SYG2000 Final

Height and Health Inequalities

"The Height Gap" that discussed how tall men benefit from their height. Taller men have higher incomes, are more politically powerful ("only 5 of the 43 U.S. presidents have been shorter than average"), and are luckier in love.Sociologists are interested in height because it is determined both by genetics and by environmental conditions during infancy and childhood.But given that the United States is a relatively prosperous country even compared with other developed European states, why are the Dutch so much taller than we are? One theory holds that it's not just about wealth but also about equality. The United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but a high, and increasing, gap also exists between the rich and the poor. In countries such as the Netherlands, which has a social-democratic government, wealth is distributed much more equally. The Netherlands provides excellent pre- and postnatal care to everyone at no or nominal cost. The U.S. population, until the recent health care legislation was enacted, included about 40 million people (roughly 13 percent of the population) who did not have health insurance. As mentioned above, health care is a relatively minor factor in determining the health (and height) of populations. The psychological stress that inequality creates may exact a toll on our height directly through stress reactions and indirectly through social behavior. Even Americans who can afford to live healthier lifestyles may not necessarily do so. Human growth primarily takes place in three spurts—one in infancy, one around the ages of 6 to 8, and one in adolescence. If American tweens and teens are stocking up on french fries and hamburgers rather than apples and carrot sticks, they might not be getting the nutrients they need to maximize their growth potential. Wealth doesn't matter just for height, though, and in the following section we'll discuss some of the social factors that affect our life outcomes.

strength of weak ties

, referring to the fact that relatively weak ties—those not reinforced through indirect paths—often turn out to be quite valuable because they bring novel information. Let's say you're on the track team and that's your primary social group. An old classmate from high school whom you didn't really know (or run in the same circles with) back then, you now see occasionally because he also attends your college, but he's on the volleyball team. If the track team isn't doing anything on Friday night but the volleyball team is having a party, you've got an "in" through this relationship that's much weaker than the ones you've got with the other members of the track team. That "in" is the strength of the weak tie you maintain with the classmate from home. If you end up taking your friends from the track team to the volleyball party and they become friends with your old friend, the tie between you and your old classmate is no longer "weak" because it is now reinforced by the ties between your old friend and your new track friends—regardless of whether you are actually more intimate with him or not. This example helps explain why the structure of the network is more complicated than the tie from one individual to another. Even though your friendships did not change at the volleyball party, the fact that people in your social network befriended others in your social network strengthens the ties between you and both of the individuals.

cultural capital

A more subtle way that social class is related to educational outcomes is through the importance of cultural capital, the symbolic and interactional resources that people use to their advantage in various situations (Bourdieu, 1977; Lareau, 1987, 2003). Pierre Bourdieu, who coined the term, recognized three distinct types of cultural capital: embodied, objectified, and institutionalized. In the first type, the skill rests in our body—hence, the term embodied. For example, if you learn to play the piano, that "competency" is a form of embodied cultural capital. The piano itself serves as an example of objectified cultural capital, because it required a significant investment of time and money to acquire. Cultural capital becomes institutionalized when it is legitimated through a formal system, such as education: For example, when you are accepted into an elite music conservatory because of your piano-playing ability

parenting stress hypothesis

A second paradigm, often called the parenting stress hypothesis, sees low income, unstable employment, a lack of cultural resources (such as reliable social networks), and a feeling of inferiority from social class comparisons as exacerbating household stress levels; this stress, in turn, leads to detrimental parenting practices such as yelling and hitting, which are not conducive to healthy child development.Furthermore, both home care and day care for low-income children generally involve fewer positive interactions between the child and the caregiver and less opportunity for play as compared with children in more affluent households. Research does suggest that parents living in poverty are more likely than parents in better conditions to display punitive behaviors such as yelling and slapping, and less likely to display love and warmth through behaviors such as cuddling and hugging.A great deal of evidence has connected such parenting practices to low IQ scores and to behavioral disorders in children

cult of domesticity

A third fallout of the new cash economy and the resulting split between public and private realms was the creation of the cult of domesticity, the notion that true womanhood centers on domestic responsibility and child rearing. During the first half of the twentieth century, ideas sprang up surrounding woman's true nature—ideas meant to support her newly created role as housewife. These included the notion that women, more than men, are endowed with the innate emotional qualities required to provide warmth and comfort. According to this ideology, not only are women better suited for home life, their domesticity also comes to be seen as necessary for the survival of society. Women, so the argument goes, are needed to ensure that the home remains a safe haven in the otherwise cold seas of capitalist enterprise. As breadwinners, men struggle in the dog-eat-dog commercial world, whereas women provide the emotional shelter that anchors private life in human sentiment, emotion, care, and love.

second shift

A third fallout of the new cash economy and the resulting split between public and private realms was the creation of the cult of domesticity, the notion that true womanhood centers on domestic responsibility and child rearing. During the first half of the twentieth century, ideas sprang up surrounding woman's true nature—ideas meant to support her newly created role as housewife. These included the notion that women, more than men, are endowed with the innate emotional qualities required to provide warmth and comfort. According to this ideology, not only are women better suited for home life, their domesticity also comes to be seen as necessary for the survival of society. Women, so the argument goes, are needed to ensure that the home remains a safe haven in the otherwise cold seas of capitalist enterprise. As breadwinners, men struggle in the dog-eat-dog commercial world, whereas women provide the emotional shelter that anchors private life in human sentiment, emotion, care, and love.

Hegemony

All of us might be willing to agree that, on some level, the media both reflect culture and work to produce the very culture they represent. How does this dynamic work? Antonio Gramsci, an Italian political theorist and activist, came up with the concept of ____ to describe just that. Refers to a historical process in which a dominant group exercises 'moral and intellectual leadership' throughout society by winning the voluntary 'consent' of popular masses" means getting them to go along with the status quo because it seems like the best course or the natural order of things. "_____ takes place in the realm of private institutions . . . such as families, churches, trade unions, and the media" The concept of _____ is important for understanding the impact of the media. It also raises questions about the tension between structure and agency. Are people molded by the culture in which they live, or do they actively participate in shaping the world around them?

Limits of socialization

Although socialization is necessary for people to function in society, they are not simply blank slates onto which society transcribes its norms and values. Twins are often used to support one or the other side of the nature-versus-nurture debate, because they allow us to factor out genetics. Twins living hundreds or even thousands of miles apart may simultaneously experience the same pain in their right arms—score one point for nature. Take another set of twins, however, who were separated at birth in the early 1900s. One of them was raised as a Jew and the other became a Nazi—score one for nurture. So which theory is correct? Both and neither. In sociology, we tend to think less about right and wrong and more about which theories are more or less helpful in explaining and understanding our social world. The concept of socialization is useful for understanding how people become functioning members of society. Like most theories, however, socialization can be limited in its explanatory power. you ever heard someone discussing a "problem child"? The conversation might go something like this: "I just don't know what's wrong with him. He comes from such a nice family. And his older brothers are such nice, respectful boys." How did this child go astray? The primary unit of socialization, the family, seems to have been functional. The other children went on to lead happy and productive lives. What else might explain the youngest son's delinquency? For starters, human beings have agency. This means that, while we operate within limits that largely are not of our own making (e.g., we cannot choose our parents or siblings, and U.S. law requires that all children receive schooling), we also make choices about how to interact with our environment. We can physically walk out of the school, fall asleep in class, or run away from home.

Group Conformity

Although we tend to put a high value on individuality in American culture, our lives are marked by high levels of conformity. That is, groups have strong influences over individual behavior.

caste system

As opposed to having a political basis, the caste system is religious in nature. That is, caste societies are stratified on the basis of hereditary notions of religious and theological purity. Today the caste system is primarily found in South Asia. For instance, in India the historical legacy of the caste system, also known as the varna system, still dominates. The varna system is composed of four main castes: Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra (the Dalits or "untouchables" are a lower order of the Shudra). These divisions correspond loosely to priests, warriors, traders, and workers, respectively. Over the past 5,000 years, however, the caste system in India has evolved into a complex matrix of thousands of subcastes. Each of the major castes is allowed to engage in certain ritual practices from which the others, for better or worse, are excluded. For instance, the Dalits (or "untouchables") are excluded from the performance of any rituals that confer purity, which places them at the bottom of the caste system and typically leaves them with occupations seen as impure, such as the cremation of corpses or disposal of sewage.Although there is little to no individual mobility in caste systems, an entire caste can leapfrog over another and obtain a higher position in the hierarchy. This process is called sanskritization. Sometimes such an attempt works, and sometimes it doesn't. During the colonial period, when the British governed South Asia, the Vaishya, the second-lowest caste in Pakistan, adopted Christianity, the religion of the British, in an attempt to jump ahead in the hierarchy. Their attempt was not successful. However, by becoming Christian, the Vaishya caste did enjoy a unique fate after the partition of Pakistan from India. Pakistan became a Muslim state in which Islamic law (the shar'ia) was enforced. One of the rules of the shar'ia is that Muslims are forbidden from imbibing or serving alcohol (or any mind-altering substances). So who got the jobs serving foreigners in the hotel bars? The Vaishya, who were now Christian. Their efforts to jump ahead in the caste system may have failed, but they ended up with fairly decent jobs in a relatively impoverished country.

hidden curriculum

At some point when these students got together, whether at college or in the workplace, these different socialization experiences would lead to inevitable conflicts. In 1968, sociologist Phillip Jackson coined the term hidden curriculum to describe these nonacademic and less overt socialization functions of schooling. According to Roland Meighan (1981), "The hidden curriculum is taught by the school, not by any teacher. . . . [S]omething is coming across to the pupils which may never be spoken in the English lesson or prayed about in assembly. They are picking up an approach to living and an attitude to learning."

formal deviance

At the other end of the continuum, we have formal deviance, or crime, which is the violation of laws enacted by society.

structural mobility

Changes in the distribution of jobs lead to what sociologists call structural mobility, mobility that is inevitable from changes in the economy. With the decline of farmwork because of technology, the sons and daughters of farmers are by definition going to have to find other kinds of work. This type of mobility stands in contrast to exchange mobility, in which, if we hold fixed the changing distribution of jobs, individuals trade jobs not one-to-one but in a way that ultimately balances out. However, a consensus seems to be slowly emerging that mobility rates should be broken down into the two components discussed above, structural and exchange mobility. When we do this, it turns out that rates of "trading places" are fairly fixed across developed societies. By contrast, historically the United States has enjoyed an advantage in growth-induced upward mobility; as the farm and blue-collar sectors withered and white-collar jobs expanded, sons and daughters of manual workers have, by necessity, experienced a degree of upward occupational mobility. However, sociologists and economists debate whether economic growth still drives upward mobility, or whether bifurcated job growth means intergenerational stagnation.

tracking

Earlier we talked about schools as sorting machines, placing students such that existing social structures would be reproduced. If you attended a typical comprehensive American high school, it is likely that much of this sorting was achieved through tracking, a way of dividing students into different classes by ability or future plans. School subjects might be divided by the level of ability required (high or low) or the type of preparation (academic, vocational, or general). For example, if you are college-bound, you may be sorted into honors or advanced placement college preparation classes. Dividing students into different tracks is instrumental in both preparing them for their future positions and explaining the large differences we observe among students within schools. page 504Tracking is intended to create a better learning environment, because students' goals are matched to their curricula. Sounds reasonable. And research has determined that tracking has significant impacts even after controlling for background characteristics. For example, Adam Gamoran and Robert Mare (1989) found that students in their school's college track had significantly higher math achievement and were more likely to graduate from high school. Furthermore, James Rosenbaum (1980) determined that tracking significantly predicted whether students attended college. Finally, Richard Arum and Yossi Shavit (1995) ascertained that students who graduated from vocational tracks were less likely to be unemployed and more likely to enter the workforce as skilled laborers. Of course, we can't know for sure whether it was the lessons learned in the respective tracks that drove these results or whether the tracking system itself is merely good at sorting students by future promise.

