economic conditions. We find that sit-in protest greatly increased the probability of desegregation, as did protest in nearby cities. Over time, desegregation in one city raised the probability of desegregation nearby. In addition, desegregation tended to occur where opposition was weak, political conditions were favorable, and the movement’s constituency had economic leverage.

After State Socialism: The Political Origins of Transitional Recessions
Andrew G. Walder, Andrew Isaacson, and Qinglian Lu

Transitions from state socialism created a startling range of initial economic outcomes, from renewed growth to deep economic crises. Debates about the causes have largely ignored the political disruptions due to regime change that coincided with sudden initial recessions, and they have defined the problem as relative growth rates over time rather than abrupt short-run collapse. Political disruptions were severe when states broke apart into newly independent units, leading to hyperinflation, armed warfare, or both. Even absent these disruptions, the disintegration of communist parties inherently undermined economic activity by creating uncertainty about the ownership of state assets. The protracted deterioration of the party-state prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union generated widespread conflict over control of assets, which crippled economic activity across the Soviet successor states. A more rapid path to regime change was less disruptive in other post-communist states, and the problem was absent in surviving communist regimes. Comparative accounts of regime change frame an analysis of panel data from 31 countries after 1989 that distinguishes the early 1990s from subsequent years. A wide range of variables associated with alternative explanations have little evident impact in accounting for the onset and severity of the early 1990s recessions.

Crime & Delinquency 61(3)

Crime & Delinquency, April 2015: Volume 61, Issue 3

Race, Ethnicity, and School-Based Adolescent Victimization
Anthony A. Peguero, Ann Marie Popp, and Dixie J. Koo

Opportunity theory enhances one’s understanding of school-based adolescent victimization. Race and ethnicity plays a significant role in school-based victimization. What is uncertain is how opportunity is linked to the school-based victimization of racial and ethnic minority adolescents. This study explores how race and ethnicity interact with opportunity and victimization. Analyses, which are drawn from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 and employ hierarchal generalized logistic model analyses, suggest some important results. Most notably, the relationships between opportunity and victimization vary across racial and ethnic groups. For instance, athletic extracurricular activity involvement is an insulating factor for White Americans but a potential risk factor for Latino Americans and Asian Americans. Besides discussing the findings of this study, this article underscores the importance of understanding racial and ethnic minority school-based adolescent victimization.

The Impact of Race/Ethnicity and Quality-of-Life Policing on Public Attitudes Toward Racially Biased Policing and Traffic Stops
Jihong Solomon Zhao, Yung-Lien Lai, Ling Ren, and Brian Lawton

This article examines the impact of race/ethnicity and quality-of-life (QOL) policing on citizens’ perceptions of racial bias and traffic stops. Using data obtained from a random-sample telephone survey of Houston citizens, respondents were asked whether they felt that the police treated citizens “equally” based on the race/ethnicity of the citizen as well as the race/ethnicity of the officer. These variables were then recoded to construct a nominal measure ranging from racially biased policing to absence of racially biased policing, with a middle category of “semiracially” biased policing. Results indicated that race/ethnicity was a significant predictor. In addition, the results strongly suggested that QOL policing was significantly associated with a decrease in respondents’ perceptions of racially biased policing. Finally, there was a significant relationship between racially biased policing and expected treatment of traffic stops made by the police.

Examining the Effects of Residential Situations and Residential Mobility on Offender Recidivism
Benjamin Steiner, Matthew D. Makarios, and Lawrence F. Travis III

Drawing from theories of social control, this study involved an examination of the time-varying effects of six different residential situations and residential mobility on offenders’ odds of recidivism during the year immediately following their release from prison. Analyses of data collected on a statewide sample of offenders released under supervision in Ohio generated results favoring a control perspective. Both residential mobility and residential situations such as living with a spouse or parent were relevant for understanding differences among offenders in their odds of recidivism. Stable characteristics of offenders such as gender and prior criminal history were also linked to recidivism.

