Crime & Delinquency 58(1)

Crime & Delinquency, January 2012: Volume 58, Issue 1

Differential Deterrence: Studying Heterogeneity and Changes in Perceptual Deterrence Among Serious Youthful Offenders
Thomas A. Loughran, Alex R. Piquero, Jeffrey Fagan, and Edward P. Mulvey

Perceptual deterrence has been an enduring focus of interest in criminology. Although recent research has generated important new insights about how risks, costs, and rewards of offending are perceived and internalized, there remain two specific limitations to advancing theories of deterrence: (a) the lack of panel data to show whether issues of changes in perceptions over age and time are linked to changes in offending and (b) the lack of research on perceptual deterrence of active offenders, arguably the most policy-relevant group for these studies. Using longitudinal data on offending and perceptions of risks and punishment costs for a large sample of serious youthful offenders, the authors identify significant heterogeneity in sanction threat perceptions generally and across different types of offenders. These differences in perception reflect variation among offenders in the amount of prior information on offending on which individuals may be basing their perceptions. There likely exists a potential “ceiling” and “floor” of sanction threat perceptions, indicating that there are deterrence boundaries beyond which some types of offenders may be more amenable to sanction threats whereas others may be undeterred by sanction threats. Directions for future theoretical and empirical research are discussed.

Cultures of Violence and Acts of Terror: Applying a Legitimation–Habituation Model to Terrorism
Christopher W. Mullins and Joseph K. Young

Although uniquely positioned to provide insight into the nature and dynamics of terrorism, overall the field of criminology has seen few empirically focused analyses of this form of political violence. This article seeks to add to the understanding of terror through an exploration of how general levels of violence within a given society influence the probability of political dissidents within that society resorting to terror as a form of political action. Drawing on the legitimation–habituation thesis, the authors explore whether general levels of legitimate and illegitimate violence within a society predict terrorist violence (both internal and external in direction) within that society. To do so, the authors use zero-inflated negative binomial regression models to perform time series cross-sectional analysis on predictors of terrorist events from the Global Terrorism Database. The authors find support for their core hypothesis and provide a discussion of the implications for the findings within their data and for future criminological research on terrorism.

Crisis Intervention Teams and People With Mental Illness: Exploring the Factors That Influence the Use of Force
Melissa S. Morabito, Amy N. Kerr, Amy Watson, Jeffrey Draine, Victor Ottati, and Beth Angell

The Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) program was first developed to reduce violence in encounters between the police and people with mental illness as well as provide improved access to mental health services. Although there is overwhelming popular support for this intervention, scant empirical evidence of its effectiveness is available—particularly whether the program can reduce the use of force. This investigation seeks to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the factors that influence use of force in encounters involving people with mental illness and evaluating whether CIT can reduce the likelihood of its use.

Public Attitudes Toward Juveniles Who Commit Crimes: The Relationship Between Assessments of Adolescent Development and Attitudes Toward Severity of Punishment
Terrence T. Allen, Eileen Trzcinski, and Sheryl Pimlott Kubiak

In this article, the authors used a statewide survey to investigate the extent to which beliefs regarding the age at which youth reach maturity, the role of peer influences, and other factors, such as abuse during childhood, are associated with measures of how harshly juveniles should be treated by the justice system. The results of this study provide strong support for the hypothesis that assessments of adolescent development are important predictors of attitudes about how juveniles should be treated in the justice system. In all cases, variables measuring attitudes surrounding adolescent development explained substantially more of the variance in attitudes toward punishment than did demographic and socioeconomic variables.

Gender and Relational-Distance Effects in Arrests for Domestic Violence
William Lally and Alfred DeMaris

This study tests two hypotheses regarding factors affecting arrest of the perpetrator in domestic violence incidents. Black’s relational-distance thesis is that the probability of arrest increases with increasing relational distance between perpetrator and victim. Klinger’s leniency principle suggests that the probability of arrest is lower for male perpetrators assaulting female intimate partners, compared with other scenarios. The authors employed marginal logistic regression models using incident-based data from the National Survey of Violence and Threats of Violence Against Women and Men in the United States, 1994-1996, to test both effects. They found support for Black’s thesis: The likelihood of arrest was lower when the perpetrator was an acquaintance, a relative, or a romantic partner of the victim, versus a stranger. However, the authors’ results failed to support Klinger’s hypothesis. They found that men were more likely to be arrested when assaulting a female—regardless of relationship status—compared with assaulting another male.

Exploring Inmate Reentry in a Local Jail Setting: Implications for Outreach, Service Use, and Recidivism
Michael D. White, Jessica Saunders, Christopher Fisher, and Jeff Mellow

Although prisoner reentry has taken center stage in correctional research and policy discussions, there has been little emphasis on reentry among jail populations. This paper examines a jail-based reentry program in New York City that begins while individuals are incarcerated and includes 90 days of postrelease services. This article explores these assumptions through an evaluation of a jail-based reentry program in New York City that begins while individuals are incarcerated and includes 90 days of postrelease services. To determine program impact, the authors compare samples of participants with nonparticipants and program completers with noncompleters. The groups are matched using developmental trajectories derived from group-based trajectory modeling, in addition to propensity score matching. Findings show that participants perform no better than nonparticipants over a 1-year follow-up, but those who stay engaged for at least 90 days of postrelease services experience significantly fewer (and slower) returns to jail. The findings regarding program completion are tempered by several methodological concerns, however. The article concludes with a discussion of how the study may offer insights for program implementation and operation with this target population.

Reevaluating Interrater Reliability in Offender Risk Assessment
Leontien M. van der Knaap, Laura E.W. Leenarts, Marise Ph. Born, and Paul Oosterveld

Offender risk and needs assessment, one of the pillars of the risk–need-responsivity model of offender rehabilitation, usually depends on raters assessing offender risk and needs. The few available studies of interrater reliability in offender risk assessment are, however, limited in the generalizability of their results. The present study examined interrater reliability in Dutch offender risk assessment by 38 raters who independently assessed 75 offenders. The results show substantial reliability (Tinsley and Weiss’s T value ≥ .61) for risk of reconviction and moderate (T value ≥ .41) to substantial reliability for offender needs, such as accommodation, finances, or education. These results are discussed in light of a recent British study on the interrater reliability of a comparable risk assessment instrument. The results from the present study show similar to better reliability, leading to the conclusion that greater external validity does not negatively influence interrater reliability results.

Criminology & Public Policy 11(1)

Criminology & Public Policy, February 2012: Volume 11, Issue 1

Editor's Preface

Continuing to Advance Criminology and Public Policy
Thomas G. Blomberg

A Signaling Perspective on Employment-Based Reentry

Editorial Introduction

Prisoner Reentry, Employment, Signaling, and the Better Identification of Desisters
Daniel P. Mears and Julie Mestre

Research Article

A Signaling Perspective on Employment-Based Reentry Programming
Shawn D. Bushway and Robert Apel

Policy Essays

Obeying Signals and Predicting Future Offending
Alex R. Piquero

Signaling and Meta-Analytic Evaluations in the Presence of Latent Offender Groups
Tim Brennan

Elements of Successful Desistance Signaling
Shadd Maruna

Why Work Is Important, and How to Improve the Effectiveness of Correctional Reentry Programs that Target Employment
Edward Latessa

A Signaling Approach to Criminal Desistance through Transitional Jobs Programs
Dan Bloom

Good Science, Good Sense: Making Meaningful Change Happen—A Practitioner's Perspective
Dora Schriro

Criminology 50(1)

Criminology, February 2012: Volume 50, Issue 1

Editors' Note
D. Wayne Osgood, Rosemary Gartner and Eric P. Baumer

Morality, Markets, and the ASC: 2011 Presidential Address to the American Society of Criminology
Steven F. Messner

This Presidential Address explores the possibilities for fruitful multilevel theorizing in criminology by proposing an integration of insights from situational action theory (SAT), a distinctively micro-level perspective, with insights from institutional anomie theory (IAT), a distinctively macro-level perspective. These perspectives are strategic candidates for integration because morality plays a central role in both. IAT can enrich SAT by identifying indirect causes of crime that operate at the institutional level and by highlighting the impact of the institutional context on the perception-choice process that underlies crime. Such multilevel theorizing can also promote the development of IAT by revealing the “micro-instantiations” of macro-level processes and by simulating further inquiry into the social preconditions for institutional configurations that are conducive to low levels of crime. Finally, drawing on Durkheim's classic work on occupational associations, I point to the potential role of professional associations such as the American Society of Criminology in promoting and sustaining a viable moral order in the advanced capitalist societies.

Deterrence and Moral Persuasion Effects on Corporate Tax Compliance: Findings from a Randomized Controlled Trial
Barak Ariel

Previous studies on tax compliance have focused primarily on the tax-reporting behavior of individuals. This study reports results from a randomized field test of the effects of deterrence and moral persuasion on the tax-reporting behavior of 4,395 corporations in Israel. Two experimental groups received tax letters, one conveying a deterrent message and the other a moral persuasion message. Three types of measures are used to evaluate compliance based on the magnitude of the difference-in-differences of means in 1) gross sales values reported to the authority, 2) tax dollars paid to the authority, and 3) tax deductions. Overall, both deterrence and moral persuasion approaches do not produce statistically significant greater compliance compared with control conditions. These results do not support the ability of a policy of sending tax letters to increase substantively the reporting of true tax liability or tax payments by corporations. However, these results also show that moral persuasion can be counterproductive: Corporations in this experimental group show an increase rather than a decrease in tax deductions, which translates into loss of state revenues. The implications for theory, research, and tax policy are discussed.