symbolic ethnicity

Ethnicity can be thought of as a nationality, not in the sense of carrying the rights and duties of citizenship but in the sense of identifying with a past or future nationality. For Americans, Herbert Gans (1979b) called this identification symbolic ethnicity. Symbolic ethnicity today is a matter of choice for white middle-class Americans. It has no risk of stigma and confers the pleasures of feeling like an individual. For example, from 2000 to 2010 the second-fastest-growing racial group in the United States was Native Americans. According to the U.S. Census, the American Indian and Alaska Native (alone or multiracial) population grew by 1.1 million, about 39 percent, whereas the entire U.S. population grew during that same time by 9.7 percent (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012a). These numbers are not the outcome of migration or a Native American baby boom, but instead reflect a growing interest in claiming one's heritage, so long as it's not too stigmatizing and brings just the right amount of uniqueness. And claiming American Indian ancestry is more than a matter of checking a box. Membership criteria vary from tribe to tribe but usually there has to be genealogical proof.

kinship networks

Families tended to live near their kin and thus could get help and support from their kinship networks, strings of relationships between people related by blood and co-residence (that is, marriage). Preindustrial communities didn't have huge savings banks, insurance companies, payday lenders, or government agencies to help in hard times; that was the role of family. For example, a down-and-out uncle might have a failed crop of wheat one summer. He could call in an IOU from his luckier cousin across the village, borrowing some of his crop and setting off a reciprocal exchange of food, clothing, and child care. Such families would have a grapevine structure where more lateral kinship ties endured than vertical ones (usually, no more than three generations of one family were alive at a time).

post natal health inequalities-family structure

Family structure, family size, and birth order are also determinants of mortality. Larger families have higher child mortality rates. When kids are spaced closer together, there is higher mortality. Why might this be the case? In developing countries in particular, resources key to survival (such as food) are stretched thinner in the household. If you have one pot of soup and eight mouths to feed instead of four, everyone gets half as much food, which translates into half the calories and nutrients. In our society, where food scarcity is less of an issue and accidental death is a greater cause of child mortality, supervision, or lack thereof, is the larger issue, because it's harder to supervise six children than two. The spacing of children also matters. Having three children in seven years is very different from having three children in three years. Parental resources are more taxed by rapid-fire spacing than by larger gaps between births. page 431Likewise, according to statistics, firstborn children are more likely to die young. One reason could be that parents are less experienced: The firstborn is an experiment in which parents learn through trial and (hopefully not too much) error. Another hypothesis is that firstborns are more often unintended pregnancies. Parents tend to be younger, and the mother may have been partying, drinking, smoking, or using drugs further into the pregnancy because she did not realize she was expecting a baby; thus, some of her actions early in the pregnancy may adversely affect the health of the fetus. It is also true, however, that the effect may run in the other direction: Child mortality creates firstborns or, to be more specific, only children. We can separate firstborn children into two groups: those who have younger siblings and those who are only children (first by default). It turns out that the higher risk of death occurs in the latter group. When we say that the direction of causation runs backward (that B causes A), what we mean is that if you have a traumatic experience with your firstborn child—if the baby is severely ill or dies in infancy—you are less likely to have more children. It is not that firstborn children are at a higher risk for any real reason; rather, it is that people change their childbearing history when something bad happens to their first child. (All the firstborns reading this passage can now breathe a sigh of relief.)

Conflict Theory

Functionalism also took a beating in the turbulent 1960s, when its place was usurped by a number of theories frequently subsumed under the label Marxist theory or ____ ____. Whereas functionalists painted a picture of social harmony as the well-oiled parts of a societal machine working together (with some friction and the occasional breakdown), conflict theory viewed society from exactly the opposite perspective. Drawing on the ideas of Marx, the theory—as expressed by Ralph Dahrendorf, Lewis Coser, and others—stated that conflict among competing interests is the basic, animating force of any society. Competition, not consensus, is the essential nature, and this conflict at all levels of analysis (from the individual to the family to the tribe to the nation-state), in turn, drives social change. And such social change occurs only through revolution and war, not evolution or baby steps. ____ theorists, inequality exists as a result of political struggles among different groups (classes) in a particular society. Although functionalists theorize that inequality is a necessary and beneficial aspect of society, ____ theorists argue that it is unfair and exists at the expense of less powerful groups. Thus, functionalism and ____ ___ take extreme (if opposing) positions on the fundamental nature of society. Today most sociologists see societies as demonstrating characteristics of both consensus and conflict and believe that social change does result from both revolution and evolution.

Breaching Experiments

Garfinkel and his followers became famous for their "___ ___." He would send his students into the social world to see what happened when they breached social norms. In one example, Garfinkel sent his students home for the weekend and told them to behave as if their parents' home were a rooming house where they paid rent. Imagine what would happen if you sat down at the kitchen table and demanded to know when dinner was typically served and what days of the week the bed linens were changed. Similarly, a New York City professor instructed his students to ask people on the subway for their seats without offering any reason. Some students simply could not take this action. Others did it, but lied and said that they were not feeling well when they asked for the seat.

self, looking glass self theory

Have you ever seen a little girl cover her eyes with her hands and declare, "You can't see me now!" She does not realize that just because she cannot see you doesn't mean you cannot see her. She is incapable of distinguishing between I and you and has not yet formed an idea of her individual ___. How does the concept of the ____ develop? Sociologists would argue that it emerges through a social process. Perhaps the first full theory of the social ___ was developed by Charles Horton Cooley, who coined the term the ___ ___ ____. According to Cooley in Human Nature and the Social Order (1902/1922), the ___ emerges from our ability to assume the point of view of others and thereby imagine how they see us. We then test this "theory" of how we are perceived by gauging others' reactions and revise our theory by fine-tuning our "___ ____."

Asch Experiment

He gathered subjects in a room under the pretense that they were participating in a vision test, showed them two images of lines, and asked which ones were longer than the others and which were the same length.The trick was that only one person in each room was really a research subject; the rest of the people had been told ahead of time to give the same incorrect answer. While a majority of subjects answered correctly even after they listened to others give the wrong answer, about one-third expressed serious discomfort—they clearly struggled with what they thought was right in light of what everyone else was saying. Subjects were the most confused when the entire group offered an incorrect answer. When the group members gave a range of responses, the research subjects had no trouble answering correctly. This experiment demonstrates the power of conformity within a group. More troubling instances of group conformity may be seen in cases of collective violence such as gang rape, which tends to occur among tightly knit groups like sports teams or fraternities

Post-modernism theory

If symbolic interactionism emphasizes the meanings negotiated through the interaction of individuals, ____ can perhaps be summarized succinctly as the notion that these shared meanings have eroded. A red light, for instance, may have multiple meanings to different groups or individuals in society. There is no longer one version of history that is correct. Everything is interpretable within this framework; even "facts" are up for debate. It's as if everyone has become a symbolic interactionist and decided that seemingly objective phenomena are social constructions, so that all organizing narratives break down. ____ may not feel compelled to act on these shared meanings as seemingly objective, because the meanings aren't, in fact, objective. The term itself derives from the idea that the grand narratives of history are over

post-natal health inequalities-interactions between race and gender

If whites live longer than blacks and women live longer than men, then how do the mortality rates of black men compare with those of white women? Although both race and sex affect mortality rates, their individual effects pale in comparison to their interactive (i.e., multiplicative) effect. The average life expectancy at birth for white women is 81.3 years, compared with only 72.1 for black men (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012c; see Figure 11.4). As noted earlier in the discussion of "John Henryism," black men may be at much higher risk for stress, which is linked to heart disease and stroke—the two leading killers of African Americans. Nonwhites are more likely to face racism, have low SES, and work more dangerous jobs, and the presence of several of these factors can be a deadly combination (Xu et al., 2009).

supermom

If, as sociologists argue, the burden of the second shift falls on working mothers in dual-income families, we might expect some nasty consequences. Indeed, Hochschild found that in response to the stalled revolution, some women tried to do it all. This is the supermom strategy. She cooks, she cleans, she climbs the career ladder, all while being a devoted parent and loving partner. Supermoms, of course, don't really exist, but there is a perpetual myth that some women can do it all, and if other women can't, it's a result of some personal flaw. page 472Women who buy into the supermom myth burn out quickly, and typically their marriages absorb the shock. In one study, Hochschild (1989) found that married women are more likely than men to think about divorce (30 percent of married women have considered divorce versus 22 percent of men). Women are also likely to give a more comprehensive list of reasons for wanting a divorce. In her interviews of dual-income families, Hochschild encountered bitter women, fed up with doing all the work, and puzzled men, confused over their wives' hostilities, or bitter themselves at begrudgingly having to help out more.

Hegemonic masculinity

In addition to a dominant image of femininity, some theorists argue that today there exists a hegemonic masculinity as well (Connell, 1987). Hegemony is the complete dominance of a group of people, a type of power so complete that it goes unnoticed by the people who are dominated. Hegemonic masculinity is so dominant that it easily escapes our attention and is regarded as the norm against which all others are judged. Erving Goffman (1963) describes this masculine ideal as a young man who is "married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and [with] a decent record in sports."

formal social sanctions

In most modern societies, these formal sanctions would be rules or laws prohibiting deviant criminal behavior such as murder, rape, and theft. These sanctions are formal, overt "expressions of official group sentiment"

exogamy

In much of the contemporary Western world, exogamy, or marriage to someone outside one's social group, is legally possible, if not always culturally acceptable. Consider the following unlikely pair: The African American son of a steel mill worker in Illinois and the only child and sole heir of a mega-millionaire, white, chart-topping rock-and-roll star in Tennessee. The 1994 union of Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson lasted less than two years, but it is an example of a couple who transgressed social, class, and racial groups. However, what is also telling is that by the time they met and fell for each other, they were already both celebrities and social equivalents, despite the gulf between their backgrounds. Total exogamy—when people from completely different social categories get together—is rare.

monogamy

In societies that practice monogamy a person can partner with only one other.

sick role

In the 1950s, sociologist Talcott Parsons combined role theory with medical sociology to create the concept of the sick role (1951). According to Parsons, the sick role comes with two rights and two obligations. The sick person has the right (1) not to perform normal social roles (the degree of exemption from rights and responsibilities depends on the severity of the illness) and (2) not to be held accountable for his or her condition. The two obligations are (1) to try to get well and (2) to seek competent help and comply with doctors' orders. Those who have successfully adopted the sick role cannot be looked down on or morally judged if they do not work. But they may be the source of opprobrium if they fail to take their medicine, continue to eat fried foods after a heart attack, or smoke after a diagnosis of throat cancer. page 415Categorizing the sick role in such a way, however, puts the emphasis on the individual rather than on the social context and thus brings about a paradox. For example, because we know that certain behaviors are linked to specific diseases—smoking to emphysema and lung cancer, a high-fat diet to heart disease, and high sugar intake to type 2 diabetes—individuals are often seen as being at least partially responsible for their diseases, rather than unaccountable as is presumed under right (2) above. Also, how many patients have the ability to assess what constitutes competent help and the resources to obtain it? If you have unlimited time and money, you might see a preeminent dermatologist about a mole on your arm. If, however, you don't have insurance or can't take the time off from work to see a doctor, you might ignore the mole. If it turns out to be skin cancer, do you lose your rights as a sick person because you didn't fulfill your obligations?

political economy of the media

In the United States, we (politicians especially) spend a lot of time talking about freedom, particularly freedom of the press. The freedom to say whatever you want is often upheld as one of the great markers of the "land of the free." The press, however, is hardly free. Most broadcasting companies are privately owned in the United States, are supported financially by advertising, and are therefore likely to reflect the biases of their owners and backers. In the United States today, six major companies—Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, News Corporation, CBS, and Comcast—own more than 90 percent of the media. Ownership alone does not equal censorship, but when the majority of the media lie in the hands of a few players, it is easier to ignore or purposely suppress messages that the owners of the media don't agree with or support. Apple's iTunes app store is the dominant player in the sales of apps for smartphones. Apple demands to review every app to ensure that the content is not something that they "believe is over the line," which they go on to explain is something developers will just know when they cross it. The Internet, to some extent, has balanced out communications monopolies. It's much easier to put up a website expressing alternative views than it is to broadcast a television or radio program suggesting the same. But not even the Internet is beyond the realm of ____ ____. Smaller sites, for example, cannot afford to have sponsored links on Google's search pages.