A Comparison of Chinese Immigrants’ Perceptions of the Police in New York City and Toronto
Doris C. Chu and John Huey-Long Song

During the past several decades, research on immigrant adaptation and incorporation experience within different host societies has proliferated. Nevertheless, studies comparing how immigrants interact with law enforcement in the largest cities, respectively, in the United States and Canada do not seem to exist. In an attempt to bridge the gap in past literature, this study examines the differences of Chinese immigrants’ perceptions of the police in New York City and Toronto. Analyzing data gathered from 444 Chinese immigrants (151 from New York City and 293 from Toronto), this study compared Chinese immigrants’ attitudes toward police efficacy and their overall perceptions in both cities. The findings indicated that Chinese immigrants in Toronto held more positive overall perceptions of the police than did their counterparts in New York City. With regard to police efficacy in dealing with crime, there were no significant attitudinal differences in Chinese immigrants between New York City and Toronto. Policy implications were discussed.

Assessing the Impact of Changes in Gender Equality on Female Homicide Victimization: 1980-2000
Lynne M. Vieraitis, Sarah Britto, and Robert G. Morris

Numerous studies have tested the feminist hypothesis that gender inequality affects homicide rates by analyzing Census and Uniform Crime Report data for a single time period. Although these “snapshot” tests are important, they do not capture the “change” element that is implied by these hypotheses. According to feminist perspectives, gender inequality and gender equality could increase homicide rates, the former increasing the structural disadvantage of women relative to men and the latter representing a “backlash” effect. Women’s absolute status may also be an important predictor of homicide victimization. Furthermore, it is quite possible that this process is dynamic and therefore the change in equality over time may be more important than the actual level of equality at any given time. The present study measures the impact of gender equality and women’s absolute status on female homicide victimization using city-level data from 1980 to 2000. In general, the results suggest that changes in gender equality and women’s absolute status have decreased women’s rate of homicide victimization, and the negative effect of gender equality appears to have grown stronger over time; however, these results are not uniform across victim–offender relationships.

Testing Ecological Theories of Offender Spatial Decision Making Using a Discrete Choice Model
Shane D. Johnson and Lucia Summers

Research demonstrates that crime is spatially concentrated. However, most research relies on information about where crimes occur, without reference to where offenders reside. This study examines how the characteristics of neighborhoods and their proximity to offender home locations affect offender spatial decision making. Using a discrete choice model and data for detected incidents of theft from vehicles (TFV), we test predictions from two theoretical perspectives—crime pattern and social disorganization theories. We demonstrate that offenders favor areas that are low in social cohesion and closer to their home, or other age-related activity nodes. For adult offenders, choices also appear to be influenced by how accessible a neighborhood is via the street network. The implications for criminological theory and crime prevention are discussed.

Social Forces 93(3)

Social Forces, March 2015: Volume 93, Issue 3

Biosocial

Cancer and the Plow
David Fielding

Past research has shown that the invention of the plow played a key role in human social evolution. The physical strength required to drive a plow gave men a comparative advantage in economically productive activity; this created gender norms that have persisted to the present day. However, there is an additional channel through which the invention of the plow could have influenced modern human societies: the creation of an economic environment favoring not only the sexual division of labor but also the selection of men with more upper-body strength. In this case, modern populations descended from plow-using communities should exhibit greater sexual dimorphism than others, and greater dimorphism should be associated with higher androgen levels in males. This has a direct epidemiological implication, because the incidence of many cancers is correlated with androgen levels. Using international data on cancer incidence, we show that there is a strong association between the magnitude of sex differences in cancer risk and the proportion of the population descended from plow-using communities. Although both of these characteristics are correlated with other socio-economic factors (such as the level of economic development), controlling for such correlations does not diminish estimates of the magnitude of the association between cancer risk and plow ancestry. In addition to their implications for cancer epidemiology, the results suggest that the international variation in gender norms might also be associated with variation in androgen levels.

Gene by Social-Environment Interaction for Youth Delinquency and Violence: Thirty-Nine Aggression-Related Genes
Hexuan Liu, Yi Li, Guang Guo

Complex human traits are likely to be affected by many environmental and genetic factors, and the interactions among them. However, previous gene-environment interaction (G × E) studies have typically focused on one or only a few genetic variants at a time. To provide a broader view of G × E, this study examines the relationship between 403 genetic variants from 39 genes and youth delinquency and violence. We find evidence that low social control is associated with greater genetic risk for delinquency and violence and high/moderate social control with smaller genetic risk for delinquency and violence. Our findings are consistent with prior G × E studies based on a small number of genetic variants, and more importantly, we show that these findings still hold when a large number of genetic variants are considered simultaneously. A key implication of these findings is that the expression of multiple genes related to delinquency depends on the social environment: gene expression is likely to be amplified in low-social-control environments but tends to be suppressed in high/moderate-social-control environments. This study not only deepens our understanding of how the social environment shapes individual behavior, but also provides important conceptual and methodological insights for future G × E research on complex human traits.