Long-Term Crime Desistance and Recidivism Patterns—Evidence from the Essex County Convicted Felon Study
Megan C. Kurlychek, Shawn D. Bushway and Robert Brame

Two conflicting definitions of desistance exist in the criminology literature. The first definition is instantaneous desistance in which an offender simply chooses to end a criminal career instantaneously moving to a zero rate of offending (Blumstein et al., 1986). The second definition views desistance as a process by which the offending rate declines steadily over time to zero or to a point close to zero (Bushway et al., 2001; Laub and Sampson, 2001; Leblanc and Loeber, 1998). In this article, we capitalize on the underlying assumptions of several parametric survival distributions to gain a better understanding of which of these models best describes actual patterns of desistance. All models are examined using 18 years of follow-up data on a cohort of felony convicts in Essex County, NJ. Our analysis leads us to three conclusions. First, some people have already desisted at the beginning of the follow-up period, which is consistent with the notion of “instantaneous desistance.” Second, a three-parameter model that allows for a turning point in the risk of recidivism followed by a long period of decline fits the data best. This conclusion suggests that for those offenders active at the start of the study period, the risk of recidivism is declining over time. However, we also find that a simpler two-group model fits the data almost as well and gains superiority in the later years of follow-up. This last point is particularly relevant as it suggests that the observed gradual decline in the hazard over time is a result of a compositional effect rather than of a pattern of individually declining hazards.

Violence Against Women in U.S. Metropolitan Areas: Changes in Women's Status and Risk, 1980–2004
Min Xie, Karen Heimer and Janet L. Lauritsen

This article examines the impact of women's status on rates of violence against women using longitudinal data from the National Crime Survey and National Crime Victimization Survey for 40 U.S. metropolitan areas for the period 1980 to 2004. Drawing on feminist and routine activities perspectives, we specify hypotheses about the association between women's status and violent victimization, some of which predict different effects depending on whether the offender is a stranger, intimate, or known (nonintimate) other. Consistent with feminist and other perspectives, we find that absolute increases in women's labor force participation, income, and education are associated with decreases in intimate partner violence. Our findings also provide limited support for the backlash hypothesis by showing that increases in female labor participation relative to men are associated with increases in intimate partner violence but not with increases in violence by others. Consistent with routine activities theory, the data also indicate that absolute increases in female labor force participation are associated with increases in victimization by strangers and by known others. Furthermore, we find that absolute increases in female voter participation are associated with decreases in violence for all victim–offender relationship categories. The findings thus show that changes in the status of women have both positive and negative associations with violence victimization, and that comparative analyses of different types of violence are necessary for clarifying the sources of violence against women.

Reconsidering the Relationship Between Perceived Neighborhood Racial Composition and Whites’ Perceptions of Victimization Risk: Do Racial Stereotypes Matter?
Justin T. Pickett, Ted Chiricos, Kristin M. Golden and Marc Gertz

Recent theoretical extensions of threat theory have posited that Whites frequently view Blacks as a criminal threat because of stereotypes linking race and crime. Several studies have found indirect support for this hypothesis and have shown that the percentage of neighborhood residents who are Black is positively associated with the perceptions of victimization risk and fear of crime by White residents. To date, however, little research has investigated whether, as theory would suggest, this relationship is either a consequence of or is contingent on Whites holding stereotypes of Blacks as criminals. In this article, we address this issue by examining whether racial typification of crime mediates or moderates the relationships between static and dynamic measures of neighborhood racial composition and the perceptions of victimization risk by Whites. The results offer mixed support for the threat hypothesis and show that racial typification of crime conditions the relationship between perceived changes in neighborhood racial composition and the perceptions of victimization risk by Whites, but neither explains nor influences the association between static measures of racial composition and the latter. The implications of the findings for threat theory and research are discussed.

Precocious Role Entry as a Mediating Factor in Women's Methamphetamine Use: Implications for Life-Course and Pathways Research
Kristin Carbone-lopez and Jody Miller

Precocious adoption of adult roles and responsibilities at an early age often has been linked to substance abuse and criminal behavior. Yet, much of the existing research suggests that early offending behaviors induce precocious movement into adulthood; less attention has focused on the way in which early adoption of adult roles and responsibilities might itself contribute to the onset of offending. In the following article, we examine the cumulative impact of early transitions into adult roles and responsibilities on the onset of methamphetamine (MA) use. Through inductive analyses of interviews with women methamphetamine users, we identified a range of adult roles and responsibilities that women described as facilitating their initiation into MA use, including family caretaking, motherhood, independent living, and peer and romantic associations with adults. Such findings have theoretical implications for both life-course perspectives and feminist pathways research. They highlight the importance of attending to the timing and sequencing of experiences as well as highlight the gendered nature of these processes.

Generative Explanations of Crime: Using Simulation to Test Criminological Theory
Daniel Birks, Michael Townsley and Anna Stewart

This study demonstrates that computational modeling and, in particular, agent-based modeling (ABM) offers a viable compatriot to traditional experimental methodologies for criminology scholars. ABM can be used as a means to operationalize and test hypothetical mechanisms that offer a potential explanation for commonly observed criminological phenomena. This study tests whether the hypothesized mechanisms of environmental criminology are sufficient to produce several commonly observed characteristics of crime. We present an ABM of residential burglary, simulating a world inhabited by potential targets and offenders who behave according to the theoretical propositions of environmental criminology. A series of simulated experiments examining the impact of these mechanisms on patterns of offending are performed. The outputs of these simulations then are compared with several well-established findings derived from empirical studies of residential burglary, including the spatial concentration of crime, repeat victimization, and the journey to crime curve. The results from this research demonstrate that the propositions of the routine activity approach, rational choice perspective, and crime pattern theory provide a viable generative explanation for several independent characteristics of crime.

Parental Involvement in the Criminal Justice System and the Development of Youth Theft, Marijuana Use, Depression, and Poor Academic Performance
Joseph Murray, Rolf Loeber and Dustin Pardini

Explanations for the fact that crime tends to run in families have focused on the deprived social backgrounds of criminal parents, methods of child-rearing, modeling processes, and genetic mechanisms. However, parental involvement in the criminal justice system itself also might contribute to the intergenerational transmission of crime and have other adverse effects on children's well-being. We investigated the development of youth problem behavior in relation to parental arrest, conviction, and incarceration in the youngest and oldest samples of the Pittsburgh Youth Study, a longitudinal survey of 1,009 inner-city boys. Parental arrest and conviction without incarceration did not predict the development of youth problem behavior. Parental incarceration was not associated with increases in marijuana use, depression, or poor academic performance. However, boys experiencing parental incarceration showed greater increases in theft compared with a control group matched on propensity scores. The association between parental incarceration and youth theft was stronger for White youth than for Black youth. Parenting and peer relations after parental incarceration explained about half of its effects on youth theft. Because the effects of parental incarceration were specific to youth theft, labeling and stigma processes might be particularly important for understanding the consequences of parental incarceration for children.

American Sociological Review 77(1)

American Sociological Review, February 2012: Volume 77, Issue 1

C-Escalation and D-Escalation: A Theory of the Time-Dynamics of Conflict [2011 Presidential Address]
Randall Collins

Conflict escalates through a series of feedback loops. On the micro level, conflict generates conditions for intense interaction rituals, and internal solidarity fuels external conflict. Perceived atrocities reciprocally increase ideological polarization between opponents, while confrontational tension/fear makes violence incompetent and produces real atrocities. Conflict groups seek allies, drive out neutrals, and mobilize material resources. Both sides in a conflict counter-escalate through the same set of feedbacks. Winning and losing are determined by differences between rates of escalation and by attacks that one-sidedly destroy organizational and material capacity. Conflict de-escalates because both sides fail to find conditions for solidarity, cannot overcome confrontational tension/fear, and exhaust their material resources. Emotional burnout sets in through a time dynamic of explosion, plateau, and dissipation of enthusiasm. Defection of allies opens the way for third-party settlement. When both sides remain stalemated, initial enthusiasm and external polarization give way to emergent internal factions—a victory faction (hard-liners) versus a peace faction (negotiators)—creating new conflict identities. Ideals promoted at the outset of conflict become obstacles to resolution at the end.

Hot Spots and Hot Moments in Scientific Collaborations and Social Movements
John N. Parker and Edward J. Hackett

Emotions are essential but little understood components of research; they catalyze and sustain creative scientific work and fuel the scientific and intellectual social movements (SIMs) that propel scientific change. Adopting a micro-sociological focus, we examine how emotions shape two intellectual processes central to all scientific work: conceiving creative ideas and managing skepticism. We illustrate these processes through a longitudinal study of the Resilience Alliance, a tightly networked coherent group collaborating at the center of a burgeoning scientific social movement in the environmental sciences. We show how emotions structured and were structured by the group’s growth and development, and how socio-emotive processes facilitated the rapid production of highly creative science and helped overcome skepticism by outsiders. Hot spots and hot moments—that is, brief but intense periods of collaboration undertaken in remote and isolated settings—fueled the group’s scientific performance and drove the SIM. Paradoxically, however, the same socio-emotive processes that ignited and sustained creative scientific research also made skepticism more likely to occur and more difficult to manage. Similarly, emotions and social bonding were essential for the group’s growth and development, but increased size and diversity have the potential to erode the affective culture that generated initial successes.