Postnatal Health Inequality-Race

In the United States, whites hold a significant advantage in health and longevity, having a life expectancy at birth of 79.0 years compared with African Americans' 75.3.This discrepancy is seen as both a major social problem and a sign of social inequality. David Satcher, the surgeon general during much of Bill Clinton's presidency, made the reduction of health disparities by race one of his primary goals. By 2010 and then 2020, he wanted to reduce gaps in outcomes such as hypertension, cancer, and overall mortality. But things don't even start out equal at birth. The infant mortality rate (per 1,000 births) by race is as follows: white and Hispanic, 5.3; black, 12.4; Asian, 4.4; and American Indian, 8.5.African American infants are more than twice as likely to die as their white counterparts, and compared with their middle-class white counterparts, middle-class black women still experience high rates of low-birth-weight babies (Kashef, 2003). Asians and Pacific Islanders have the lowest infant mortality rates, probably because, although a diverse group, they do better economically, on average. Indeed, with regard to health, racial inequalities historically have played out in a variety of ways. Heart disease and cancer are most prevalent among African Americans, cirrhosis of the liver and suicide most prevalent among Native Americans. Hispanics have higher rates of diabetes and HIV/AIDS than whites.there's a high correlation between SES and race, but blacks have worse health than whites regardless of income or education level. There is evidence to suggest that racism in day-to-day life contributes to differences in health in several ways. Blacks are disproportionately poor in the United States, and being poor can be very stressful. The irony is that middle- and upper-class African Americans also have high rates of hypertension, which is known to be linked to stress. One theory is that it is precisely the mismatch—the incongruity between what people assume their economic status to be, based on stereotypes, and what it actually is—that elevates stress levels. Also, middle- and upper-class blacks may face discrimination when they are perceived as "token" minorities in the workplace.

structural hole

In the figure, Jenny is a social entrepreneur bridging a structural hole because the people on the left side of the network diagram (Emily and Jason) have no direct ties with the people on the right (Michael, Doug and Jeff). Their ties are only indirect, through Jenny. Assuming that the two sides have resources (romantic or otherwise) that would complement each other's, Jenny is in a position to mediate by acting as a go-between for the groups. When a third party connects two groups or individuals who would be better off in contact with each other, that third party is an "entrepreneur," and he or she can profit from the gap. (Sound like the tertius gaudens in the triad? It should.)

racialization

In the wake of terrorist anxiety, and several years into the war on terror, Muslims in America have undergone what scholars call racialization, the formation of a new racial identity by drawing ideological boundaries of difference around a formerly unnoticed group of people. These days, any brown-skinned man with a beard or woman with a headscarf is subject to threats, violence, and harassment. And men with turbans bear some of the worst discrimination, although nearly all men who wear turbans in the United States are Sikh or Punjabi, members of one of the world's largest religious groups, which originated in India.

Accomplishment of natural growth- annette lareau

Indeed, sociologists have long recognized that parents' social class matters, but how exactly this privilege is transmitted to children (beyond strictly monetary benefits) has been less clear. To better understand this process, ethnographer Annette Lareau spent time in both black and white households with children approximately ten years of age. She found that middle-class parents, both black and white, are more likely to engage in what she calls "concerted cultivation." They structure their children's leisure time with formal activities (such as soccer leagues and piano lessons) and reason with them over decisions in an effort to foster their kids' talents.Working-class and poor parents, in contrast, focus on the "accomplishment of natural growth." They give their children the room and resources to develop but leave it up to the kids to decide how they want to structure their free time. A greater division between the social life of children and that of the adults exists in such households (Lareau, 2002). Whereas middle-class parents send their kids off to soccer leagues, music lessons, and a myriad of other after-school activities, kids in poor families spend a disproportionate page 122 amount of time "hanging out," as has been observed by Jason DeParle in American Dream (2004), his chronicle of three families on public assistance struggling through the era of welfare reform in Milwaukee. Likewise, a 2006 study by Annette Lareau, Eliot Weingarter, and this author shows the same statistical results: Outside of school, disadvantaged children spend 40 percent more time in unstructured activities than their middle-class counterparts.Working-class and poor parents, in contrast, focus on the "accomplishment of natural growth." They give their children the room and resources to develop but leave it up to the kids to decide how they want to structure their free time. A greater division between the social life of children and that of the adults exists in such households (Lareau, 2002). Whereas middle-class parents send their kids off to soccer leagues, music lessons, and a myriad of other after-school activities, kids in poor families spend a disproportionate page 122 amount of time "hanging out," as has been observed by Jason DeParle in American Dream (2004), his chronicle of three families on public assistance struggling through the era of welfare reform in Milwaukee. Likewise, a 2006 study by Annette Lareau, Eliot Weingarter, and this author shows the same statistical results: Outside of school, disadvantaged children spend 40 percent more time in unstructured activities than their middle-class counterparts.Working-class and poor parents, in contrast, focus on the "accomplishment of natural growth." They give their children the room and resources to develop but leave it up to the kids to decide how they want to structure their free time. A greater division between the social life of children and that of the adults exists in such households (Lareau, 2002). Whereas middle-class parents send their kids off to soccer leagues, music lessons, and a myriad of other after-school activities, kids in poor families spend a disproportionate page 122 amount of time "hanging out," as has been observed by Jason DeParle in American Dream (2004), his chronicle of three families on public assistance struggling through the era of welfare reform in Milwaukee. Likewise, a 2006 study by Annette Lareau, Eliot Weingarter, and this author shows the same statistical results: Outside of school, disadvantaged children spend 40 percent more time in unstructured activities than their middle-class counterparts.Middle-class kids, on the other hand, spend their days learning how to interact with adult authority figures, how to talk to strangers, and how to follow rules and manage schedules. From a very young age, they are taught to use logic and reason to support their choices by mirroring their parents' explanations of why they can or cannot get what they want. Low-income parents, Lareau found, were more likely to answer their children with "Because I said so," instilling respect for authority but missing an opportunity to help their children develop logical reasoning skills commonly used in adult interactions. Middle-class kids discover the confidence that comes with achievements such as learning to play the piano or mastering a foreign language. Whether they actually have fun is unknown, but they are certainly socialized into the same kind of lifestyles that their parents hope them to have as adult professionals. In fact, it should be no surprise that the rise of the "overscheduled" child comes during a period when, for the first time in history, higher-income Americans work more hours than lower-income Americans. If we flip the equation and look at leisure time, it seems that getting lots of education might limit your fun time. Highly educated women spend the fewest hours at leisure (30.3 hours every week), and men with a high-school education or less spend the most leisure time (39.1 hours), though half of the leisure gap is due to the difficulty less-educated men and women have finding full-time jobs (Attanasio et al., 2013). Professional parents familiarize their children with the kind of lives they expect them to lead as adults.her mother depended on the [high] school to help her daughter go to college. So the mother didn't see the applications, and the mother had a car, but she didn't go on college tours. It was up to her daughter and the school. And that is a reasonable decision. Her daughter was rejected everywhere, and she ended up going to community college for a semester and dropping out. And [her experience follows] a very typical pattern for working-class families. Though Lareau can't definitively discern cause and effect here—What if Tara's SAT scores had been higher? Or if she had lucked out with a fabulous guidance counselor?—things might have turned out differently for Tara, despite the "natural growth" strategy her mother followed. But by showing how social stratification actually worked on the ground, Lareau tells a pretty convincing—if depressing—story.

I

Infants only know the _—that is, one's sense of agency, action, or power.

glass escalator

Just as the odds are stacked against female tokens, they tilt in favor of men in female-dominated jobs. In Still a Man's World (1995), Christine Williams found that male nurses, elementary school teachers, librarians, and social workers inadvertently maintain masculine power and privilege. Specifically, when token men enter feminized jobs, they enjoy a quicker rise to leadership positions on the aptly named glass escalator. These escalators also operate in law firms, where male paralegals, themselves tokens in the overwhelmingly female semi-profession, reap benefits from their heightened visibility (Pierce, 1995). Male paralegals are said to enjoy preferential treatment over their female peers, such as promotions and even the simple (but substantial) benefit of being invited to happy hour with the litigators. Or at least that is how it used to be. Williams' new research suggests that women are holding a more equitable share of the top spots in nursing, elementary schools, and libraries, but that a larger problem is emerging that hits both men and women: wages in these careers have not kept pace with the cost of living

subculture

Like culture, ___ as a concept can be a moving target: It's hard to lock into one specific definition of the term. Historically, _____ have been defined as groups united by sets of concepts, values, symbols, and shared meaning specific to the members of that group. Accordingly, they frequently are seen as vulgar or deviant and are often marginalized. Part of the original impetus behind ____ studies was to gain a deeper understanding of individuals and groups who traditionally have been dismissed as weirdos at best and deviants at worst. For example, many music genres have affiliated subcultures: hip-hop, hardcore, punk, Christian rock. High-school cliques may verge on subcultures—the jocks, the band kids, the geeks—although these groups don't really go against the dominant society, because athleticism, musical talent, and intelligence are fairly conventional values.

informal deviance

Minor violations are acts of ___ ___, such as picking your nose. Even if no one will punish you, you sense it is somehow wrong.

agents of socialization-peers

Once we reach school age, peers become an important part of our lives and function as agents of socialization. Adolescents, in particular, spend a great deal of their free time in the company of peers. Peers can reinforce messages taught in the home (even the most liberal of friends will probably expect you to wear clothing when you hang out with them after school) or contradict them. Either way, conformity is generally expected; hence, the term peer pressure. Walk into any high-school cafeteria and you'll observe the power of conformity among peer groups.A 2002 study of young adolescents (by Wood et al.) found, on the one hand, that friends were a major source of information on dating and sex. This makes sense. No matter how cool your parents are (or try to be), when you're 15, you probably don't want to talk to them about your love life. On the other hand, the same study found that even though adolescents obtained much of their information on sex from friends, they didn't necessarily believe it. In fact, they were less likely to believe what they learned from friends and the media and more likely to name parents and sex educators as sources of reliable information. It seems as if most adolescents have already learned that they shouldn't believe everything they hear.

agents of socialization-media

Ongoing is a debate about the impact the media have on us. Do violent video games desensitize children to violence and socialize them to become criminals? The jury is still out on that question, but the media can indeed serve as socializing agents. Some television shows are designed with that explicit purpose. Sesame Street was created with the intent of providing educational programming for low-income children who didn't have the same opportunities for day care and preschool as their wealthier peers. Guess what—this approach works!

Poverty

Poverty can be defined as a condition of deprivation due to economic circumstances; this deprivation may be absolute or relative but is generally thought to be severe enough that the individual in this condition cannot live with dignity in his or her society.

estate system

Primarily found in feudal Europe from the medieval era through the eighteenth century, and in the American South before the Civil War, social stratification in estate systems has a political basis. That is, laws are written in a language in which rights and duties separate individuals and distribute power unequally. For example, in the antebellum American South, many states required land ownership for voting privileges. Europe also historically restricted voting rights to landowners. Before reforms, political participation depended on the social group (the estate) to which you belonged. There was limited mobility among the three general estates—the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners (the commoners were typically further divided into peasants and city dwellers)—and each group enjoyed certain rights, privileges, and duties. In certain eras, it was possible for a rich commoner to buy a title and become a member of the nobility. And often, one son or daughter of a noble family would join the clergy and become part of that estate. Therefore, there was some mobility, but social reproduction—you are what your parents were and what your children will be—generally prevailed. (We'll examine the concept of social mobility more closely below.)