Economic Sociology

The Recruitment Paradox: Network Recruitment, Structural Position, and East German Market Transition
Richard A. Benton, Steve McDonald, Anna Manzoni, David F. Warner

Economic institutions structure links between labor-market informality and social stratification. The present study explores how periods of institutional change and post-socialist market transition alter network-based job finding, in particular informal recruitment. We highlight how market transitions affect both the prevalence and distribution of network-based recruitment channels: open-market environments reduce informal recruitment’s prevalence but increase its association with high wages. We test these propositions using the case of the former East Germany’s market transition and a comparison with West Germany’s more stable institutional environment. Following transition, workers in lower tiers increasingly turned toward formal intermediaries, active employee search, and socially “disembedded” matches. Meanwhile, employers actively recruited workers into higher-wage positions. Implications for market transition theory and post-socialist stratification are discussed.

Balancing Permission and Prohibition: Private Trade and Adaptation at the VOC
Stoyan V. Sgourev, Wim van Lent

The first wave of global trade, in which the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was a key player, writ large the problem of how “principals” could ensure that overseas “agents” protected company interests. The two principal mechanisms were suppression of opportunism and permission of agents to engage in private trade. There is near consensus in past research that the rigidity of the VOC in not permitting private trade left it unable to emulate more nimble rivals and contributed to its demise. Drawing on unique 18th-century archival data, a time-series analysis revises this assumption, showing that private-trade regulations, as a historical form of adaptation, occurred as a response to declining performance and exercised a beneficial financial impact. From the 1740s, control was more flexible than typically asserted, attempting to balance permission and prohibition. If principals recognized the economic upside of private trade, they were apprehensive about its social consequences. The study underlines the need of dynamic models to capture complex historical events, illustrating how seeming inactivity may in fact mask inconsistent activity. It also contributes to better understanding historical transitions when forms of adaptation may prove beneficial in the short run, but are insufficient to prevent decline in the long run.

Family

Non-Standard Work Schedules and Childbearing in the Netherlands: A Mixed-Method Couple Analysis
Katia Begall, Melinda Mills, Harry B. G. Ganzeboom

This study examined the effect of working at non-standard times on the transition to first and second childbirth. Using quantitative couple data from two waves of the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (N = 742) and semi-structured qualitative interviews (N = 29), we found a lower probability of having a first child when the female partner was engaged in non-standard schedules, and a higher likelihood of second childbirth for couples where either partner worked in a non-standard schedule. In line with expectations about the institutional and normative context of the Netherlands, we concluded that women adjusted their work schedules to their fertility plans and that couples had a preference for the personal care of their children rather than relying on formal care arrangements. Non-standard schedules served as a means to achieve this.

A Life-Changing Event: First Births and Men’s and Women’s Attitudes to Mothering and Gender Divisions of Labor
Janeen Baxter, Sandra Buchler, Francisco Perales, Mark Western

Previous research has shown that the transition to parenthood is a critical life-course stage. Using data from the Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey and fixed-effects panel regression models, we investigate changes in men’s and women’s attitudes to mothering and gender divisions of labor following the transition to parenthood. Key findings indicate that attitudes become more traditional after individuals experience the birth of their first child, with both men and women becoming more likely to support mothering as women’s most important role in life. We argue that these changes are due to both changes in identity and cognitive beliefs associated with the experience of becoming a parent, as well as institutional arrangements that support traditional gender divisions. More broadly, our results can be taken as strong evidence that attitudes are not stable over the life course and change with the experience of life events.