Cultural Reception and Production: The Social Construction of Meaning in Book Clubs
C. Clayton Childress and Noah E. Friedkin

Investigations of the reception of textual objects have alternately emphasized demographically conditioned patterns of evaluation and taste, or the agency of viewers, readers, and listeners in constructing their own cultural interpretations. In the present article, we advance an empirical and formal analysis of the cultural reception of texts in which interpretations of the multiple dimensions on which a text may be evaluated are transmitted and modified within small groups of individuals in face-to-face contact. We contribute an approach in which the intersection of social structure, individual readings, and interactive group processes all may enter into readers’ interpretations of a novel. Our investigation focuses on a set of book clubs for which we collected data on group members’ pre- and post-discussion evaluations of a specific book, and the interpersonal influence networks that were formed during the groups’ discussions. We analyze these data with a multilevel model of individuals nested in groups, which allows us to address the effects of structure and group dynamics on cultural reception in a single analytic framework.

Globalization and Commitment in Corporate Social Responsibility: Cross-National Analyses of Institutional and Political-Economy Effects
Alwyn Lim and Kiyoteru Tsutsui

This article examines why global corporate social responsibility (CSR) frameworks have gained popularity in the past decade, despite their uncertain costs and benefits, and how they affect adherents’ behavior. We focus on the two largest global frameworks—the United Nations Global Compact and the Global Reporting Initiative—to examine patterns of CSR adoption by governments and corporations. Drawing on institutional and political-economy theories, we develop a new analytic framework that focuses on four key environmental factors—global institutional pressure, local receptivity, foreign economic penetration, and national economic system. We propose two arguments about the relationship between stated commitment and subsequent action: decoupling due to lack of capacity and organized hypocrisy due to lack of will. Our cross-national time-series analyses show that global institutional pressure through nongovernmental linkages encourages CSR adoption, but this pressure leads to ceremonial commitment in developed countries and to substantive commitment in developing countries. Moreover, in developed countries, liberal economic policies increase ceremonial commitment, suggesting a pattern of organized hypocrisy whereby corporations in developed countries make discursive commitments without subsequent action. We also find that in developing countries, short-term trade relations exert greater influence on corporate CSR behavior than do long-term investment transactions.

Politics of Organizational Adornment: Lessons from Las Vegas and Beyond
Jeffrey J. Sallaz

Practices of design, although integral to contemporary capitalism, are too often overlooked by economic sociologists. To remedy this, I study a novel technology of organizational adornment: theming. Case data drawn from the global casino industry reveal that theming has diffused worldwide as standard business practice. Close examination, however, reveals divergence across jurisdictions in terms of the meanings that themes convey. These patterns derive from neither successful marketing (i.e., customizing design for consumers) nor symbolic isomorphism (i.e., signaling deference to global norms). In line with the markets-as-politics paradigm, I analyze design as a field-specific conception of control. In this view, themes signal to particular constituencies that one is a certain kind of organization (and not another). The makeup of these signals and audiences—that is, what counts as socially legitimate action—will depend on the political field in which a firm is embedded. Results demonstrate the explanatory power of markets-as-politics and also extend this theory by elucidating the performative mechanisms that bridge economic and political domains.

A Theory of the Self for the Sociology of Morality
Jan E. Stets and Michael J. Carter

Sociology has seen a renewed interest in the study of morality. However, a theory of the self that explains individual variation in moral behavior and emotions is noticeably absent. In this study, we use identity theory to explain this variability. According to identity theory, actors are self-regulating entities whose goal is to verify their identities. An individual’s moral identity—wherever it falls on the moral–immoral continuum—guides behavior, and people experience negative emotions when identity verification does not ensue. Furthermore, the identity verification process occurs within situations that have cultural expectations—that is, framing rules and feeling rules—regarding how individuals should act and feel. These cultural expectations also influence the degree to which people behave morally. We test these assumptions on a sample of more than 350 university students. We investigate whether the moral identity and framing situations in moral terms influences behavior and feelings. Findings reveal that the identity process and framing of situations as moral are significantly associated with moral action and moral emotions of guilt and shame.

Forms of Exchange and Integrative Bonds: Effects of History and Embeddedness
Linda D. Molm, Monica M. Whitham, and David Melamed

In this study we bring together two sociological traditions: experimental research on how different forms of exchange affect attachments to partners and relationships, and organizational research in natural settings on how embeddedness contributes to social capital. We conceptualize embeddedness in terms of the underlying forms of exchange—negotiated and reciprocal—that are associated with economic exchanges and the social relationships in which they are embedded. Building upon the reciprocity theory of social exchange, we test predictions of how relationship histories (i.e., different sequences of the two forms of exchange) and relationship contexts (i.e., embedding one form of exchange within an ongoing relation of the other form) modify effects of each form in isolation. Results from two experiments show that the reciprocal form of exchange, independent of close ties or personal associations, is critical for producing the strong trust and affective bonds typically associated with embedded relationships. A history or context of reciprocal exchange significantly boosts integrative bonds for negotiated exchange, whereas a history or context of negotiated exchange dampens integrative bonds for reciprocal exchange only moderately. The relative effects of history and context vary by actors’ positions of power.

Social Forces 90(1)

Social Forces, September 2011: Volume 90, Issue 1

Labor Markets

2010 SSS Presidential Address: The Devolution of Risk and the Changing Life Course in the United States
Angela M. O'Rand

Recent patterns of labor exit in late life in the United States are increasingly heterogeneous. This heterogeneity stems from diverse employment careers that are emerging in the workplace where job security is declining. Individuals' structural locations in the labor market expose them to diverse risks for employment and income security at older ages. Among those risks are access to institutional mechanisms for retirement saving and the requirement to assume full responsibility for decisions about retirement savings that involve market risks. The spread of these individualized pressures to invest in retirement has elevated the importance of financial literacy in the 21st century. Late employment careers and patterns of financial literacy are studied in this article using the premier U.S. longitudinal dataset from the National Institute of Aging, the Health and Retirement Study initiated in 1992, which is linked to restricted Social Security earnings records that extend over several decades. These merged data afford the opportunity to observe continuous work histories in this sample from 1981 through 2006 to identify latent trajectories of employment in late life. In addition, a supplementary module attached to the 2004 wave of the HRS provides valuable information on the financial literacy of subgroups. The work-retirement trajectories and financial literacy patterns observed reflect persistent patterns of inequality amplified by modern risks in the labor market.

Labor Market Flexibility and Inequality: The Changing Skill-Based Temporary Employment and Unemployment Risks in Europe
Michael Gebel, Johannes Giesecke

In this article we use comparative micro data for 15 European countries covering the period 1992-2007 to study the impact of labor market reforms on the skill-related individual risk of holding a temporary contract and the risk of being unemployed. Our results indicate no general increase in either of these skill gaps. Using two-step multilevel analyses, we show that in the case of high protection of regular contracts, lowering restrictions on the use of temporary contracts increases the relative temporary employment rates of low-skilled workers. However, this kind of partial deregulation, which has been implemented in the majority of Western European countries, has not translated into decreasing unemployment risks of the low-skilled vis-à-vis medium- and highly-skilled persons.

Education, Labor Markets and the Retreat from Marriage
Kristen Harknett, Arielle Kuperberg

Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study and the Current Population Survey, we find that labor market conditions play a large role in explaining the positive relationship between educational attainment and marriage. Our results suggest that if low-educated parents enjoyed the same, stronger labor market conditions as their more-educated counterparts, then differences in marriage by education would narrow considerably. Better labor markets are positively related to marriage for fathers at all educational levels. In contrast, better labor markets are positively related to marriage for less-educated mothers but not their more-educated counterparts. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories about women's earning power and marriage, the current economic recession and future studies of differences in family structure across education groups.

Expectation and Realities

What Do Children Know About Their Futures: Do Children's Expectations Predict Outcomes in Middle Age?
Björn Halleröd

Are children's statements about their futures related to outcomes in middle age? In 1966 almost 13,500 children ages 12-13 were asked whether they thought their futures would be worse, similar or better as compared to others of their own age. It was shown that children with low, and surprisingly high, expectations did suffer from increased mortality, economic hardship and weak labor market attachment risks in middle age. Although it cannot be ruled out that expectations worked as self-fulfilling prophesies, the analyses showed that expectations essentially reflected facts known to the children (i.e., upbringing conditions and their own abilities and achievements).

Change in the Stratification of Educational Expectations and Their Realization
John R. Reynolds, Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson

What do recent trends toward increasingly ambitious educational expectations and rising college completion rates mean for the stratification of higher education? This article shows that the odds of achieving expectations for a bachelor's degree increased across 15 cohorts of young adults, and to a lesser extent, for expectations to attend graduate/professional school. Gender-related constraints on realizing expectations for a bachelor's degree weakened, while constraints associated with minority racial/ethnic and lower socioeconomic statuses did not. Recent trends in educational stratification were thus a mixture of fulfilled expectations for growing proportions of some young adults, but continued social constraints for many others. Note, these results are derived from the experiences of high school seniors successfully reinterviewed over time, who are advantaged relative to school dropouts and nonrespondents.

Marriage and Divorce

The Happy Homemaker?: Married Women's Well-Being in Cross-National Perspective
Judith Treas, Tanja van der Lippe, Tsui-o ChloeTai

A long-standing debate questions whether homemakers or working wives are happier. Drawing on cross-national data for 28 countries, this research uses multi-level models to provide fresh evidence on this controversy. All things considered, homemakers are slightly happier than wives who work fulltime, but they have no advantage over part-time workers. The work status gap in happiness persists even controlling for family life mediators. Cross-level interactions between work status and macro-level variables suggest that country characteristics - GDP, social spending, women's labor force participation, liberal gender ideology and public child care - ameliorate the disadvantage in happiness for full-time working wives compared to homemakers and part-time workers.