Social Construction of Race

Race and Racial Identity Are Social Constructs.Race is not biological. It is a social construct. Race is not biological. It is a social construct. There is no gene or cluster of genes common to all blacks or all whites. Were race "real" in the genetic sense, racial classifications for individuals would remain constant across boundaries.

racism

Racism is the belief that members of separate races possess different and unequal traits coupled with the power to restrict freedoms based on those differences. Racist thinking is characterized by three key beliefs: that humans are divided into distinct bloodlines and/or physical types; that these bloodlines or physical traits are linked to distinct cultures, behaviors, personalities, and intellectual abilities; and that certain groups are superior to others.

causality

Remember, it is very difficult, especially in social science, to assert ____—that change in one factor causes a change in another. It's much easier to say two things are correlated, which just means that we observe change in both. For example, as race varies (across individuals), so does average life expectancy. Likewise, as nutrition changes across or within populations, so does average height, but can we say that better nutrition causes some populations to be taller? Maybe, but maybe not. To establish causality, three factors are needed: correlation, time order, and ruling out alternative explanations.

ethnocentrism

Scientific racism sought to make sense of people who were different from white Europeans—who constituted the norm, according to the French scientist Comte de Buffon (1707-1788). This way of thinking, called ethnocentrism, the judgment of other groups by one's own standards and values, has plagued scientific studies of "otherness." In Buffon's classification schemes, anyone different from Europeans was a deviation from the norm. His pseudoscientific research, like all racial thinking of the time, justified imperial exploits by automatically classifying nonwhites as abnormal, improper, and inferior.

postnatal health inequalities-socioeconomic status

So how do we explain the correlation between SES and health? There are three main theories that attempt to explain this association. The first theory, which we might call selection theory, says that the relationship between lower income and higher morbidity is spurious (that is, false or not really causal) because other factors such as genetics and biology affect both health and SES. A second theory, called the drift explanation, asserts that reverse causality exists—that health causes social position (as in the education example given in the previous paragraph). There is some logic behind this argument: If you don't have good health, you may not be able to work, so higher morbidity would result in lower SES. Finally, one must consider the social determinants theory that social status position determines health (see Chapter 7). Being of a lower income level or SES causes higher morbidity and lower general health. What are the factors that could make this happen? Again, there are three general schools of thought for answering this question: 1. The psychosocial interpretation focuses on individuals' social class status relative to that of those around them. Feelings of inadequacy, low worth, and stigma cause people stress and wear down their bodies. If you have taken out tens of thousands of dollars in loans and work two jobs to get through college while your roommate is independently wealthy, the persistent presence of that inequality could affect your health directly by making you feel stressed, depressed, or angry, or indirectly by causing poor health choices such as smoking, using drugs, failing to exercise, and eating badly. 2. The second theory, the materialist interpretation, asserts that the differential access to a healthy life—including all monetary, psychological, and environmental risk factors—is a result of socioeconomic factors. Buying organic may be healthy, for example, but it is also expensive. So is joining a health club or obtaining top-notch medical care. Poor neighborhoods, meanwhile, are more likely to have higher concentrations of toxic chemicals. 3. The final theory seeking to explain how lower SES causes lower mortality is called the fundamental causes interpretation. This theory focuses on examining how social factors shape illness and health in order to understand the pervasive link between SES and health. The crux of the argument is this: "Because resources are differentially distributed across the socioeconomic hierarchy, people of higher social position have more resources at their disposal than those below them and are, therefore, better able to maintain good health and avoid disability and death" (Carpiano et al., 2006). Essentially, the fundamental causes hypothesis states that multiple and ever-changing mechanisms exist by which SES (and other dimensions of power) affect health. What the causes have in common, however, is the greater ability of high-status individuals to make use of new information and health resources as they become available. For example, Figure 11.3 shows that the gradient for lung cancer, which is strongly impacted by health behaviors, is much steeper than that for brain cancer, which is generally viewed as less predictable or less preventable.

Class/SES and schooling

Social class or socioeconomic status (SES), an individual's position in a stratified social order, is composed of any combination of parental educational attainment, parental occupational status (e.g., janitor versus doctor), family income, and family wealth. Students whose parents have higher levels of any of these four measures of class generally enjoy better educational opportunities. Higher-class students obtain more years of schooling (Conley, 2001), get better grades (Arum, 2003), are more likely to complete high school before age 19 (Conley, 1999), score higher on cognitive tests (Chase-Lansdale et al., 1997), and, as mentioned earlier, are more likely to be placed in higher tracks (Gamoran & Mare, 1989; Lucas, 1999).If your parents have a higher income, they may be able to afford extra tutoring if you're lagging behind. They could pay for SAT prep courses (Kaplan, one of the largest test-prep services, charges about $1,000 per comprehensive course) and hand scoring ($50 for the essay section and $50 for the multiple-choice section) to ensure that the College Board doesn't screw up again. They might even enlist the services of a college consultant, who may charge up to $40,000, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, to get you into the best college (Berfield & Tergeson, 2007). Likewise, if your parents are wealthy, they can liquidate or borrow against stocks and bonds or mortgage their house to pay for your college education, buy another house in a better school district, or send you to a private school. The same goes for parental education. More educated parents may feel comfortable helping their children with homework through high school, whereas less educated parents may have difficulty with the assignments as they become more difficult. As you might imagine, these factors overlap and are cumulative; for example, parents with more income, wealth, and education can afford tutors and the best schools and provide more extensive help with homework.

the whitehall study

The Whitehall Study has shown that who you are, where you live, how much you earn, and what you do for a living all play a major role in determining your health. Along with similar research, it has shown how social forces affect our bodies, our morbidity, and our general risk of mortality. Morbidity means illness in a general sense—the absence of complete health. It could mean something like having chicken pox (an acute condition) or not being able to walk very well because you have lower back pain (a chronic condition). Mortality means death, so when we refer to mortality rates in this chapter, we're talking about the likelihood of an individual or groups of individuals dying. The Whitehall scholars speculated that the social stress resulting from lower rank in the hierarchy of social class led directly to poorer outcomes for those at the bottom—through the release of stress hormones, for example—as well as indirectly, through different behavioral responses (such as overeating and smoking as a result of their social position). These assertions, however, remain controversial in the field, because some researchers argue that the Whitehall Study does not adequately address the possibility that underlying personality differences and skill sets led to both occupational and health differences, or that health directly determined the rank to which the bureaucrats rose by virtue of its effect on productivity.

Institutional Racism

The case of race and property values is an example of institutional racism—institutions and social dynamics that may seem race-neutral but actually end up disadvantaging minority groups. Another example is provided by sentencing laws for dealing or consuming cocaine. At the height of a period of panic over crack cocaine infiltrating neighborhoods, the United State passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. This law declared that for sentencing purposes, 1 gram of crack cocaine was equivalent to 100 grams of powdered cocaine. The result was a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for a first-time possession charge for a typical crack user. Because crack was cheaper and more prevalent in low-income, predominantly black communities, the result was a huge racial disparity in drug sentences by race.Yet another example of institutional racism can be found in the case of hiring patterns by employers. With limited information about job applicants, employers may be rational to use social networks to recruit employees since informal ties (i.e., references) can provide more reliable information about individuals than can be gleaned from paper job applications. And because whites tend to hold more managerial positions, and social networks tend to be segregated by race, this need for additional information on the part of employers also perpetuates racial disparities with no racially explicit motivation.

elite-mass dichotomy system

The final stratification system is the elite—mass dichotomy system, with a governing elite, a few leaders who broadly hold the power in society. Vilfredo Pareto, in The Mind and Society (1935/1983), took a positive view of elite—mass dichotomies, whereas C. Wright Mills saw much to dislike in such systems. For Pareto, when a select few elite leaders hold power—as long as the elites are the most able individuals and know what they are doing—the masses are all the better for it. This imbalance, where a small number of people (say 20 percent) cause a disproportionately large effect (more like 80 percent), has come to be known as the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule. The basis for Pareto's argument is that individuals are unequal physically, intellectually, and morally. He suggests that those who are the most capable in particular groups and societies should lead.Mills takes a much more negative view of the elite—mass dichotomy, arguing that it is neither natural nor beneficial for society. In Mills's view, the elite do not govern the way Pareto claims they do. Mills argues in The Power Elite (1956/2000) that there are three major institutional forces in modern American society where the power of decision making has become centralized: economic institutions (with a few hundred giant corporations holding the keys to economic decisions), the political order (the increasing concentration of power in the federal government and away from the states and localities, leading to a centralized executive establishment that affects every cranny of society), and the military order (the largest and most expensive feature of government). According to Mils, "families and churches and schools adapt to modern life; governments and armies and corporations shape it; and, as they do so, they turn these lesser institutions into means for their ends." The elite for Mils are simply those who have most of what there is to possess: money, power, and prestige. But they would not have the most were it not for their positions within society's great institutions. Whereas Pareto views elite status as the reward for the talent that helped certain individuals rise through the ranks of society, Mills sees the unequal power and rewards as determining the positions. And whereas Pareto sees a benefit in having power centralized in a large, otherwise ungovernable society, Mills warns of the dangers. For Mills, such a system hurts democracy by consolidating the power to make major decisions into the hands (and interests) of the few.

Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment

The force of labels and roles can affect us very quickly. The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971, provides insight into the power of such social labels and how they might explain the incredibly inhumane acts of torture, most involving violence and humiliation, committed at Abu Ghraib, the American-run prison in Iraq. Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford, rounded up some college undergraduate men to participate in an experiment about "the psychology of prison life." Half the undergraduates were assigned the role of prisoner, and half were assigned the role of prison guard. These roles were randomly assigned, so there was nothing about the inherent personalities of either group that predisposed them to prefer one role over the other. To simulate the arrest and incarceration process, the soon-to-be prisoners were taken from their homes, handcuffed, and searched by actual city police. Then all the prisoners were taken to "prison"—the basement of the Stanford psychology department set up with cells and a special solitary confinement closet. The guards awaited their prisoners in makeshift uniforms and dark sunglasses to render their eyes invisible to inmates. Upon arrival at the prison, all the criminals were stripped, searched, and issued inmate uniforms, which were like short hospital gowns. The first day passed without incident, as prisoners and guards settled into their new roles. But on the morning of the second day, prisoners revolted, barricading themselves in their mock cells and sparking a violent confrontation between the fictitious guards and prisoners that would ensue for the next four days. From physical abuse, such as hour-long counts of push-ups, to psychological violence, such as degradation and humiliation, the guards' behavior verged on sadism, although just days before these same young men were normal Stanford undergrads. The prisoners quickly began "withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways," while some of the guards seemed to relish their abuse. The original plan was for the experiment to last 14 days, but after only 6 days it spiraled out of control and had to be aborted.The lesson, claims Zimbardo, is that good people can do terrible things, depending on their social surroundings and expectations. When thrown into a social context of unchecked authority, anonymity, and high stress, average people can become exceptional monsters. It's a phenomenon Zimbardo calls the "Lucifer effect," and it offers insights into how the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became possible (Zimbardo, 2007). In 2005, when the media made public the horrifying images of Iraqi prisoners being degraded and abused—some naked and on their knees inches from barking dogs; some wearing hoods and restrained in painful, grotesque positions; some forced to lie atop a pile of other naked prisoners—with grinning American soldiers looking on, many commentators (and military officials) sought to explain the abuses as a case of "bad apples" among otherwise good soldiers. Bad apples don't just arise out of nowhere, however, nor are people inherently malicious or brutal by nature. When given limitless power under the high stakes of uncertainty, as happened to the soldiers at Abu Ghraib, abuse becomes the norm, and people who are otherwise good can do evil things.

labeling theory

The labeling theory of social deviance offers insight into how people become deviants. According to this theory, individuals subconsciously notice how others see or label them, and their reactions to those labels over time form the basis of their self-identity. It is only through the social process of labeling that we create deviance by assigning shared meanings to acts. We all know that stealing, trespassing, and vandalizing are wrong, abnormal, and criminal behavior, but these acts are considered deviant only because of our shared meanings about the sanctity of private property and our rules about respecting that property. Although the fire caused by my unfortunate stint in pyrotechnics was labeled an accident, it might have been termed a crime just as easily. There was and is nothing inherently deviant about setting an apartment on fire, accidentally or otherwise. In 1963, Howard S. Becker, a proponent of labeling theory, made precisely this point, arguing that individuals don't commit crimes. Rather, social groups create deviance, first by setting the rules for what's right and wrong, and second by labeling wrongdoers as outsiders. Offenders are not born; they are made. They are a consequence of how other people apply rules and sanctions to them.Labeling theorists call the first act of rule breaking (which can include experiences or actions such as hearing voices, breaking windows, or dyeing one's hair neon orange) primary deviance. After you are labeled a deviant (a criminal, a drug addict, a shoplifter, even a prostitute), you might begin behaving differently as a result of the way people think about and act toward you. Others' expectations about how you will act affect how you do act. Secondary deviance refers to deviant acts that occur after primary deviance and as a result of your new deviant label.