Inequality and Stratification

Mexican American Mobility: Early Life Processes and Adult Wealth Ownership
Lisa A. Keister, Jody Agius Vallejo, E. Paige Borelli

Mexican Americans are a large group whose mobility patterns can provide important insight into immigrant assimilation processes. It is well known that Mexicans have not attained economic parity with whites, but there is considerable debate about the degree to which Mexican immigrants and their American-born children experience mobility over their lives. We contribute to this literature by studying Mexican American wealth ownership, focusing on three interrelated processes. First, we examine childhood poverty and inheritances to establish financial starting points and to identify the degree to which resources from prior generations affect wealth ownership. Second, we study impediments to mobility in young adulthood to understand how childhood conditions create early adult obstacles to well-being. Third, we study midlife net worth and homeownership to better understand whether childhood and young adult impediments necessarily reduce adult wealth ownership. We find high levels of early life disadvantage among Mexican Americans, but these disadvantages are least pronounced in the second and third generations compared to the first generation. Consistent with prior research, we also find high levels of young adult impediments to mobility for Mexican Americans. However, we find that these early roadblocks do not necessarily translate into lower adult wealth: we show that Mexican Americans have less total wealth than whites but more than African Americans, even when early life impediments are controlled. Our results suggest that Mexican Americans are establishing a solid financial foundation that is likely to lead to long-term class stability.

Income Inequality and Intergenerational Income Mobility in the United States
Deirdre Bloome

Is there a relationship between family income inequality and income mobility across generations in the United States? As family income inequality rose in the United States, parental resources available for improving children’s health, education, and care diverged. The amount and rate of divergence also varied across US states. Researchers and policy analysts have expressed concern that relatively high inequality might be accompanied by relatively low mobility, tightening the connection between individuals’ incomes during childhood and adulthood. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and various government sources, this paper exploits state and cohort variation to estimate the relationship between inequality and mobility. Results provide very little support for the hypothesis that inequality shapes mobility in the United States. The inequality children experienced during youth had no robust association with their economic mobility as adults. Formal analysis reveals that offsetting effects could underlie this result. In theory, mobility-enhancing forces may counterbalance mobility-reducing effects. In practice, the results suggest that in the US context, the intergenerational transmission of income may not be very responsive to changes in inequality.

Racial and Spatial Targeting: Segregation and Subprime Lending within and across Metropolitan Areas
Jackelyn Hwang, Michael Hankinson, Kreg Steven Brown

Recent studies find that high levels of black-white segregation increased rates of foreclosures and subprime lending across US metropolitan areas during the housing crisis. These studies speculate that segregation created distinct geographic markets that enabled subprime lenders and brokers to leverage the spatial proximity of minorities to disproportionately target minority neighborhoods. Yet, the studies do not explicitly test whether the concentration of subprime loans in minority neighborhoods varied by segregation levels. We address this shortcoming by integrating neighborhood-level data and spatial measures of segregation to examine the relationship between segregation and subprime lending across the 100 largest US metropolitan areas. Controlling for alternative explanations of the housing crisis, we find that segregation is strongly associated with higher concentrations of subprime loans in clusters of minority census tracts but find no evidence of unequal lending patterns when we examine minority census tracts in an aspatial way. Moreover, residents of minority census tracts in segregated metropolitan areas had higher likelihoods of receiving subprime loans than their counterparts in less segregated metropolitan areas. Our findings demonstrate that segregation played a pivotal role in the housing crisis by creating relatively larger areas of concentrated minorities into which subprime loans could be efficiently and effectively channeled. These results are consistent with existing but untested theories on the relationship between segregation and the housing crisis in metropolitan areas.

Inequality Preservation through Uneven Diffusion of Cultural Materials across Stratified Groups
Neha Gondal

Inequality between groups is frequently maintained through the construction and legitimation of inter-group cultural differences. I draw on Blau’s multiform heterogeneity and complex contagion models to theorize and develop a relational mechanism that shows how inequality can be preserved when additional, new bases of differentiating between groups layer over existing ones. I investigate the conditions under which variations in the distribution of the population across stratified groups and homophily of social networks along the stratifying attribute interact in such a way that a belief/practice diffuses widely in one group but not the other—an outcome referred to as differential diffusion. I also analyze how size of ego networks and adoption thresholds affect differential diffusion. Using mathematical and agent-based models, I find a positive correlation between adoption thresholds and homophily: when social networks are highly homophilous (e.g., race and socioeconomic class), uneven diffusion of non-normative behavior reproduces inequality; inclusive networks (e.g., in diverse city schools), in contrast, reestablish inequality through differential diffusion of low-risk behavior. This suggests that cultivating diversity is likely to mitigate inequality preservation in conservative situations where adoption of new beliefs/practices needs considerable affirmation. Encouraging status-based solidarity is more appropriate in receptive contexts where adoption of new behaviors entails comparatively lower risk. The results also imply that analyses of diffusion need to be sensitive to contextual factors, including homophily, cultural institutionalization of the diffusing material, and population distribution. Finally, I extend Ridgeway’s seminal work to show how relational structure can not only construct status hierarchies but also contribute to their symbolic maintenance.