Stigma or Separation?: Understanding the Incarceration-Divorce Relationship
Michael Massoglia, Brianna Remster, Ryan D. King

Prior research suggests a correlation between incarceration and marital dissolution, although questions remain as to why this association exists. Is it the stigma associated with "doing time" that drives couples apart? Or is it simply the duration of physical separation that leads to divorce? This research utilizes data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the Survey of Officer and Enlisted Personnel to shed light on these questions. The findings generally support a separation explanation of the incarceration-divorce relationship. Specifically, the data show that exposure to incarceration has no effect on marital dissolution after duration of incarceration is taken into account. In addition, across both datasets we find that individuals who spend substantial time away from spouses are at higher risk of divorce. The findings point to the importance of spousal separation for understanding the incarceration-marital dissolution relationship. Moreover, and in contrast to settings in which stigma appears quite salient (e.g., labor markets), our results suggest that the shared history and degree of intimacy among married partners may weaken the salience of the stigma of incarceration. Findings are discussed in the context of a burgeoning body of work on the collateral consequences of incarceration and have implications for the growing pool of men in American society returning from prison.

Religion

Substitution or Symbiosis?: Assessing the Relationship between Religious and Secular Giving
Jonathan P. Hill, Brandon Vaidyanathan

Research on philanthropy has not sufficiently examined whether charitable giving to religious causes impinges on giving to secular causes. Examining three waves of national panel data, we find that the relationship between religious and secular giving is generally not of a zero-sum nature; families that increase their religious giving also increase their secular giving. We argue that this finding is best accounted for by a practice theory of social action which emphasizes how religious congregations foster skills and practices related to charitable giving. We also argue that denominational variation in the influence of religious giving is best accounted for by the financial structuring of the denomination. We conclude with the implications for studies of religious causal influence more generally.

Higher Education and Religious Liberalization among Young Adults
Damon Mayrl, Jeremy E. Uecker

Going to college has long been assumed to liberalize students' religious beliefs. Using longitudinal data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, we compare change in the content of religious beliefs of those who do and do not attend college. We find that, in general, college students are no more likely to develop liberal religious beliefs than non-students. In some cases, collegians actually appear more likely to retain their initial beliefs. Change in religious beliefs appears instead to be more strongly associated with network effects. These findings indicate that college's effect on students' religious beliefs is both weak and fragmented, and suggest that the multiplicity of social worlds on college campuses may help to sustain religious beliefs as well as religious practice and commitment.

Gender Roles and Sexual Relationships

The Effect of a Child's Sex on Support for Traditional Gender Roles
Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer, Neil Malhotra

We examine whether sex of child affects parents' beliefs about traditional gender roles. Using an improved methodological approach that explicitly analyzes the natural experiment via differences in differences, we find that having a daughter (vs. having a son) causes men to reduce their support for traditional gender roles, but a female child has no such effect among women, representing less than 4 percent of the size of the standard deviation of the attitude scale.

Social Exchange and the Progression of Sexual Relationships in Emerging Adulthood
Sharon Sassler, Kara Joyner

Research has extensively examined matching on race and other characteristics in cohabitation and marriage, but it has generally disregarded sexual and romantic relationships. Using data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we examine the tempo of key transitions in the recent relationships of young adults ages 18-24. We focus on how the racial mix of partners in relationships is associated with the timing of sex, cohabitation and marriage. We find evidence that relationships between white men and minority women proceed more rapidly from romance to sexual involvement and from sexual involvement to cohabitation compared to relationships involving other racial combinations. Our findings have important implications for social exchange perspectives on mate selection.

Consequences of Sex Ratios

Too Many Men?: Sex Ratios and Women's Partnering Behavior in China
Katherine Trent, Scott J. South

The relative numbers of women and men are changing dramatically in China, but the consequences of these imbalanced sex ratios have received little empirical attention. We merge data from the Chinese Health and Family Life Survey with community-level data from Chinese censuses to examine the relationship between cohort- and community-specific sex ratios and women's partnering behavior. Consistent with demographic-opportunity theory and sociocultural theory, we find that high sex ratios (indicating more men relative to women) are associated with an increased likelihood that women marry before age 25. However, high sex ratios are also associated with an increased likelihood that women engage in premarital and extramarital sexual relationships and have more than one sexual partner, findings consistent with demographic-opportunity theory but inconsistent with sociocultural theory.

Relationship Formation and Stability in Emerging Adulthood: Do Sex Ratios Matter?
Tara D. Warner, Wendy D. Manning, Peggy C. Giordano, Monica A. Longmore

Research links sex ratios with the likelihood of marriage and divorce. However, whether sex ratios similarly influence precursors to marriage (transitions in and out of dating or cohabiting relationships) is unknown. Utilizing data from the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study and the 2000 U.S. Census, this study assesses whether sex ratios influence the formation and stability of emerging adults' romantic relationships. Findings show that relationship formation is unaffected by partner availability, yet the presence of partners increases women's odds of cohabiting, decreases men's odds of cohabiting, and increases number of dating partners and cheating among men. It appears that sex ratios influence not only transitions in and out of marriage, but also the process through which individuals search for and evaluate partners prior to marriage.

Culture

Intergenerational Continuity of Taste: Parental and Adolescent Music Preferences
Tom F.M. ter Bogt, Marc J.M.H. Delsing, Maarten van Zalk, Peter G. Christenson, Wim H.J. Meeus

In this article, the continuity in music taste from parents to their children is discussed via a multi-actor design. In our models music preferences of 325 adolescents and both their parents were linked, with parental and adolescent educational level as covariates. Parents' preferences for different types of music that had been popular when they were young were subsumed under the general labels of Pop, Rock and Highbrow. Current adolescent music preferences resolved into Pop, Rock, Highbrow and Dance. Among partners in a couple, tastes were similar; for both generations, education was linked to taste; and parental preferences predicted adolescent music choices. More specifically, the preference of fathers and mothers for Pop was associated with adolescent preferences for Pop and Dance. Parents' preferences for Rock seemed to indicate their daughters would also like Rock music, but not their sons. Parental passion for Highbrow music was associated with Highbrow preferences among their children. It is concluded that preferences for cultural artifacts such as (popular) music show continuity from generation to generation.

Journal of Marriage and Family 74(1)

Journal of Marriage and Family, February 2012: Volume 74, Issue 1

Marriage

Reexamining the Case for Marriage: Union Formation and Changes in Well-being
Kelly Musick and Larry Bumpass

Marriage and Desistance From Crime: A Consideration of Gene–Environment Correlation
J. C. Barnes and Kevin M. Beaver

Marriage (In)equality: The Perspectives of Adolescents and Emerging Adults With Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Parents
Abbie E. Goldberg and Katherine A. Kuvalanka

Variation in the Relationship Between Education and Marriage: Marriage Market Mismatch?
Kelly Musick, Jennie E. Brand and Dwight Davis

Family Influences on Intermarriage Attitudes: A Sibling Analysis in the Netherlands
Willem Huijnk and Aart C. Liefbroer

I Do … Want to Save: Marriage and Retirement Savings in Young Households
Melissa A. Z. Knoll, Christopher R. Tamborini and Kevin Whitman

Intergenerational Relationships

Life Course Status and Exchanges of Support Between Young Adults and Parents
Freek Bucx, Frits van Wel and Trudie Knijn

Gender and Material Transfers Between Older Parents and Children in Ismailia, Egypt
Kathryn M. Yount, Solveig A. Cunningham, Michal Engelman and Emily M. Agree

“I'm Not Supporting His Kids”: Nonresident Fathers' Contributions Given Mothers' New Fertility
Daniel R. Meyer and Maria Cancian

Neighborhood Contexts, Fathers, and Mexican American Young Adolescents' Internalizing Symptoms
Rebecca M. B. White and Mark W. Roosa

Of General Interest

Adolescents' Pregnancy Intentions, Wantedness, and Regret: Cross-Lagged Relations With Mental Health and Harsh Parenting
Patricia L. East, Nina C. Chien and Jennifer S. Barber

Domestic Work and the Wage Penalty for Motherhood in West Germany
Michael Kühhirt and Volker Ludwig

Mate Availability and Women's Sexual Experiences in China
Katherine Trent and Scott J. South

Familial Reciprocity and Subjective Well-being in Ghana
Ming-Chang Tsai and Dan-Bright S. Dzorgbo

The ANNALS of the AAPSS 639

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 2012: Volume 639

Gender and Race Inequality in Management: Critical Issues, New Evidence

Introduction: Gender, Race, and Management
Matt L. Huffman

Minority Vulnerability in Privileged Occupations: Why Do African American Financial Advisers Earn Less than Whites in a Large Financial Services Firm?
William T. Bielby

Managing Ambivalent Prejudices: Smart-but-Cold and Warm-but-Dumb Stereotypes
Susan T. Fiske

Power, Influence, and Diversity in Organizations
Jeffrey W. Lucas and Amy R. Baxter

Diversity within Reach: Recruitment versus Hiring in Elite Firms
Lauren A. Rivera

Developmental Practices, Organizational Culture, and Minority Representation in Organizational Leadership: The Case of Partners in Large U.S. Law Firms
Fiona M. Kay and Elizabeth H. Gorman