Hypothesis testing

The process of assigning a precise method for measuring a term being examined for use in a particular study is called operationalization. I need to tell stories—that is, causal stories about why I would expect the hypotheses to be true.Establishing the groundwork for a reasonably "fair fight" between main and alternative hypotheses is important so we do not spend time discovering trivialities that are already well known. Validity, reliability, and generalizability are simple but important concepts. To say a measure has validity means that it measures what you intend it to.Reliability refers to how likely you are to obtain the same result using the same measure the next time. Generalizability is the extent to which we can claim that our findings inform us about a group larger than the one we studied. When we do qualitative fieldwork (interviews, ethnography, or participant observation) we talk about reflexivity, which means analyzing and critically considering the white coat effects you may be inspiring with your research process. As researchers, we're supposed to remain objective, but even if you want to (and some people may not want to remain impartial in certain situations), it's not always possible.

proletariat

The working class. Sells its labor to the bourgeoisie in order to receive wages and thereby survive.

relative poverty

Theorists who believe that all poverty is relational have argued for the implementation of measures identifying relative poverty, the determination of poverty based on a percentage of the median income in a given location. For instance, a relative measure might consider anyone with less than one-half the median income poor (Fuchs, 1967; Rainwater, 1974). This sort of measure has become standard in the literature on international comparisons of the poverty rate, because it provides an obvious yardstick across nations. However, it really measures income inequality at the bottom half of the distribution.

how meritocratic is the sat

Third, researchers question how meritocratic the SAT actually is. Do the scores reflect the abilities that should matter? Not necessarily SAT scores are consistently correlated with race, ethnicity, and class. African Americans and Hispanics systematically score lower than white students, and higher-class students (who, among other things, can pay for SAT preparatory classes, which do increase scores) systematically score higher than lower-class students. Unless we're willing to believe that lower-class, black, and Hispanic students are inherently less intelligent, the SAT is biased toward certain groups of students. In fact, evidence exists that negative stereotypes of minority groups play an important role in explaining at least some of the differences in test scores—this is called stereotype threat, a particular form of test anxiety. At this point, I am compelled to point out the extreme irony of this situation. The SAT was originally created to give the child who attends local public schools the chance to show that he or she is just as "able" as the kid who went to an elite, private high school. Back in 1933, Harvard University sought to cast a wider net than the handful of elite private schools that had routinely provided most of its undergraduate population. The solution was to come up with a more "objective" standard, set by an institution external to the university itself. Thus, it was in this spirit of meritocracy that the SAT was born.

me

Through social interaction infants learn the ___—that is, the self as a distinct object to be perceived by others (and by the I).

the social construction of the black ghetto

Various structural changes—industrialization, urbanization, the influx of southern blacks to the North who competed with huge waves of European immigrants—led to increased hostility and violence toward blacks, who found themselves shut out of both white jobs and white neighborhoods. The color line, previously more flexible and fuzzy, hardened into a rigid boundary between black and white. The black ghetto was manufactured by whites through a set of deliberate, conscious practices. Boundaries separating black neighborhoods were policed by whites, first with the threat of violence and periphery bombings in the 1920s and then with "neighborhood associations" that institutionalized housing discrimination. Property owners signed secret agreements promising to not allow blacks into their domain. When a black family did move to a neighboring block, whites often adopted the strategy of flight instead of fight, and this process of racial turnover yielded the same result: black isolation. Even today, when a black family moves into a white neighborhood, the property value declines slightly, in subtle anticipation of the process of white flight, which leaves behind a run-down, undesirable black neighborhood—a veritable vicious circle. On the other hand, the formerly black neighborhood of Harlem in New York City is now no longer majority black, a consequence of the recent in-migration of whites and Hispanics (Roberts, 2010). page 354Also helping to create the black ghetto have been specific government policies, such as the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), that in the early 1930s granted loans to home owners who were in financial trouble. The HOLC also instituted the practice of "redlining," which declared inner-city, black neighborhoods too much of a liability and ineligible for aid. Following the HOLC's lead, the U.S. Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration—both of which were designed to make home ownership a reality for struggling Americans—funneled funds away from black areas and predominantly into white suburbs. Finally, by the 1950s, urban slums were being razed in the name of "urban renewal," which essentially became a program of removal, as African Americans were relocated to concentrated public housing projects (Massey & Denton, 1993). These deliberately discriminatory policies are perpetuated today by de facto segregation in the form of continued suburban white flight and the splintering of school districts along racial lines. Some scholars argue that a new form of segregation has emerged in America: The criminal justice system. During the 1960s, blacks were slightly overrepresented in the nation's prisons, but in absolute numbers there were many more white felons, because whites made up a larger percentage of the total U.S. population. Today the racial distribution in jails and prisons is the reverse. Blacks and Latinos now make up the majority of incarcerated people. One in four black men in their twenties is in prison or jail, on probation, or on parole at any given moment (Pettit & Western, 2004). Is imprisonment just another means of confining the black population away from whites? Several scholars make this case, based on changes in drug laws that seem to affect minorities disproportionately.

symbolic interactionism

We might call the process by which things—ideas, concepts, values—are socially constructed ____ ____, which suggests that we interact with others using words and behaviors that have symbolic meanings. This theory has three basic tenets: 1. Human beings act toward ideas, concepts, and values on the basis of the meaning that those things have for them. 2. These meanings are the products of social interaction in human society 3. These meanings are modified and filtered through an interpretive process that each individual uses in dealing with outward signs. ____ ____ can be very useful in understanding cultural differences in styles of social interaction. A classic example of this would be the distance two people stand from one another when conversing. Just because these boundaries are symbolic does not mean that they aren't real. In an interaction between a tourist and a local, standing too close or too far away may make one of the parties feel uncomfortable, but in an international business meeting or in peace talks between nations, ___ ____ take on a greater level of importance. Similarly, in our culture, we generally believe that looking someone in the eye while talking to them indicates respect and sincerity. In some other cultures, however, it is considered extremely rude to look someone directly in the eye. Comprehending the three basic tenets of ____ ___ listed above is key to seeing how the process of social construction is both ongoing and embedded in our everyday interactions. ____ ____ as a theory is a useful tool for understanding the meanings of symbols and signs and the way shared meanings—or a lack thereof—facilitate or impede routine interactions.

dramaturgical theory

We might say that the ____ ___ of society has its roots in William Shakespeare, but we generally credit Goffman with expounding this theory in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). He argued that life is essentially a play—a play with a moral, of sorts. And this moral is what Goffman and social psychologists call "impression management." That is, all of us actors on the metaphorical social stage are struggling to make a good impression on our audience (who also happen to be actors). What's more, the goal is not just to make the best impression on others; we often actively work to ensure that others will believe they are making a good impression as well. This helps keep society and social relations rolling along smoothly (without the need for too many retakes).Because we are all actors with roles, according to Goffman's ____ ____, we also need scripts, costumes, and sets. Think again about your first day in this college classroom. You knew your role was student, and presumably the professor understood his or her role as well. The professor handed out the syllabus (a prop), talked about the general outline of the class for the semester (a script), and maybe gave a short lecture (a performance).Because we are all actors with roles, according to Goffman's ___ ___, we also need scripts, costumes, and sets. Think again about your first day in this college classroom. You knew your role was student, and presumably the professor understood his or her role as well. The professor handed out the syllabus (a prop), talked about the general outline of the class for the semester (a script), and maybe gave a short lecture (a performance).

Suicide and social integration

What are the social mechanics that cause suicide rates to vary? Durkheim proposed that by plotting social integration on the y-axis and social regulation on the x-axis of a Cartesian coordinate system, we can construct a theory about how social forces influence suicide rates (Figure 6.1). Social integration refers to the degree to which you are integrated into your social group or community. A tightly knit community in which members interact with each other in a number of different capacities—say the coach of your child's Little League team is also your dentist and you are the dentist's mechanic—is more socially integrated than one in which people do not interact at all or interact in only one role. Social regulation refers to how many rules guide your daily life and what you can reasonably expect from the world on a day-to-day basis. To be at low risk for suicide (and other deviant behavior), you need to be somewhere in the middle: integrated into your community with a reasonable (not oppressive) set of guidelines to structure your life. If you go too far in either direction along either axis, you have either too much or too little of some important facet of "normal" life.Let's say you drop down the y-axis significantly in the direction of egoism. You are not very well integrated into your group. What happens as a result? Durkheim argues that, because others give your life meaning, you would feel hopeless. You wouldn't be part of some larger long-term project, would feel insignificant, and would be at risk of committing egoistic suicide. We all need to feel as if we have made a difference in other people's lives or produced something for their good that will endure after we have died. Durkheim demonstrated the prevalence of this phenomenon by using statistics about suicide rates across different religious groups.Too little social integration increases the risk of suicide, but too much social integration can lead to the same result. A person who strays too far up the y-axis might commit altruistic suicide, because a group dominates the life of that individual to such a degree that he or she feels meaningless aside from this social recognition. Think about Japanese ritual suicide, sometimes called seppuku (sometimes colloquially known as hara-kiri). In this scenario, samurai warriors who had failed their group in battle would disembowel themselves with a sword rather than continue to live as a disgrace in the community. Durkheim uses the example of Hindu widows in some castes and regions of India, who were expected to throw themselves on their husbands' funeral pyre to prove their devotion. This practice, called suttee or sati, symbolized that a woman properly recognized that her life was meaningless outside her social role as a wife. Official efforts to ban suttee commenced as early as the sixteenth century, and it is now illegal and extremely rare in India. At the heart of learned helplessness is the sense that we are unable to stave off the sources of our pain, that we have no control of our own well-being. Durkheim studied a similar condition, which he termed anomie. Literally meaning "without norms," anomie is a sense of aimlessness or despair that arises when we can no longer reasonably expect life to be more or less meaningful. Our sense of connection between our actions and values is eroded, because too little social regulation exists. Durkheim labeled suicide that resulted from insufficient social regulation anomic suicide. For example, after the stock market crashed in 1929, many businessmen jumped out of skyscraper windows to their deaths. These stockbrokers and investors may have felt that they did everything right and still ended up destitute. For them, the connection between what they thought was the right thing to do—work hard on Wall Street—and just rewards was severed. They had no idea how to cope with the changes.The final coordinate is fatalistic suicide, which occurs when a person experiences too much social regulation. Instead of floundering in a state of anomie with no guiding rules, you find yourself doing the same thing day after day, with no variation and no surprises. In 10 years, what will you be doing? The same thing. In 20 years? The same thing. You have nothing to look forward to because you reasonably expect that nothing better than this will ever happen for you. This type of suicide usually occurs among slaves and prisoners. You might imagine that slaves and prisoners would commit suicide because of their physical hardships, but Durkheim's research suggested that it is more accurate to understand their suicidal deaths as resulting from the suffocating tyranny of monotony.