Double Jeopardy: Why Latinos Were Hit Hardest by the US Foreclosure Crisis
Jacob S. Rugh

Recent research has demonstrated that Latinos have been hit hardest by the US foreclosure crisis. In this article, I combine place stratification and spatial assimilation theory to explain why Latinos suffered a devastating double blow during the foreclosure crisis. Using a national sample of borrowers who received risky mortgage loans during the boom and following them through the crisis, I find that Latinos were most likely subject to high-cost subprime lending and especially risky low-/no-documentation lending as Latino suburbanization and immigration peaked along with national home prices. As a result, while Latino borrowers were no less likely to lose their homes to foreclosure than blacks prior to the crisis or in the Rust Belt, they were significantly more likely to lose their homes after the crisis began and in the Sand States of Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada. Taken together, the results demonstrate the risk of rising Latino immigration, suburbanization, and homeownership during the stages of the housing boom and foreclosure crisis.

Social Capital

Intrinsically Advantageous?: Reexamining the Production of Class Advantage in the Case of Home Mortgage Modification
Lindsay A. Owens

Social class confers a bundle of capabilities, practices, and beliefs that are conventionally assumed to be hierarchical, rigid, and self-perpetuating. However, this framework often belies the fact that these qualities needn’t be necessarily or exhaustively advantageous. In particular, social change may render obsolete class-linked characteristics that were advantageous in previous periods. Drawing on interviews with homeowners at risk of foreclosure and a yearlong ethnography of a housing counseling organization, I find that although the housing crisis of the “Great Recession” affected both working- and middle-class homeowners alike, the practices of working-class borrowers better positioned them to exploit a number of informational advantages in the rapidly changing mortgage modification setting. My findings are a departure from existing research that treats middle-class capabilities and practices as intrinsically advantageous.

Ethnic Diversity, Economic and Cultural Contexts, and Social Trust: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Evidence from European Regions, 2002–2010
Conrad Ziller

A growing literature investigates the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust. Comparative research in the European context employing country-level indicators has predominantly produced inconclusive results. This study examines the relationship between immigration-related diversity and social trust at the sub-national level of European regions. The regional perspective allows the capture of relevant variations in ethnic context while it still generates comparable results for a broader European context. Using survey data from the European Social Survey 2002–2010 merged with immigration figures from the European Labour Force Survey, this study builds upon previous research by testing the relationships between various diversity indicators and social trust in cross-sectional and longitudinal perspective. In addition, it investigates the role of economic and cultural contexts as moderators. The results show that across European regions, different aspects of immigration-related diversity are negatively related to social trust. In longitudinal perspective, an increase in immigration is related to a decrease in social trust. Tests of the conditional hypotheses reveal that regional economic growth and ethnic polarization as a cultural context moderate the relationship. Immigration growth is particularly strongly associated with a decrease in social trust in contexts of economic decline and high ethnic polarization. However, there is some evidence that in contexts of low polarization the relationship is actually positive.

Humor

Using “Wild” Laughter to Explore the Social Sources of Humor
Mike Reay

Analyses of the multiple cognitive structures and social effects of humor seldom look at why these tend to center on particular topics. The puzzle of how humor can be highly varied yet somehow constrained by its source “material” is explored using a corpus of over 600 incidents, not of deliberate jokes, but of the “wilder,” unplanned laughter that occurred during a set of interviews with economists—professionals who at the time (1999–2000) enjoyed an unprecedented degree of status and influence. The analysis finds that the source material for this laughter typically involved three kinds of socially structured contradiction: between ideals and reality, between different socially situated viewpoints, and between experiences occurring at different times. This illustrates how particular kinds of content can have a special laughter-inducing potential, and it suggests that wild laughter may at root be an interactional mechanism for dealing with social incongruity—even for members of relatively powerful groups. It is argued that this could not only help solve the larger puzzle of simultaneous variety and constraint in deliberate comedy, but also explain why the characteristic structures of humor are associated with a particular range of social effects in the first place.