If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You the Boss? Explaining the Persistent Vertical Gender Gap in Management
Heather A. Haveman and Lauren S. Beresford

Women’s Mobility into Upper-Tier Occupations: Do Determinants and Timing Differ by Race?
George Wilson

Money, Benefits, and Power: A Test of the Glass Ceiling and Glass Escalator Hypotheses
Ryan A. Smith

Do Female Top Managers Help Women to Advance? A Panel Study Using EEO-1 Records
Fidan Ana Kurtulus and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey

Minorities in Management: Effects on Income Inequality, Working Conditions, and Subordinate Career Prospects among Men
David Maume

Female Leaders, Organizational Power, and Sex Segregation
Kevin Stainback and Soyoung Kwon

Checking the Pulse of Diversity among Health Care Professionals: An Analysis of West Coast Hospitals
Sheryl L. Skaggs and Julie A. Kmec

The Gender Gap in Executive Compensation: The Role of Female Directors and Chief Executive Officers
Taekjin Shin

Criminology 49(4)

Criminology, November 2011: Volume 49, Issue 4

Examining the Genetic Underpinnings to Moffitt's Developmental Taxonomy: A Behavioral Genetic Analysis
J.C. Barnes, Kevin M. Beaver and Brian B. Boutwell

In recent years, criminological research has observed an increase in studies examining different offending trajectories. Much of this research has been guided by Moffitt's (1993) developmental taxonomy of life-course persistent offenders, adolescence-limited offenders, and abstainers. Moffitt (1993) argued that the etiologies of these different pathways could be traced to several biosocial factors, including perhaps genetic factors. To date, research has failed to address this possibility directly. The current study addressed this gap in the literature by examining the extent to which genetic factors explain variance in different offending patterns. Analysis of sibling pairs (N = 2,284; ages spanned between 11 and 27 years) drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) revealed that genetic factors contributed significantly to being classified in each of the different offending patterns. Specifically, genetic factors explained between 56 and 70 percent of the variance in being classified as a life-course persistent offender across different coding strategies, 35 percent of the variance in being classified as an adolescence-limited offender, and 56 percent of the variance in being classified as an abstainer. We discuss the importance of integrating genetics into future studies examining offending trajectories.

Ghettos, Thresholds, and Crime: Does Concentrated Poverty Really Have an Accelerating Increasing Effect on Crime?
John R. Hipp and Daniel K. Yates

Theories make varying predictions regarding the functional form of the relationship between neighborhood poverty and crime rates, ranging from a diminishing positive effect, to a linear positive effect, to an exponentially increasing or even threshold effect. Nonetheless, surprisingly little empirical evidence exists testing this functional form. This study estimates the functional form of the relationship between poverty and various types of serious crime in a sample of census tracts for 25 cities, and it finds that a diminishing positive effect most appropriately characterizes this relationship whether estimating the models nonparametrically or parametrically. Only for the crime of murder does some evidence exist of an accelerating effect, although this occurs in the range of 20 to 40 percent in poverty, with a leveling effect on crime beyond this point of very high poverty. Thus, no evidence is found here in support of the postulate of scholars extending William Julius Wilson's (1987) insight that neighborhoods with very high levels of poverty will experience an exponentially higher rate of crime compared with other neighborhoods.

The Cascading Effects of Adolescent Gang Involvement across the Life Course
Marvin D. Krohn, Jeffrey T. Ward, Terence P. Thornberry, Alan J. Lizotte and Rebekah Chu

The short-run deleterious effects of gang involvement during adolescence have been well researched. However, surprisingly little empirical attention has been devoted to understanding how gang involvement in adolescence influences life chances and criminal behavior in adulthood. Drawing on the life-course perspective, this study argues that gang involvement will lead to precocious transitions that, in turn, will have adverse consequences on the fulfillment of adulthood roles and statuses in the economic and family spheres. Moreover, problems fulfilling these conventional roles are hypothesized then to lead to sustained involvement in criminal behavior in adulthood. Using data from a sample of males from the Rochester Youth Development Study, results from structural equation models support the indirect link between gang membership and noncriminal and criminal outcomes in adulthood. Specifically, gang involvement leads to an increase in the number of precocious transitions experienced that result in both economic hardship and family problems in adulthood. These failures in the economic and family realms, in turn, contribute to involvement in street crime and/or arrest in adulthood. Implications for the criminal desistance process are discussed.

On Ambiguity in Perceptions of Risk: Implications for Criminal Decision Making and Deterrence
Thomas A. Loughran, Raymond Paternoster, Alex R. Piquero and Greg Pogarsky

Deterrence theorists and researchers have argued that the critical dimension of sanction certainty is its level—increasing the certainty of punishment from a lower to a higher level will inhibit criminal conduct. However, the true certainty of punishment is rarely known with much precision. Both Sherman (1990) and Nagin (1998) have suggested that ambiguity about the level of punishment certainty is itself consequential in the decision to commit or refrain from crime. Here, we investigate this proposition. We find some evidence that individuals are “ambiguity averse” for decisions involving losses such as criminal punishments. This finding means that a more ambiguous perceived certainty of punishment is a greater deterrent of some crimes than a nominally equivalent but less ambiguous one. However, this effect depends on how large an individual's risk certainty perception is initially. That is, we find evidence for “boundary effects” (Casey and Scholz, 1991a, 1991b) in which this effect holds for lower probabilities but reverses for higher ones. For higher detection probabilities, individuals become “ambiguity seeking” such that a less ambiguous detection probability has more deterrent value than a nominally equivalent but more ambiguous detection probability. Results are presented from two distinct, but complementary, analysis samples and empirical approaches. These samples include a survey to college students with several hypothetical choice problems and data from the Pathways to Desistance study, a longitudinal investigation of serious adolescent offenders transitioning from adolescence to young adulthood.

Neuropsychological Measures of Executive Function and Antisocial Behavior: A Meta-Analysis
James M. Ogilvie, Anna L. Stewart, Raymond C. K. Chan and David H. K. Shum

A meta-analysis was performed to quantify the association between antisocial behavior (ASB) and performance on neuropsychological executive functioning (EF) measures. This meta-analysis built on Morgan and Lilienfeld's (2000) meta-analysis of the same topic by including recently published studies and by examining a wider range of EF measures. A total of 126 studies involving 14,786 participants were included in the analyses. Antisocial groups performed significantly worse on measures of EF compared with controls, with a grand mean effect size of d= .44. Significant variation occurred in the magnitude of effect sizes calculated across studies. The largest effect sizes were found for criminality (d= .61) and externalizing behavior disorder (d= .54) ASB groups, whereas the smallest effect sizes were found for antisocial personality disorder (d= .19) groups. Larger differences in EF performance were observed across studies involving participants from correctional settings and with comorbid attention deficit and hyperactivity problems. Overall, the results indicated that a robust association exists between ASB and poor EF that held across studies with varied methodological approaches. The methodological issues in the research literature and the implications of the meta-analysis results are discussed, and the directions for future research are proposed.

Associations of Fathers' History of Incarceration with Sons' Delinquency and Arrest Among Black, White, and Hispanic Males in the United States
Michael E. Roettger and Raymond R. Swisher

Nearly 13 percent of young adult men report that their biological father has served time in jail or prison; yet surprisingly little research has examined how a father's incarceration is associated with delinquency and arrest in the contemporary United States. Using a national panel of Black, White, and Hispanic males, this study examines whether experiencing paternal incarceration is associated with increased delinquency in adolescence and young adulthood. We find a positive association with paternal incarceration that is robust to controls for several structural, familial, and adolescent characteristics. Relative to males not experiencing a father's incarceration, our results show that those experiencing a father's incarceration have an increased propensity for delinquency that persists into young adulthood. Using a national probability sample, we also find that a father's incarceration is highly and significantly associated with an increased risk of incurring an adult arrest before 25 years of age. These observed associations are similar across groups of Black, White, and Hispanic males. Taken as a whole, our findings suggest benefits from public policies that focus on male youth “at risk” as a result of having an incarcerated father.

Does the Time Cause the Crime? An Examination of the Relationship Between Time Served and Reoffending in the Netherlands
G. Matthew Snodgrass, Arjan A. J. Blokland, Amelia Haviland, Paul Nieuwbeerta and Daniel S. Nagin

This work uses a sample of Dutch offenders, serving an average of 6.7 months of confinement, to examine the relationship between time served in prison and future criminality. To overcome the selection issues inherent in this examination, this article introduces a new method to the criminological literature that relies on a generalization of the propensity score to control for observed differences in offenders sentenced to different periods of confinement. On the whole, very little evidence of a relationship between time served and future offending was found. In particular, 3-year reconviction rate and the proportion of offenders reconvicted in the next 3 years do not seem to depend on incarceration length. Although a relationship between time served and future sentence length was found, the evidence is modest.

The Effects of Employment on Longitudinal Trajectories of Offending: A Follow-Up of High-Risk Youth from 18 to 32 Years of Age
Victor R. Van Der Geest, Catrien C. J. H. Bijleveld and Arjan A. J. Blokland

This article analyzes the effects of employment on delinquent development from 18 to 32 years of age in 270 high-risk males. Prior to 18 years of age, all men had undergone residential treatment for serious problem behavior in a juvenile justice institution in the Netherlands. We use semiparametric group-based models to investigate the effect of employment on their offending, taking into account static personality and background characteristics. We examine the effect of being employed and further distinguish the effects of job quality (“on the payroll” or being employed through temporary work agencies) and job stability (duration). We find that employment is significantly related to delinquent development among most (active) offender groups. Among high-frequency chronic offenders, only temporary employment is significantly associated with a reduction in offending, whereas among high-frequency desisters, the association is significantly stronger with regular employment. Stability in employment was limited in our sample, and it did not have an additional effect on offending.