endogamy

When a culture maintains either legal or normative sanctions against people marrying outside their race, class, or caste, we call it a rule of endogamy, meaning marriage from within. To some extent, we all practice endogamy—that is, on some level people tend to hook up with similar people, because it makes for easier relations if you and your partner share a social group. In other parts of the world, such as India, historically people haven't had much of a choice: The caste system of India is based on a rigid adherence to endogamy

agents of socialization-school

When children enter school, the primary locus of socialization shifts to include reference groups such as peers and teachers. In addition to helping you learn the three Rs, one of the teacher's main goals is to properly socialize you—teaching you to share, take turns, resolve conflict with words, be quiet when necessary, and speak when appropriate. Schools, however, teach us more than how to show up prepared for class, and all schools are not created equal.

glass ceiling

When women do enter more prestigious corporate worlds, they often encounter gendered barriers to reaching the very top: the so-called glass ceiling, which effectively is an invisible limit on women's climb up the occupational ladder. Sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter argues in her classic study Men and Women of the Corporation (1977) that the dearth of women in top corporate positions results from a cultural conflation of authority with masculinity. In Indesco, the fictitious name of the corporation Kanter studied, she found another case of deceptive distinctions at work: Most people believe that men and women come to occupy the kinds of jobs for which they are naturally best suited. Secretaries are predominantly women (98.6 percent), according to this belief, because women seem to act the feminine part better than they play the masculine managerial role. To the contrary, Kanter showed, job segregation often works the other way around: The job makes the person; the person doesn't make the job. Employee behavior tends to be determined by job requirements and the constraints of the organizational structure of the company. At Indesco, secretarial positions derived status from that of the boss. The job was also based on principled arbitrariness, meaning that there were no limits to the boss's discretion as to what his secretary should do (type, fax, pick up his dry cleaning, look after his dog when he's away). Furthermore, secretarial work was characterized by fealty, the demand of personal loyalty and devotion of secretary to boss. Under these conditions, secretaries adopted certain behaviors to get through a day's work, including timidity and self-effacement, addiction to praise, and displays of emotion—all qualities that Indesco bosses tended to think of as just the way women are.What happens when a woman breaks into a top managerial position? She becomes a numerical minority, what Kanter calls a token, a stand-in for all women. Because tokens have heightened visibility, they experience greater performance pressures. Male peers tend to rely on gender stereotypes when interpreting a token's behavior, seeing female managers as "seductresses, mothers, pets," or tough "iron maidens." When a token female manager botches the job, it just goes to show that women can't handle the corporate world and should be kept out of it.

post natal health inequalities-gender

Who lives longer, women or men? Women do, at least in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2011 male life expectancy at birth was 76.3 years, but for women it was 81.1 years. Even the projected 2050 life expectancy statistics show women outliving men by four years (U.S. Census, 2012i; Figure 11.4). Many differences in mortality are linked to specific illnesses, such as heart disease and cancer, both of which are more likely to afflict men than women. In fact, heart disease is the number-one killer of both American men and women. As more women enter higher-level and consequently higher-stress jobs, their rates of hypertension, heart disease, and stroke are increasing. (See Chapter 14 for more about the impact of this change on the health of working mothers.) However, other reasons for higher mortality rates among men include the differences in health care-seeking behavior between men and women: Women are more likely to see the doctor for a persistent cough or an unexplained skin rash.

leisure gap

Within a two-career household, parents are likely to spend their at-home time on separate—and unequal—tasks. One study from 1965 to 1966 found that working women averaged 3 hours each day on housework, whereas men put in a meager 17 minutes. When it comes to leisure activities, however, men surpass their working wives. Working fathers watch an hour more of television per day than working mothers. They also sleep a half hour longer (Hochschild, 2003). The resulting 'leisure gap" can brew hostilities between exasperated, exhausted wives and their unresponsive husbands. Using national studies on time use from the 1960s and 1970s, Hochschild counted the hours that women and men put in on the job in addition to their time spent on housework and child care. She determined that women worked roughly 15 hours longer each week than men (Hochschild, 2003). After 52 weeks, this added up to 780 hours more that women work than men—that's an extra month! This gap appears to be closing, however, as men do more and women do less housework (Figure 12.3). Valerie A. Ramey and Neville Francis (2006) found that as of 2004, women spent roughly 9 hours more per week on what they termed "home production": housework along with child care and homework assistance.

six degrees of separation

You have probably heard the term "six degrees of separation" and wondered if it is really true that each one of us is connected to every other person by social chains of no more than six people. The evidence supporting the six degrees theory came out of research undertaken in the 1960s by Stanley Milgram, whose colleagues were pestering him about why it always seemed like the strangers they met at cocktail parties turned out to be friends of a friend. Milgram decided to test the reach of social networks by asking a stockbroker in Boston to receive chain letters from a bunch of folks living in Lincoln, Nebraska. The Lincolnites could only send letters to friends or relatives who they believed would be likely to know someone who might know someone who might know the guy in Boston. About 20 percent of the letters eventually made it to Boston, and the average trip length was just over five people, hence the summary that in the United States there are no more than five people between any set of strangers, or six degrees of separation.Duncan Watts (2003) noticed that Milgram's findings applied only to the letters that made it to their final destination. What about the letters that did not complete the journey? Were their chains quite a bit longer than six steps, thus making our six-degree theory more like a twelve-degree theory? Watts set up a similar, this time worldwide, experiment using e-mail and statistical models to estimate global connectedness and found that Milgram was not quite right. In Watts's words, "It's not true that everyone is connected to everyone else, but at least half the people in the world are connected to each other through six steps, which is actually kind of surprising" (Conley, 2009b). Furthermore, Watts was able to test the commonsense notion that there are some people out there who just seem to know everyone and that it must be through these superconnected people that the rest of us are able to say we're only six degrees from Kevin Bacon (or whomever). But instead he found that when it comes to whom we know, "the world's remarkably egalitarian," and that superconnectors played almost no role in getting the e-mail forwarded all the way to its destination (Conley, 2009b).

ethnomethodology

a method for studying social interactions, _____, that involves acting critically about them. ____ literally means "the methods of the people" (from ethnos, the Greek word for "people").

Hypothesis

a proposed relationship between two variables, usually with a stated direction. The direction of the relationship refers to whether your variables move in the same direction (positive) or in opposite directions (negative).

meritocracy

a society where status and mobility are based on individual attributes, ability, and achievement.

sociological imagination

a term coined by C. Wright Mills. The ability to see the connections between our personal experience and the larger forces of history. "The first fruit of this imagination—and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one." The terrible part of the lesson is to make our own lives ordinary—that is, to see our intensely personal, private experience of life as typical of the period and place in which we live. This can also serve as a source of comfort, however, helping us to realize that we are not alone in our experiences, whether they involve our alienation from the increasingly dog-eat-dog capitalism of modern America, the peculiar combination of intimacy and dissociation that we may experience on the Internet, or the ways that nationality or geography affect our life choices. It also allows us to see the veneer of social life for what it is, and to step outside the "trap" of rapid historical change in order to comprehend what is occurring in our world and the social foundations that may be shifting right under our feet. It enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst." Another way to think about this is to ask ourselves what we take to be natural that actually isn't. For example: why go to college?

class system

an economically based hierarchical system characterized by cohesive, oppositional groups and somewhat loose social mobility. Class means different things to different people, and there is no consensus among sociologists as to the term's precise definition. For instance, some might define class primarily in terms of money, whereas others see it as a function of culture or taste. Some people barely even notice it (consciously at least), whereas others feel its powerful effects in their daily lives. So what is class? Is it related to lifestyle? Consumption patterns? Interests? Attitudes? Or is it just another pecking order similar to the caste system? Some controversy has existed about whether class is a real category or a category that exists in name only. As in the caste and estate systems, the lines that separate class categories in theory should be clearly demarcated, but there have been problems in drawing boundaries around class categories—for instance, upper class, middle class, and so on. Some scholars have even argued that class should be abandoned as a sociological concept altogether. So let's try to clear up some of the misconceptions. a class system implies an economic basis for the fundamental cleavages in society. That is, class is related to position in the economic market.In this sense, class is a relational concept. That is, one can't gain information about a person's class by simply looking at his or her income (as in, "That person made only $13,000 last year; therefore, she is working class"). Class identity, in fact, does not correspond to an individual at all but rather to a role. A person may pull in a six-figure salary, but as long as he owns no capital (that is, stock or other forms of firm ownership) and earns his salary by selling his labor to someone else, he finds himself in the same category as the lowest-paid wage laborer and antagonistic to "owners," who may net a lot less income than he does. And an individual may, over the course of her career, change class positions as that career evolves. The class positions, the roles with respect to the production process, do not change, however.

informal social sanctions

are based on the usually unexpressed but widely known rules of group membership. Have you ever heard someone use the expression "an unwritten rule"? ____ ____ ____ are the unwritten rules of social life. So, hypothetically, if you loudly belch in public, you will probably be the object of scowls of disgust. These gestures of contempt at your socially illicit behavior are examples of ____ ____ ____, the ways we keep each other in check by watching and judging those around us.

the culture of poverty

argument was that poor people adopt certain practices that differ from those of middle-class, "mainstream" society in order to adapt and survive in difficult economic circumstances. In the U.S. context, these practices might include illegal work, multigenerational living arrangements, multifamily households, serial relationships in place of marriage, and the pooling of community resources as a form of informal social insurance (otherwise known as "swapping"). Each of these cultural practices seems to be a rational response to a tenuous financial situation; according to the culture of poverty theory, once these survival adaptations are in place, they take on a life of their own, and in the long run they hold poor people back when they are no longer advantageous.

post-natal health inequalities-marital status

arried people tend to live longer, particularly married men. But can we say that being married causes you to live longer or enjoy better health? Remember that we are not randomly assigning people to marry or remain single. There is a marriage market, and as in all markets, different groups have varying levels of success in it. We already mentioned that taller men tend to have higher rates of marriage. Because height is a fairly good proxy for childhood health, maybe healthier people do better on the marriage market, thus suggesting the true causal story is that health leads to marriage. Do you want to marry someone who suffers from a hacking tuberculosis cough and therefore cannot work and has no money? All other things being equal, you might opt for a healthier partner. Likewise, if you're very ill and spend a lot of time in the hospital or are confined to your home by a disability or chronic condition, you might have difficulty meeting people. It might be that better health leads to better marriage prospects, not the other way around. page 429Perhaps, though, marriage actually has a salutary effect—maybe it benefits your health. This idea certainly seems plausible. After all, when you settle down, you probably do not go out as much or engage in the risky behaviors you might have when single. Ramen noodles and soda may no longer be acceptable dinner options. Does marriage have beneficial effects, or does who gets married tend to be special in some way? There's probably some truth to both explanations.