Disasters

Governing Natural Disasters: State Capacity, Democracy, and Human Vulnerability
Thung-Hong Lin

From the perspective of historical institutionalism, I argue that state capacity, democracy, and their interaction shape the distribution of human vulnerability in natural disasters. The ruling elite, irrespective of whether it is democratic, has the incentive to develop state capacity to prevent damage caused by natural disasters, which is considered a threat to its rule and revenue. To win elections in a democracy, the elite may increase public spending for disaster mitigation in favor of voters’ demands. Democracy also empowers civil society and stimulates social spending, which benefits vulnerable citizens. Thus, a strong state capacity effectively reduces human vulnerability, especially in a democracy. I used panel data from 150 countries between 1995 and 2009 to demonstrate the relationship among state capacity, democracy, and the impact of disasters. After controlling for the density and magnitude continuity of natural-disaster hazards, the empirical results I obtained from the multilevel models indicate that democracy reduces the disaster mortality rate, and a strong state capacity mitigates the effect of a disaster on a population, especially in a democracy. I also found that state capacity and democracy are more effective in preventing human losses caused by predictable disasters such as floods and storms, rather than earthquakes.

Social Science Research 51

Social Science Research, May 2015: Volume 51

Gender and venture capital decision-making: The effects of technical background and social capital on entrepreneurial evaluations
Justine E. Tinkler, Kjersten Bunker Whittington, Manwai C. Ku, Andrea Rees Davies

Religiosity and reactions to terrorism
Amy Adamczyk, Gary LaFree

School choice & social stratification: How intra-district transfers shift the racial/ethnic and economic composition of schools
Kristie J.R. Phillips, Elisabeth S. Larsen, Charles Hausman

Gender, justice and work: A distributive approach to perceptions of housework fairness
Francisco Perales, Janeen Baxter, Tsui-o Tai

Privacy, technology, and norms: The case of Smart Meters
Christine Horne, Brice Darras, Elyse Bean, Anurag Srivastava, Scott Frickel

Diverging fortunes? Economic well-being of Latinos and African Americans in new rural destinations
Martha Crowley, Daniel T. Lichter, Richard N. Turner

Employers’ social contacts and their hiring behavior in a factorial survey
Valentina Di Stasio, Klarita Gërxhani

The socioeconomic consequences of dropping out of high school: Evidence from an analysis of siblings
Colin Campbell

Developing spatial inequalities in carbon appropriation: A sociological analysis of changing local emissions across the United States
James R. Elliott, Matthew Thomas Clement

Like strangers we trust: Identity and generic affiliation networks
Ryan Light

Alcohol outlets, social disorganization, and robberies: Accounting for neighborhood characteristics and alcohol outlet types
Aleksandra J. Snowden, Tina L. Freiburger

Do grandparents matter? A multigenerational perspective on educational attainment in Taiwan
Yi-Lin Chiang, Hyunjoon Park

The making of family values: Developmental idealism in Gansu, China
Qing Lai, Arland Thornton

The bright side of migration: Hedonic, psychological, and social well-being in immigrants in Spain
Magdalena Bobowik, Nekane Basabe, Darío Páez

Convenience on the menu? A typological conceptualization of family food expenditures and food-related time patterns
Sarah Daniels, Ignace Glorieux, Joeri Minnen, T.P. van Tienoven, Djiwo Weenas

Foreclosures and crime: A city-level analysis in Southern California of a dynamic process
John R. Hipp, Alyssa W. Chamberlain

A loosening tray of sand? Age, period, and cohort effects on generalized trust in Reform-Era China, 1990–2007
Anning Hu

Do you see what I see? Perceptual variation in reporting the presence of disorder cues
Danielle Wallace, Brooks Louton, Robert Fornango

Gatekeepers of the American Dream: How teachers’ perceptions shape the academic outcomes of immigrant and language-minority students
Sarah Blanchard, Chandra Muller

Explaining attitudes about homosexuality in Confucian and non-Confucian nations: Is there a ‘cultural’ influence?
Amy Adamczyk, Yen-hsin Alice Cheng

State contexts and the criminalization of marital rape across the United States
Aubrey L. Jackson

The African Development Bank and women’s health: A cross-national analysis of structural adjustment and maternal mortality
Carolyn Coburn, Michael Restivo, John M. Shandra

Anti-minority attitudes and Tea Party Movement membership
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The importance of survey content: Testing for the context dependency of the New Ecological Paradigm Scale
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Equality and quality in education. A comparative study of 19 countries
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Threat, prejudice and the impact of the riots in England
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