Decomposing the Peer Effect on Adolescent Substance Use: Mediation, Nonlinearity, and Differential Nonlinearity
Gregory M. Zimmerman and Bob Edward Vásquez

Although the correlation between peer delinquency and delinquency is one of the most consistently demonstrated findings in delinquency research, researchers have focused primarily on the direct, linear, and additive effects of peers in statistical models, rather than on empirically modeling mediating, nonlinear, and moderating processes that are specified by theory. To address these issues, we measure respondent delinquency and peer delinquency with illegal substance use and then decompose the effect of peer substance use on self-reported substance use. Logistic hierarchical models on a sample of adolescents from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) indicate that the effect of peer substance use on self-reported substance use is partially mediated by perceptions of the health risks of substance use. In addition, the direct statistical effect of peers is nonlinear: On average, the peer effect decreases at higher values of peer substance use, which is consistent with a “saturation” effect. We also find that the functional form of the peer substance use/substance use relationship is dependent on the neighborhood context. In neighborhoods with more opportunities for crime, the peer effect is initially strong but decreases as peer substance use increases, which is consistent with a saturation effect. Conversely, in neighborhoods with fewer opportunities for crime, the effect of peers is initially small, but as delinquent peer associations increase, the peer effect increases multiplicatively.

British Journal of Criminology 52(1)

British Journal of Criminology, January 2012: Volume 52, Issue 1

Using ‘Turning Points’ to Understand Processes of Change in Offending: Notes from a Swedish Study on Life Courses and Crime
Christoffer Carlsson

Processes of within-individual change in offending and desistance from crime can be very complex, often involving multiple, context-specific processes. But even in a generous reading of much research on turning points, while this is theoretically stated or inferred, it is less often shown or illustrated in empirical cases. I explore processes of change in offending with the help of the concept of ‘turning points’, through life story interviews conducted in the Stockholm Project, trying to make use of the possibilities inherent in qualitative inquiry. I show how life course processes and the turning points that emerge within them are often interdependent on each other, emerging in very context-specific circumstances, and need to be studied and understood and such. Future research areas are suggested.

History And Global Criminology: (Re)Inventing Delinquency in Vietnam
Pamela Cox

How might historical analysis enrich global criminology? More specifically, could histories of European crime contribute to understandings of social change in present-day Asia? How can evidence bases generated through distinct research practices—those used by historians, criminologists and criminal justice consultants—be combined? This article explores these challenges through an analysis of contemporary Vietnamese concerns about youth crime and a critique of local and international policy makers’ efforts to address these. It argues that historically informed analysis can enrich understanding in four key ways. The first is that this kind of analysis suggests how French colonialism and its legacies have shaped Vietnamese criminal justice practice through (in)direct policy transfer. The second is that it can help to defuse current moral panics by locating Vietnam's rising youth crime within a familiar historical pattern. The third is that it can broaden the narrow evidence base available to those searching for youth justice interventions that ‘work’. Finally, a historical view can expand existing spaces for difficult but critical dialogues around human rights in a reforming authoritarian state with its own traumatic past.

Informers and the Transition in Northern Ireland
Ron Dudai

Though criminological literature has paid attention to the use of informers in ordinary law enforcement, there is a research gap regarding their usage in contexts of conflict and political violence. This article explores the social, political and security functions of IRA informers in the transition from conflict in Northern Ireland. Based on that experience, it develops four heuristic models regarding informers that the paper argues may be of direct relevance to other conflicted and transitional societies. These are the informer as folk devil, the informer as rumour, the informer as political manipulator, and the informer as celebrity. All these themes demonstrate the long-term effects of the use of informers during the Northern Ireland conflict—an important finding given the increasing prevalence of the use of informers in a political context.

E-Resistance and Technological In/Security in Everyday Life: The Palestinian Case
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

This paper analyses the roles played by Information Computer Technologies (ICT) and the internet in areas of conflict, with a specific focus on the Palestinian context in Jerusalem. In particular, it examines the way the politics of everydayness in Jerusalem constructs Palestinians as security threats and, in turn, subjects them to technologized surveillance and spatial control. Examining the effect of the politics of everydayness when juxtaposed with the effect of technologized surveillance on a group of young Palestinian college women from Jerusalem and surrounding areas, the paper considers the ‘double-edged’ nature of new information technologies and the internet. On the one hand, Palestinian women’s narratives demonstrate the emancipatory possibilities of such technologies, in that they allow for and forge spaces of resistance and contestation. On the other hand, women participants indicated that such technologies increased their vulnerability and victimization. Looking closely at the Palestinian case study, it is argued, enables us to shed light on broader issues related to criminology, surveillance and ICT in militarized/occupied areas.

Compstat and The New Penology: A Paradigm Shift in Policing?
James J. Willis and Stephen D. Mastrofski

Using fieldwork data collected at seven police agencies in the United States, this study asks ‘To what extent is the operation of Compstat, a recent and highly touted police management and accountability system, consistent with the new penology?’. Examining a multidimensional reform in an area (police innovation) that has been relatively neglected helps illuminate to what degree Compstat is part of a new trend in criminal justice, and it gives theoretical insight into how the applicability of the new penology's elements may vary across different institutional settings. Our findings suggested support for the new penology at a general level but this weakened significantly upon closer examination. This article then provides a broader theoretical explanation for this looseness of fit with our observations of Compstat's operation.

Using Jurors to Explore Public Attitudes to Sentencing
Kate Warner and Julia Davis

This paper reports the findings of an innovative method of ascertaining public opinion about sentencing—namely using jurors in actual cases to explore both the appropriateness of the sentence imposed in the juror's trial and more general views about sentencing levels. Contrasting images of public opinion emerged: a punitive public in relation to general perceptions of leniency and a more merciful public in relation to individual cases. The extent and reasons for this dichotomy are explored, as are differences in levels of satisfaction for different offence types.

Executions, Imprisonment and Crime in Trinidad and Tobago
David F. Greenberg and Biko Agozino

The effect of death sentences, executions and imprisonment on crime rates in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is assessed using annual time series data from 1955 to 2005. Policy implications of the research findings are drawn, and speculations are offered as to the reasons for the recent large increase in homicide rates.

Sentencing for Murder: Exploring Public Knowledge and Public Opinion in England and Wales
Barry Mitchell and Julian V. Roberts

In 1965, it was thought that nothing less than a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment would be an acceptable replacement for the death penalty for murder in England and Wales. It was assumed that anything else would have led to a significant loss of public confidence in the criminal justice system. The authors have recently conducted what is believed to be the first survey in this country that tests this assumption, as well as the extent of public knowledge and belief of the current system for sentencing convicted murderers. The survey casts doubt over the assumption and highlights the misunderstanding and lack of knowledge on which public opinion is based.

Homicide Law Reform in Victoria, Australia: From Provocation to Defensive Homicide and Beyond
Kate Fitz-Gibbon and Sharon Pickering

Homicide law reform surrounding the partial defences to murder currently animates legal stakeholders in Australia and the United Kingdom, particularly in relation to cases of lethal intimate partner violence. In 2005, the Victorian Government implemented a series of homicide law reforms, central to which was the abolition of the partial defence of provocation and the instatement of an offence of defensive homicide. This article, based on a larger qualitative research study with British, Victorian and New South Wales legal stakeholders, explores experiences and perceptions of reforms in Victoria. An analysis of the impact of homicide law reform, using Hudson's principles of discursiveness and reflectiveness as a framework for analysis, reveals some dissonance between the intent and outcomes of these legal reforms. This study concludes that reforms crafted to counter gender bias in the operation of homicide law have produced mixed results for female victims of intimate partner homicide and related case law.

Understanding Cooperation With Police in a Diverse Society
Kristina Murphy and Adrian Cherney

Past research has shown that procedural justice enhances an authority's legitimacy and encourages people to cooperate with them. However, this past research has examined legitimacy by focusing solely on the perceived legitimacy of authorities and has ignored how people may perceive the legitimacy of the laws and rules authorities enforce. This distinction has relevance to the policing of ethnic minority groups who may come from different cultures or countries where distrust in the law and legal institutions is prevalent. Using survey data collected from a random sample of 1,203 Australians, this paper explores how procedural justice and both institutional and legal legitimacy impact on people's willingness to cooperate with police. The findings will be explained using Braithwaite's (2003; 2010) social distancing framework.

Review Article

A Symposium of Reviews of Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition: By David Garland (Oxford University Press, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 417pp.) Reviews by Anette Ballinger, David Brown, Pat Carlen, Richard Garside and Magnus Hörnquist

Law & Society Review 45(4)

Law & Society Review, December 2011: Volume 45, Issue 4

How an Authoritarian Regime in Burma Used Special Courts to Defeat Judicial Independence
Nick Cheesman

Why do authoritarian rulers establish special courts? One view is that they do so to insulate the judiciary from politically oriented cases and allow it continued, albeit limited, independence. In this article I present a contrary case study of an authoritarian regime in Burma that used special courts not to insulate the judiciary but to defeat it. Through comparison to other Asian cases I suggest that the Burmese regime's composition and character better explain its strategy than does extant judicial authority or formal ideology. The regime consisted of war fighters for whom the courts were enemy territory. But absent popular support, the regime's leaders could not embark immediately on a radical project for legal change that might compromise their hold on power. Consequently, they used special courts and other strategies to defeat judicial independence incrementally, until they could displace the professional judiciary and bring the courts fully under executive control.