eugenics

claimed that each race had a separate package of social and psychological traits transmitted through bloodlines. Eugenics literally means "well born"; it is the pseudoscience of genetic lines and the inheritable traits they pass on from generation to generation. Everything from criminality and feeblemindedness to disease and intelligence, Galton asserted, could be traced through bloodlines and selectively bred out of or into populations. One of his followers, the American psychologist H. H. Goddard (1866-1957), applied eugenic thinking to generalize findings from his intelligence tests in America. He tested a handful of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in the early twentieth century and generalized their test scores to whole populations, claiming—and garnering many believers, too—that around 70 percent of the immigrants sailing from eastern and southern Europe were, in his phraseology, "morons" who posed a serious threat to the good of the nation. Goddard supported the immigration exclusion acts that in 1924 largely blocked non-Anglos from immigrating and were intended to improve the "stock" of the nation.

gender

denotes a social position, the set of social arrangements that are built around normative sex categories. It is, you could say, what people do with the physical materials of sex. No one disputes that biological differences exist between men and women. However, what we make of those differences does not inevitably arise out of the biological. Gender is one set of stories we tell each other and believe in to get by in the world. It's a collectively defined guidebook that humans use to make distinctions among themselves, to separate one being from another, and to comprehend an otherwise fuzzy mass of individuals.

correlation

exists between income and health; that is, they tend to vary together. For example, people with higher levels of income tend to enjoy better overall health. But to say two things are ____ is very different from stating that one causes the other. In fact, there are three possible causal stories about the relationship between income and health. We might reasonably assert that bad health causes you to have a lower income—because when you get sick you can't work, you lose your job, and so forth. However, we could just as easily tell the opposite story—that higher income leads to better health because you can afford better doctors; you have access to fresh, healthful foods in your upscale neighborhood; and there's a gym at the office.Finally, we could conclude that a third factor causes both income and health to vary in the same direction. For the sake of argument, we will call this factor "reckless tendencies"—a love of fast cars, wine, and late nights. Such shortsighted behavior could negatively affect our health (especially the wine). And it could also affect our income. Maybe we are unable to get to work on time or are spending too much money on those fast cars instead of investing it in the stock market. In this scenario, if we merely observe health and income, it may appear as if one causes the other, but the truth of the matter is that they are not related in the slightest apart from being connected through a third factor.

Essentialism

explain social phenomena in terms of natural ones. The hallmarks of essentialism are fixity, lack of history, absolutism, and biological determinism—meaning that what you do in the social world should be a direct result of who you are in the natural world. If you are born with male parts, essentialists believe, you are essentially and absolutely a man, and you will be sexually attracted to women only, as preordained by nature.

broken windows theory of deviance

explains how social context and social cues impact the way individuals act; specifically, whether local, informal social norms allow such acts. When signals seem to tell us that it's okay to do the otherwise unthinkable, sometimes we do. The broken windows theory of deviance has inspired some politicians to institute policies that target the catalysts for inappropriate behavior (vandalism, burglary, and so forth). In fact, one of Zimbardo's graduate students who participated in the car experiment, George Kelling, later worked as a consultant for the New York City Transit Authority in 1984, devising a plan to crack down on graffiti. The underlying assumption of the plan was that the continued presence of graffiti-covered cars served as a green light for more graffiti and perhaps even violent crimes. The Transit Authority then launched a massive campaign to clean up graffiti, car by car, to erase the signs of urban disorder, in the hope of reducing subway crime. In the mid-1990s New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani also initiated a campaign of "zero tolerance" for petty crimes such as turnstile jumping, public urination, the drinking of alcohol in public, and graffiti. Today, the city's newer subway cars are "graffiti-proof," meaning that spray paint doesn't adhere to the metal exterior of the cars. Indeed, both petty and serious crimes have dropped dramatically in New York City since the 1990s (Kelling & Sousa, 2001), although some criminologists dispute the causal impact of the Giuliani strategy.

Status Hierarchy System

has its basis in social prestige, not in political, religious, or economic factors. In classical sociology, Weber contributed most heavily to the modern-day sociologist's understanding of status. For Weber, status groups are communities united by either a positive or negative social estimation of their honor. Put more simply, status is determined by what society as a whole thinks of the particular lifestyle of the community to which you belong. In this sense, those with and without property can belong to the same status group if they are seen to live the same lifestyle. Let's use the example of professors. There are certain things that professors typically do in common: They attend conferences to discuss scholarly issues, they teach college courses, and they tend to read a lot. This leads society as a whole to confer a certain status on professors, without placing the sole focus on income, which can vary widely among professors. Likewise, various individuals in a society who earn similar incomes may not have much in common in terms of lifestyles (and therefore status).Although a status group can be defined by something other than occupation, such as a claim to a specific lifestyle of leisure (skate punks) or membership in an exclusive organization that defines one's identity (the Daughters of the American Revolution), much work by sociologists has been related to occupational status. After all, work is one of the most centrally defining aspects of our lifestyle. In the 1960s, for example, Peter M. Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan created the Index of Occupational Status by polling the general public about the prestige of certain occupations.hows that occupations with very different characteristics may have similar prestige scores. For instance, college presidents are given the same occupational status as instructors despite the huge salary discrepancy between the two. Blau and Duncan observed that five-sixths (just over 83 percent) of the explanation for people's status ratings of occupations was attributed to the education necessary for the position and not the income corresponding to that position. page 252Although we have emphasized that status may have its basis in occupation, it can also be formed through consumption and lifestyle, though these factors are often closely linked. This means that there should be a tendency for status differences between groups to be finely gradated and not relational: Fundamentally antagonistic status groups such as capitalists and laborers or owners and renters do not exist. Rather, people exist along a status ladder, so to speak, on which there is a lot of social mobility. Often, individuals seek to assert their status or increase their status not just through their occupation but also through their consumption, memberships, and other aspects of how they live. They might try to generate social prestige by driving a fancy car, living in a gated community, wearing stylish clothes, or using a certain kind of language.

nonmaterial culture

includes values, beliefs, behaviors, and social norms,

intersex

is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn't seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.

gini coefficient

is a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income distribution of a nation's residents, and is the most commonly used measure of inequality.On another measure, called the Gini coefficient, where a higher score means more inequality, the United States scores about 0.37, almost perfectly equidistant between Mexico's 0.49 on the high end and Sweden's 0.22 and Germany's 0.26 on the low side.) So although we have a way to go to reach developing-world levels, the United States does not fit the model of most other industrialized nations either.

Social Network

is a set of relations—a set of dyads, essentially—held together by ties between individuals. A tie is the content of a particular relationship. One way to think about "the ties that bind" is as a set of stories we tell each other that explain a particular relationship. If I ask you how you know a specific person, and you explain that she was your brother's girlfriend in the eighth grade, and the two of you remained close even after her relationship with your brother ended, that story is your tie to that person. For every person in your life, you have a story. To explain some ties, the story is very simple: "That's the guy I buy my coffee from each morning." This is a uniplex tie. Other ties have many layers. They are multiplex: "She's my girlfriend. We have a romantic relationship. We also are tennis and bridge partners. And now that you mention it, we are classmates at school and also fiercely competitive opponents in Trivial Pursuit."

Ideology

is a system of concepts and relationships, an understanding of cause and effect. For example, generally on airplanes you're not allowed to use the toilets in the first-class cabin if you have a coach-class ticket. Why not? It's not as if the lavatories in first class are that much better. What's the big deal? We subscribe to an ____ that the purchase of an airline ticket at the coach, business, or first-class fare brings with it certain service expectations—that an expensive first-class ticket entitles a passenger to priority access to the lavatory, more leg room, and greater amenities, such as warm face towels. The ____ is embedded within an entire series of suppositions, and if you cast aside some of them, they will no longer hold together as a whole. If everyone flying coach started to hang out in first class, chatting with the flight attendants and using the first-class toilets, the system of class stratification (in airplanes at least) would break down. People would not be willing to pay extra for a first-class ticket; more airlines might go bankrupt, and the industry itself would erode.

Ethnocentrism

is a term that encapsulates the sense of taken-for-granted superiority in the context of cultural practices and attitudes. It is the belief that one's own culture or group is superior to others, and the tendency to view all other cultures from the perspective of one's own. At the time, some even believed that non-Westerners did not have souls and weren't human, and this notion was used to justify slavery, violence, and oppression. Such claims obviously weren't true (and we owe a lot to anthropologists for disproving them), but the long history of racism with which we still struggle does have some of its roots in these ideas.

gender identity

is defined as a personal conception of oneself as male or female (or rarely, both or neither). This concept is intimately related to the concept of gender role, which is defined as the outward manifestations of personality that reflect the gender identity.

material culture

is everything that is a part of our constructed, physical environment, including technology.

culture jamming

is the act of turning media against themselves. Part of a larger movement against consumer culture and consumerism, it's based on the notion that advertisements are basically propaganda. ____ ____ differs from appropriating advertisements for the sake of art and sheer vandalism (where the sole goal is destruction of property), although advertisers probably don't care too much about this latter distinction. Adbusters also sponsors an annual Buy Nothing Day (held, with great irony, on the day after Thanksgiving, known in retail as "Black Friday," the busiest shopping day of the year), which encourages people to do just that—buy nothing on this specific day of the year, encouraging them to reclaim their buying power and focus on the noncommercial aspects of the holiday, such as spending time with family and friends.

social capital

is the information, knowledge of people or things, and connections that help individuals enter preexisting networks or gain power in them. Consider the importance of networking in endeavors such as preventing neighborhood crime or obtaining a good job. As it turns out, the cliché holds a lot of truth: It's not just what you know but whom you know. But whereas weak ties may be the most advantageous for an individual, for a community, many dense, embedded ties are generally a sign of high levels of social capital.This concept makes sense when you think about it. Dense social capital means that people are linked to one another through a thick web of connections. As a result of these connections, they will feel inclined—perhaps even impelled—to help each other, to return favors, to keep an eye on one another's property. The more connections there are, the more norms of reciprocity, values, and trust are shared. After all, there is no such thing as total anonymity: Even if you don't know someone directly, chances are that you are only one or two degrees removed from him or her.

agents of socialization-family

is the original source of significant others and the primary unit of socialization. If you have siblings, you may develop the sense that older and younger children are treated differently. The general impression is that the younger siblings get away with more. Parents, having already gone through the experience of child rearing may relax their attitudes and behaviors toward later children (even if unconsciously). As computers and other technology become more ubiquitous in our society, children may need to socialize their parents in terms of how to use such technology. The socialization that occurs within the family can be affected by various demographics. Parents of different social classes socialize their children differently. For example, when asked what values they want their children to have, middle-class parents are more likely to stress independence and self-direction, whereas working-class parents prioritize obedience to external authority

ontological equality

is the philosophical and religious notion that all people are created equal.

culture

is the sum of the social categories and concepts we recognize in addition to our beliefs, behaviors (except the instinctual ones), and practices. In other words, culture is everything but nature. has referred to the distinction between what is natural—what comes directly from the earth and follows the laws of physics—and what is modified or created by humans and follows (or breaks) the laws of the state. That said, ___ is both the technology by which humans have come to dominate nature and the belief systems, ideologies, and symbolic representations that constitute human existence.

cohabitation

living together in an intimate relationship without formal legal or religious sanctioning, has also emerged as a socially acceptable arrangement; roughly 7 percent of heterosexual American couples live together as opposed to legally tying the knot, a 13 percent increase from 2009 (Fry & Cohn, 2011). However, two-thirds of cohabiters either break up or get married within three years (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2013a). Most cohabiters believe that living together is an effective means of curtailing future divorce. It's the commonsense notion that living together provides a sample of what married life is like and will inform and improve the couple's future marriage. On the opposite side of the debate, conservative supporters of "family values" point to studies showing a higher divorce rate among couples who cohabit before marriage than those who don't (Meckler, 2002). Conservative Christian counselors advise that "living in sin" sets up a rockier road for a marriage, but the actual reason for the higher divorce rate probably has to do more with selection bias: Most people who cohabit are also the kind of individuals who are more likely to flout social conventions and therefore divorce anyway.