Political Liberalism and Political Embeddedness: Understanding Politics in the Work of Chinese Criminal Defense Lawyers
Sida Liu and Terence C. Halliday

This article examines the meanings of politics in everyday legal practice using the case of Chinese criminal defense lawyers. Based on 194 in-depth interviews with criminal defense lawyers and other informants in 22 cities across China, we argue that lawyers’ everyday politics have two faces: on the one hand, lawyers potentially can challenge state power, protect citizen rights, and pursue proceduralism in their daily work; on the other hand, they often have to rely on political connections with state agencies to protect themselves and to solve problems in their legal practice. The double meanings of politics—namely, political liberalism and political embeddedness—explain the complex motivations and coping tactics that are frequently found in Chinese lawyers’ everyday work. Our data show that the Chinese criminal defense bar is differentiated along these two meanings of politics into five clusters of lawyers: progressive elites, pragmatic brokers, notable activists, grassroots activists, and routine practitioners. They also suggest that a principal manifestation of political lawyering is not merely short-term mobilization or revolutionary struggle against arbitrary state power, but also an incremental everyday process that often involves sophisticated tactics to manage interests that often conflict.

Going beyond Ascribed Identities: The Importance of Procedural Justice in Airport Security Screening in Israel
Badi Hasisi and David Weisburd

Today, passengers at every major Western airport are subjected to heightened levels of security screening that not only are inconvenient, but also raise important questions about the treatment of members of specific groups that are seen as presenting special security risks. Our study examines the importance of ethnic identity in explaining perceptions of legitimacy in airport screening among a random sample of Jewish and Arab passengers in Israel. The main hypothesis of our study is that ethnicity will play a major role in predicting passengers’ attitudes toward the airport security process. In fact, our survey shows that Israeli Arab passengers are, on average, significantly more negative regarding the legitimacy of security checks than Israeli Jewish passengers are. However, using a multivariate model, we find that ethnicity (Arab versus Jew) disappears as a significant predictor of legitimacy when we included factors of procedural justice and controlled for specific characteristics of the security process. The results of our research indicate that differences in legitimacy perceptions are by and large the result of the processes used in airport screening and not a direct result of ethnic identity. In concluding, we argue that profiling strategies aimed at preventing terrorism, which often include embarrassing public procedures, may actually jeopardize passengers’ trust in airport security. Such security is dependent on the cooperation of citizens, and heightened security procedures focused on particular groups may compromise legitimacy evaluations and thus the cooperation of the public.

Talking Law in Times of Reform: Paradoxes of Legal Entitlement in Cameroon
José-María Muñoz

Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2003 and 2005, this article examines how legality is constructed in present-day Adamaoua Province, Cameroon. Focusing on an instance of a process locally referred to as la concertation, I analyze how state officials and cattle traders gather to discuss the practical fate of law. As a heightened moment of suspended enforcement, la concertation is productive for both officials, who work out the limits of their respective spheres of authority and imagine a trade based on business norms and practices that severely limit the scope of regulatory action, and traders, who manage to stave off the increased scrutiny that income tax law presupposes, while asserting their concern for the integrity and consistency of the law.

What's So Private about Private Ordering?
Tehila Sagy

Private ordering—i.e., development of extralegal forums and forms of dispute processing by nonhierarchical groups—has preoccupied legal economists for nearly three decades. According to the prevailing analysis, private orders grow in socially-flat market communities without any intervention by the state. This article challenges the received view on two fronts: First, it establishes a causal connection between the development of private orders and a social hierarchy. Second, the article demonstrates that the state often intentionally assumes a proactive role in the creation of these orders. To illustrate this two-pronged theory of private ordering, this article offers a detailed analysis of three well-known cases that have been considered prototypes of private ordering by market communities: the Diamond Dealers Club of New York, the kibbutz in Israel, and ranch owners in Shasta County, California. Finally, the article argues for a need to re-evaluate the feasibility and desirability of private ordering and privatization of law.

Paying for the Past: Redressing the Legacy of Land Dispossession in South Africa
Bernadette Atuahene

The constitution of South Africa mandates equitable redress for individuals and communities evicted from their properties during colonialism and apartheid. The Commission on Restitution of Land Rights' institution-wide assumption is that the financial awards given as equitable redress had no long-term economic impact on recipients because the money is gone and they are still in poverty, whereas if people had received land, the economic impact would have been lasting. Consequently, in recent years, the commission has adopted a policy of using its soft power to force claimants to choose land restitution instead of financial awards. However, the interviews I conducted with financial award recipients show that in 30 percent of the cases, the award did produce a long-term economic benefit because respondents invested in their homes. This empirical evidence suggests that the commission should rethink its recent shift in policy and not totally discount the potential of financial awards to produce a lasting economic benefit.

Multiple Disadvantages: An Empirical Test of Intersectionality Theory in EEO Litigation
Rachel Kahn Best, Lauren B. Edelman, Linda Hamilton Krieger and Scott R. Eliason

A rich theoretical literature describes the disadvantages facing plaintiffs who suffer multiple, or intersecting, axes of discrimination. This article extends extant literature by distinguishing two forms of intersectionality: demographic intersectionality, in which overlapping demographic characteristics produce disadvantages that are more than the sum of their parts, and claim intersectionality, in which plaintiffs who allege discrimination on the basis of intersecting ascriptive characteristics (e.g., race and sex) are unlikely to win their cases. To date, there has been virtually no empirical research on the effects of either type of intersectionality on litigation outcomes. This article addresses that lacuna with an empirical analysis of a representative sample of judicial opinions in equal employment opportunity (EEO) cases in the U.S. federal courts from 1965 through 1999. Using generalized ordered logistic regression and controlling for numerous variables, we find that both intersectional demographic characteristics and legal claims are associated with dramatically reduced odds of plaintiff victory. Strikingly, plaintiffs who make intersectional claims are only half as likely to win their cases as plaintiffs who allege a single basis of discrimination. Our findings support and elaborate predictions about the sociolegal effects of intersectionality.

Justices and Legal Clarity: Analyzing the Complexity of U.S. Supreme Court Opinions
Ryan J. Owens and Justin P. Wedeking

Legal clarity is important to understand and measure because of its connection to the rule of law. We provide the first systematic examination of the clarity of Supreme Court opinions and discover five important results. First, certain justices systematically craft clearer opinions than others. Justices Scalia and Breyer write the clearest opinions, while Justice Ginsburg consistently writes the most complex opinions. Second, ideology does not predict clarity in majority or concurring opinions. Third, all justices write clearer dissents than majority opinions, while minimum winning coalitions produce the clearest majority opinions. Fourth, justices across the board write clearer opinions in criminal procedure cases than in any other issue area. Finally, opinions that formally alter Court precedent render less clear law, potentially leading to a cycle of legal ambiguity.

Sociological Theory 29(4)

Sociological Theory, December 2011: Volume 29, Issue 4

The Gift Revisited: Marcel Mauss on War, Debt, and the Politics of Reparations
Grégoire Mallard

This article offers a new interpretation of Marcel Mauss's The Gift. It situates Mauss's argument within his broader thinking on the politics of sovereign debt cancellation and the question of German reparations paid to the Allies after World War I. Mauss applauded the policies of reparation and debt cancellation proposed by the French “solidarist” activists who were responsible for inclusion of reparations provisions in the Versailles Treaty. But Mauss was also aware that their legal mobilization could not by itself restore a sense of solidarity among European peoples. Broader systems of political alliance and anthropological norms of gift-making were also necessary. In Mauss's writings on war reparations, as in The Gift, he described the legal, political, and macrostructural dynamics at work in the settlement of reparations and sovereign debts, which he differentiated from the dynamics at work in the speculative logics of financial capitalism. In doing so, Mauss provided insights into the settlement of sovereign debt crises, which still agitate the international community today.

The Jews, the Revolution, and the Old Regime in French Anti-Semitism and Durkheim's Sociology
Chad Alan Goldberg

The relationship between European sociology and European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is investigated through a case study of one sociologist, Émile Durkheim, in a single country, France. Reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism are distinguished and contrasted to Durkheim's sociological perspective. Durkheim's remarks about the Jews directly addressed anti-Semitic claims about them, their role in French society, and their relationship to modernity. At the same time, Durkheim was engaged in a reinterpretation of the French Revolution and its legacies that indirectly challenged other tenets of French anti-Semitism. In sum, Durkheim's work contains direct and indirect responses to reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism, and together these responses form a coherent alternative vision of the relationship between modernity and the Jews.

The Question of Moral Action: A Formalist Position
Iddo Tavory

This article develops a research position that allows cultural sociologists to compare morality across sociohistorical cases. In order to do so, the article suggests focusing analytic attention on actions that fulfill the following criteria: (a) actions that define the actor as a certain kind of socially recognized person, both within and across fields; (b) actions that actors experience—or that they expect others to perceive—as defining the actor both intersituationally and to a greater extent than other available definitions of self; and (c) actions to which actors either have themselves, or expect others to have, a predictable emotional reaction. Such a position avoids both a realist moral sociology and descriptive-relativism, and provides sociologists with criteria for comparing moral action in different cases while staying attuned to social and historical specificity.

The Eventfulness of Social Reproduction
Adam Moore

The work of William Sewell and Marshall Sahlins has led to a growing interest in recent years in events as a category of analysis and their role in the transformation of social structures. I argue that tying events solely to instances of significant structural transformation entails problematic theoretical assumptions about stability and change and produces a circumscribed field of events, undercutting the goal of developing an “eventful” account of social life. Social continuity is a state that is achieved just as much as are structural transformations, and events may be constitutive of processes of reproduction as well as change.

A Path to Understanding Guanxi in China's Transitional Economy: Variations on Network Behavior
Kuang-chi Chang

Current research on guanxi (Chinese social connections) suffers from conceptual confusion. This article presents a new theoretical framework for understanding guanxi in the face of China's economic and social transformations. Guanxi is viewed as a purposive network behavior that can take different “strategic” forms, such as accessing, bridging, and embedding. Pairing this conceptualization with a social-evolutionary framework, I argue that the emergence and increasing or decreasing prevalence of each form over time result from (1) a combination of factors at three analytical levels—microagency, mesonetwork, and macroinstitutional—and (2) endogenous processes of selection. By focusing on behavioral forms and their evolution, this framework is able to bridge divides in the guanxi literature, provide a foundation for comparative studies of network behavior across societies, and connect the study of guanxi with economic sociology more broadly.

Social Psychology Quarterly 74(4)

Social Psychology Quarterly, December 2011: Volume 74, Issue 4

Culture, Cooperation, and the General Welfare
Nick Berigan and Kyle Irwin

Job Burnout and Couple Burnout in Dual-earner Couples in the Sandwiched Generation
Ayala Malach Pines, Margaret B. Neal, Leslie B. Hammer, and Tamar Icekson

The Emergence of Embedded Relations and Group Formation in Networks of Competition
Shane R. Thye, Edward J. Lawler, and Jeongkoo Yoon

Managing Emotional Manhood: Fighting and Fostering Fear in Mixed Martial Arts
Christian A. Vaccaro, Douglas P. Schrock, and Janice M. McCabe

American Sociological Review 76(6)

American Sociological Review, December 2011: Volume 76, Issue 6

Revisiting the Gender Gap in Time-Use Patterns: Multitasking and Well-Being among Mothers and Fathers in Dual-Earner Families
Shira Offer and Barbara Schneider

This study suggests that multitasking constitutes an important source of gender inequality, which can help explain previous findings that mothers feel more burdened and stressed than do fathers even when they have relatively similar workloads. Using data from the 500 Family Study, including surveys and the Experience Sampling Method, the study examines activities parents simultaneously engage in and how they feel when multitasking. We find that mothers spend 10 more hours a week multitasking compared to fathers and that these additional hours are mainly related to time spent on housework and childcare. For mothers, multitasking activities at home and in public are associated with an increase in negative emotions, stress, psychological distress, and work-family conflict. By contrast, fathers’ multitasking at home involves less housework and childcare and is not a negative experience. We also find several similarities by gender. Mothers’ and fathers’ multitasking in the company of a spouse or children are positive experiences, whereas multitasking at work, although associated with an increased sense of productivity, is perceived as a negative experience.

How Mothers and Fathers Share Childcare: A Cross-National Time-Use Comparison
Lyn Craig and Killian Mullan

In most families today, childcare remains divided unequally between fathers and mothers. Scholars argue that persistence of the gendered division of childcare is due to multiple causes, including values about gender and family, disparities in paid work, class, and social context. It is likely that all of these factors interact, but to date researchers have not explored such interactions. To address this gap, we analyze nationally representative time-use data from Australia, Denmark, France, and Italy. These countries have different employment patterns, social and family policies, and cultural attitudes toward parenting and gender equality. Using data from matched married couples, we conduct a cross-national study of mothers’ and fathers’ relative time in childcare, divided along dimensions of task (i.e., routine versus non-routine activities) and co-presence (i.e., caring for children together as a couple versus caring solo). Results show that mothers’ and fathers’ work arrangements and education relate modestly to shares of childcare, and this relationship differs across countries. We find cross-national variation in whether more equal shares result from the behavior of mothers, fathers, or both spouses. Results illustrate the relevance of social context in accentuating or minimizing the impact of individual- and household-level characteristics.

"I Need Help!" Social Class and Children's Help-Seeking in Elementary School
Jessica McCrory Calarco

What role do children play in education and stratification? Are they merely passive recipients of unequal opportunities that schools and parents create for them? Or do they actively shape their own opportunities? Through a longitudinal, ethnographic study of one socioeconomically diverse, public elementary school, I show that children’s social-class backgrounds affect when and how they seek help in the classroom. Compared to their working-class peers, middle-class children request more help from teachers and do so using different strategies. Rather than wait for assistance, they call out or approach teachers directly, even interrupting to make requests. In doing so, middle-class children receive more help from teachers, spend less time waiting, and are better able to complete assignments. By demonstrating these skills and strategies, middle-class children create their own advantages and contribute to inequalities in the classroom. These findings have implications for theories of cultural capital, stratification, and social reproduction.

Social Environment, Genes, and Aggression: Evidence Supporting the Differential Susceptibility Perspective
Ronald L. Simons, Man Kit Lei, Steven R. H. Beach, Gene H. Brody, Robert A. Philibert, and Frederick X. Gibbons

Although gene by environment studies are typically based on the assumption that some individuals possess genetic variants that enhance their vulnerability to environmental adversity, the differential susceptibility perspective posits that these individuals are simply more susceptible to environmental influence than others. An important implication of this perspective is that individuals most vulnerable to adverse social environments are the same ones who reap the most benefit from environmental support. Using longitudinal data from a sample of several hundred African Americans, we found that relatively common variants of the dopamine receptor gene and the serotonin transporter gene interact with social conditions to predict aggression in a manner consonant with the differential susceptibility perspective. When social conditions were adverse, individuals with these genetic variants manifested more aggression than other genotypes, whereas when the environment was favorable they demonstrated less aggression than other genotypes. Furthermore, we found that these genetic variants interact with environmental conditions to foster schemas and emotions consistent with the differential susceptibility perspective and that a latent construct formed by these schemas and emotions mediates the gene by environment interaction on aggression.

The Enduring Association between Education and Mortality: The Role of Widening and Narrowing Disparities
Richard Miech, Fred Pampel, Jinyoung Kim, and Richard G. Rogers

This article examines how educational disparities in mortality emerge, grow, decline, and disappear across causes of death in the United States, and how these changes contribute to the enduring association between education and mortality over time. Focusing on adults age 40 to 64 years, we first examine the extent to which educational disparities in mortality persisted from 1989 to 2007. We then test the fundamental cause prediction that educational disparities in mortality persist, in part, by shifting to new health outcomes over time. We focus on the period from 1999 to 2007, when all causes of death were coded to the same classification system. Results indicate (1) substantial widening and narrowing of educational disparities in mortality across causes of death, (2) almost all causes of death with increasing mortality rates also had widening educational disparities, and (3) the total educational disparity in mortality would be about 25 percent smaller today if not for newly emergent and growing educational disparities since 1999. These results point to the theoretical and policy importance of identifying social forces that cause health disparities to widen over time.

Uncertainty and Fertility in a Generalized AIDS Epidemic
Jenny Trinitapoli and Sara Yeatman

Sociologists widely acknowledge that uncertainty matters for decision making, but they rarely measure it directly. In this article, we demonstrate the importance of theorizing about, measuring, and analyzing uncertainty as experienced by individuals. We adapt a novel probabilistic solicitation technique to measure personal uncertainty about HIV status in a high HIV prevalence area of southern Malawi. Using data from 2,000 young adults (ages 15 to 25 years), we demonstrate that uncertainty about HIV status is widespread and that it expands as young adults assess their proximate and distant futures. In conceptualizing HIV status as something more than sero-status itself, we gain insight into how what individuals know they don’t know influences their lives. Young people who are uncertain about their HIV status express desires to accelerate their childbearing relative to their counterparts who are certain they are uninfected. Our approach and findings show that personal uncertainty is a measurable and meaningful phenomenon that can illuminate much about individuals’ aspirations and behaviors.

Variance Function Regression in Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort Models: Applications to the Study of Self-Reported Health
Hui Zheng, Yang Yang, and Kenneth C. Land

Two long-standing research problems of interest to sociologists are sources of variations in social inequalities and differential contributions of the temporal dimensions of age, time period, and cohort to variations in social phenomena. Recently, scholars have introduced a model called Variance Function Regression for the study of the former problem, and a model called Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort regression has been developed for the study of the latter. This article presents an integration of these two models as a means to study the evolution of social inequalities along distinct temporal dimensions. We apply the integrated model to survey data on subjective health status. We find substantial age, period, and cohort effects, as well as gender differences, not only for the conditional mean of self-rated health (i.e., between-group disparities), but also for the variance in this mean (i.e., within-group disparities)—and it is detection of age, period, and cohort variations in the latter disparities that application of the integrated model permits. Net of effects of age and individual-level covariates, in recent decades, cohort differences in conditional means of self-rated health have been less important than period differences that cut across all cohorts. By contrast, cohort differences of variances in these conditional means have dominated period differences. In particular, post-baby boom birth cohorts show significant and increasing levels of within-group disparities. These findings illustrate how the integrated model provides a powerful framework through which to identify and study the evolution of variations in social inequalities across age, period, and cohort temporal dimensions. Accordingly, this model should be broadly applicable to the study of social inequality in many different substantive contexts.