Social deviance

loosely understood, can be taken to mean any transgression of socially established norms. It can be as minor as farting in church or as serious as murder, so long as it consists of breaking the rules by which most people abide.

biological determinism

meaning that what you do in the social world should be a direct result of who you are in the natural world. If you are born with male parts, essentialists believe, you are essentially and absolutely a man, and you will be sexually attracted to women only, as preordained by nature.

cultural relativism

means taking into account the differences across cultures without passing judgment or assigning value. For example, in the United States you are expected to look someone in the eye when you talk to him or her, but in China this is considered rude, and you generally divert your gaze as a sign of respect. Neither practice is inherently right or wrong. By employing the concept of ____ ____, we can understand difference for the sake of increasing our knowledge about the world. _____ ____is also important for businesses that operate on a global scale.

Double consciousness

mechanism by which African Americans constantly maintain two behavioral scripts. The first is the script that any American would have for moving through the world; the second is the script that takes the external opinions of an often racially prejudiced onlooker into consideration. The double consciousness is a "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity"Without a double consciousness, a person shopping for groceries moves through the store trying to remember everything on the list, maybe taste-testing the grapes, impatiently scolding children begging for the latest sugary treat, or snacking on some cookies before paying for them at the register. With a ____ _____, an African American shopping for groceries is aware that he or she might be watched carefully by store security and makes an effort to get in and out quickly. He or she does not linger in back corners out of the gaze of shopkeepers and remembers not to reach into a pocket lest this motion be perceived as evidence of shoplifting. Snacking on a bag of chips before reaching the register or sampling a tasty morsel from the bulk bins is totally out of the question.Those operating with a double consciousness risk conforming so closely to others' perceptions that they are fully constrained to the behaviors predicted of them.

qualitative methods

of which there are many, attempt to collect information about the social world that cannot be readily converted to numeric form. The information gathered with this approach is often used to document the meanings that actions engender in social participants or to describe the mechanisms by which social processes occur. Qualitative data are collected in a host of ways, from spending time with people and recording what they say and do (participant observation) to interviewing them in an open-ended manner to reviewing archives.

Verstehen

one of max weber's most important contributions. Weber was suggesting that sociologists approach social behavior from the perspective of those engaging in it. In other words, to truly understand why people act the way they do, a sociologist must understand the meanings people attach to their actions. Weber's emphasis on subjectivity is the foundation of interpretive sociology, the study of social meaning.

sociological definition of race

refers to a group of people who share a set of characteristics—typically, but not always, physical ones—and are said to share a common bloodline. People obviously have different physical appearances, including eye color, hair texture, and skin color, so it's perhaps puzzling to hear that (biological) racial differences somehow do not exist. To speak of the myth of race is to say that it is largely a social construction, a set of stories we tell ourselves to organize reality and make sense of the world, rather than a fixed biological or natural reality. We tell the set of stories over and over and, collectively, believe in it and act on it, therefore making it real through such practices as largely separate marriage and reproductive communities.

consumerism

refers to more than just buying merchandise; it refers to the belief that happiness and fulfillment can be achieved through the acquisition of material possessions. Versace, J. Crew, and realtors in certain hip neighborhoods are not just peddling shoes, jeans, and apartments. They are also selling a self-image, a lifestyle, and a sense of belonging and self-worth. The media, and advertising in particular, play a large role in the creation and maintenance of ____.

social capital

researchers determined that private school students did more homework, had a greater chance of being enrolled in academic programs, and took more college preparatory classes than public school students. Behaviorally, private school students had better attendance, became involved in fewer fights, and threatened teachers less than public school students. James S. Coleman and Thomas Hoffer (1987) also suggest that the strong effects of the Catholic schools stem from the large amounts of social capital in the community—that is, any relationship between people that can facilitate the actions of others (see Chapter 5). In the case of Catholic schools, Coleman and Hoffer (1987), as well as Anthony Bryk, Valerie Lee, and Peter Holland (1993), hypothesize that the closeness of the Catholic community reinforces among teachers, parents, and students behaviors and norms that are conducive to learning. Alternatively, it could just be that families who value education the most and are most able to get their kids into a private school are the families whose kids would succeed no matter what schools they attended; in this paradigm, schools again act as social sorting machines rather than having important effects of their own. In fact, recent evidence from private school scholarship lotteries suggests that this last explanation may indeed be the most accurate

quantitative methods

seek to obtain information about the social world that is already in or can be converted to numeric form. This methodology then uses statistical analysis to describe the social world that those data represent. Some of this analysis attempts to mimic the scientific method of using treatment and control (or placebo) groups to determine how changes in one factor affect another social outcome, while factoring out every other simultaneous event. Such information is often acquired through surveys but may also include data collected by other means, ranging from sampling bank records to weighing people on a scale to hanging out with teens at the mall.

Feminist Theory

shares many ideas with Marxist theory—in particular, the Marxist emphasis on conflict and political reform. Emphasis on women's experiences and a belief that sociology and society in general subordinate women. Emphasize equality between men and women and want to see women's lives and experiences represented in sociological studies. Focused on defining concepts such as sex and gender, and on challenging conventional wisdom by questioning the meanings usually assigned to these concepts. In Sex, Gender, and Society (1972), sociologist Ann Oakley argued that much of what we attribute to biological sex differences can be traced to behaviors that are learned and internalized through socialization. Much feminist research focuses on inequalities based on gender categories. Feminist theorists have studied women's experiences at home and in the workplace. They have also researched gender inequality in social institutions such as schools, the family, and the government. In each case, feminist sociologists remain interested in how power relationships are defined, shaped, and reproduced on the basis of gender differences.

deductive approach

starts with a theory, forms a hypothesis, makes empirical observations, and then analyzes the data to confirm, reject, or modify the original theory.

inductive approach

starts with empirical observations and then works to form a theory.

other

that is, someone or something outside of oneself. In Joey's mind, there is no ___, the you who hasn't seen a toilet in six hours; there is only the self who wants a cookie.

bourgeoisie

the employing class. Extract surplus value from the proletariat, even when a few of the proletarians make high incomes.

segregation

the legal or social practice of separating people on the basis of their race or ethnicity. An extreme case of segregation was the southern United States before the civil rights movement. Under the Jim Crow system of segregation, reinforced by the Supreme Court's 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, a "separate but equal" doctrine ruled the South. Strictly enforced separation existed between blacks and whites in most areas of public life—from residence to health facilities to bus seats, classroom seats, and even toilet seats. Although the Plessy decision ruled that separate facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were equal, in real life the doctrine legalized unequal facilities for blacks. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has long recognized that segregation and discrimination are inescapably linked. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of education. Social science data consistently show that an integrated educational experience for minority children produces advantages over a nonintegrated school experience. School segregation almost always entails fewer educational resources and lower quality for minority students.

social mobility

the movement between different positions within a system of social stratification in any given society. Pitirim A. Sorokin (1927/1959) emphasized the importance of not just looking at the mobility of individuals but also examining group mobility.Vertical social mobility, in contrast, refers to the rise or fall of an individual (or group) from one social stratum to another. We can further distinguish two types of vertical mobility: ascending and descending (more commonly termed upward and downward). An individual who experiences ascending vertical mobility either rises from a lower stratum into a higher one or creates an entirely new group that exists at a higher stratum. Ugo's promotion to regional manager at Sears is an example of rising from a lower stratum to a higher one. By becoming a manager, he has changed his class position, a change that confers both a higher salary and more prestige. Conversely, imagine that for some reason there was an immediate need for translators of Igbo (or Ibo, the language spoken by the Igbo people based in southeast Nigeria) in the United States. Ugo, who speaks Igbo, along with many other Nigerians who speak the language, would then find better jobs and thereby enjoy higher social status. This would be an example of a new group, Igbo translators, existing in a higher stratum. Descending vertical mobility can similarly take either of two forms: individual or group. One way to think of these forms is as the distinction between a particular person falling overboard from a ship and the whole ship sinking. Sorokin asserted that "channels of vertical circulation necessarily exist in any stratified society and are as necessary as channels for blood circulation in the body" (1927/1959).

Dependent Variables

the outcome you are trying to explain

absolute poverty

the point at which a household's income falls below the necessary level to purchase food to physically sustain its members.The most famous American version of the food-based measurement of poverty status was that of Mollie Orshansky in her 1963 article "Children of the Poor." To estimate the poverty line, she used a strategy not unlike that implicit in Monaghan's speech. She took the U.S. Department of Agriculture's recommendations for the minimum amount of healthy food, estimated the cost for a variety of family types (62 in all), and multiplied this figure by a factor of three (based on the results of the Consumer Expenditure Survey in the mid-1950s, which estimated that families spent an average of 35 percent of their household budgets on food). Soon, this became the official poverty line of the United States, and it has been the definition of poverty against which researchers have most frequently suggested alternatives.

socialization

the process by which you learn how to become a functioning member of society. You've internalized many unwritten rules about social behavior and public interaction. Think for a moment about the differences between your knowledge of how to respond to the following situations versus the responses of our droid: knowing how to answer when someone asks "What's up?"; knowing to shift one's knees when someone else needs to slip in or out of a row of seats in the lecture hall; knowing to wait your turn when asking a question in the lecture or discussion section; knowing how to react when someone yells "Fire!" during class and then screams, versus a student shouting the same word during a final exam and then laughing.

cultural scripts

the validity of Mead's findings has been disputed, but her work continues to be a landmark of early anthropology for introducing the idea that ____ _____, modes of behavior and understanding that are not universal or natural, shape our notions of gender. This concept stands in opposition to the belief that such ideas derive from biological programming.

scientific racism

what today we call the nineteenth-century theories of race, brought a period of feverish investigation into the origins, explanations, and classifications of race. In 1684, François Bernier (1625-1688) proposed a new geography based not on topography or even political borders but on the body, from facial lineaments to bodily configurations. Bernier devised a scheme of four or five races based on the following geographic regions: • Europe (excluding Lapland), South Asia, North Africa, and America: people who shared climates and complexions • Africa proper: people who had thick lips, flat noses, black skin, and a scanty beard • Asia proper: people who had white skin, broad shoulders, flat faces, little eyes, and no beard • Lapps (small traditional communities living around the northern regions of Finland and Russia): people who were ugly, squat, small, and animal-like

Independent Variables

which are the measured factors that you believe have a causal impact on the dependent variable.

Symbolic Interaction Theory

which eschewed big theories of society (macrosociology) and instead focused on how face-to-face interactions create the social world (micro sociology). Paradigm operates on the basic premise of a cycle of meaning—namely, the idea that people act in response to the meaning that signs and social signals hold for them (e.g., a red light means stop). By acting on perceptions of the social world in this way and regarding these meanings as sui generis (i.e., appearing to be self-constituting rather than flimsily constructed by ourselves or others), we then collectively make their meaning so. Language of theater to describe the social facade we create through such devices as tact, gestures, front-stage (versus backstage) behavior, props, and scripts. For example, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Goffman explored how our everyday personal encounters shape and reinforce our notions about class and social status. We make judgments about class and social status based on how people speak, what they wear, and the other tiny details of how they present themselves to others, and at the same time, they rely on the same information from our everyday interactions with them to classify us, too.

generalized other

which represents an internalized sense of the total expectations of others in a variety of settings—regardless of whether we've encountered those people or places before. In this way, we should be able to function with complete strangers in a wide range of social settings. For example, it is the perception of the ___ ___ that keeps you from taking off your pants to more comfortably lounge in the park on hot summer days, that keeps you from singing on the bus no matter how much you are enjoying the song on your iPod, and that keeps you from extracting an uncomfortable wedgie in public. We can, and do, continually update our internal sense of the generalized other as we gather new information about norms and expectations in different contexts.