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Family Composition, Race, and Teachers’ Perceptions of Parent-Teacher Alliance Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-03-26 Emma Romell
Both family composition and teachers’ perceptions of parents are important for student success. However, we know little about whether teachers’ perceptions of parents vary by family composition. Using data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, I show that teachers perceive single mothers with multipartner fertility and, to a lesser extent, repartnered mothers with multipartner fertility
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Shifting Cohort Patterns in the Use of Drugs with Elevated Overdose Risk in the United States Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-03-25 Kira England, Liying Luo, Ashton M Verdery, Shannon M Monnat
Rising drug overdose rates are a major social problem, but understanding of trends in the use of high-risk drugs is limited. The increasingly addictive potential of high-risk drugs, broader social changes, and the importance of peers and social contexts in shaping use may create conditions in which some cohorts have elevated use further into adulthood than others. We use an age-period-cohort model
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Controlling Images of Neighborhoods in Gentrification Coverage Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-03-25 Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana
Prior literature has largely used the concept of “controlling images” to explain how the news media and other institutions use racialized and gendered stereotypes to control marginalized groups. This article extends the concept of controlling images to neighborhoods using 583 newspaper articles about gentrification in San Francisco. Using qualitative and spatial analysis, I demonstrate how controlling
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Unwitting Accomplices: Equal Treatment and the Perpetuation of Racialized Information Inequality in School Choice Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-03-25 Sarah Faude
In public education, racially segregated schools are now often understood as a natural result of a messy mix of failed policies and parent decisions. However, parent decisions and school choice are both constrained by districts. In the case of Boston Public Schools (BPS), the staff hired to support “well-informed choices” do not provide information to families—including those who need it most—even
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The Effect of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests on Police Budgets: How “Defund the Police” Sparked Political Backlash Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Mathis Ebbinghaus, Nathan Bailey, Jacob Rubel
This article investigates whether a core political demand of the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests was realized: “defund the police.” Original hand-compiled data containing budget information on 264 major cities in the United States and comprehensive protest data enable us to assess the effect of protests on changes in city police budgets. We find no evidence that BLM protests led to police defunding
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No Room to Fall: Criminal Justice Contact and Neighborhood Disadvantage Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Laura M DeMarco
Neighborhoods across the United States are shaped by the criminal justice system and socioeconomic inequality. This article examines whether multiple forms of criminal justice contact affect neighborhood attainment for a cohort of young adults coming of age in the era of mass incarceration. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort, and census data, I analyze neighborhood conditions
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The New Black Right: A Paranoid Turn in Black Conservatism? Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Marcus A Brooks
Is there a uniquely Black paranoid style of conservatism, and, if so, how is that style articulated, and what are the potential impacts on conservatism, U.S. politics, and Black people in the coming decades? Despite our theoretical understanding that Black people can support white supremacy, the literature of far-right racism assumes that all white nationalists are white, and all Black nationalists
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Diversity as Philanthropy: Diversity Ideology among Pastors, Professors, and Professionals of Color Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-02-25 Oneya Fennell Okuwobi
Examinations of diversity ideology have focused primarily on white people and institutions. As a result, there remains an open question as to the systems of meaning people of color may hold when it comes to diversity. In this article, I analyze 60 semi-structured interviews with employees of color across three organization types: churches, universities, and corporations. I find that employees of color
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“You have to be grateful that they have eyes watching over us”: When Security Guards Protect and Serve People Experiencing Homelessness Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Katharina Maier, Marta-Marika Urbanik, Carolyn Greene
Relationships between private security and People Experiencing Homelessness (PEH) are largely portrayed in negative, controlling, and punitive terms. Studies have shown that like police, security guards regularly engage in behaviors that impede PEH’s access to public spaces and produce harm. By contrast, drawing upon interviews with 50 PEH in a mid-sized Canadian city, our research examining PEH’s
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How Discrimination Narratives Resolve Ambiguity: The Case of Islamophobia in Quebec Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Jan Doering
Discrimination frequently appears in ambiguous rather than overt forms. How do individuals manage the challenges associated with ambiguous discrimination, such as classifying incidents of negative but ambiguous treatment? Building on studies of microaggressions and perceived discrimination, this article develops an explanation rooted in a novel theory of discrimination narratives. Discrimination narratives
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Black Women as Superwomen? The Mental Health Effects of Superwoman Schema, Socioeconomic Status, and Financial Strain Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-02-17 Christy L Erving, Izraelle I McKinnon, Courtney S Thomas Tobin, Miriam E Van Dyke, Raphiel Murden, Reneé H Moore, Bianca Booker, Viola Vaccarino, Tené T Lewis
Informed by Black feminist thought and intersectionality, Superwoman Schema (SWS) is a construct that captures a collective response of Black women to racial and gender marginalization by highlighting expectations that they exude strength, suppress emotions, resist vulnerability, succeed despite limitations, and help others to their own self-neglect. Using a sample of Black women (N = 390) in early-midlife
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Handcrafted Careers: How Workers Navigate Racialized Career Pathways in the Craft Beer Industry Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-02-10 Eli R Wilson
What do work career dynamics in contemporary labor settings tell us about how racism operates in ways that go beyond the explicitly exclusionary actions of management? Building on theories of racialized organizations, this research offers a ground-level examination of the career pathways of craft beer workers in the United States. Drawing on 107 in-depth interviews and two years of ethnographic fieldwork
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Prisons and Pollution: A Nationwide Analysis of Carceral Environmental Inequality Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Pierce Greenberg, Robert Todd Perdue
The disproportionate exposure of incarcerated populations to environmental harms is an emerging area of interest among scholars and activists. Existing research has illuminated these intersecting systems of inequality with broad theorization and case study examples of prisons and jails located near environmental hazards. However, there are few nationwide assessments of carceral environmental inequality—studies
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Cultural Resistance to Policy Change: Welfare Privatization, Policy Feedback, and the Moral Economy of Welfare Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-01-23 Morten Frederiksen
Social policy research posits that people adapt to policy change by aligning their preferences and institutional expectations through habituation. At face value, this policy feedback theory conflicts with theories of moral economy, which suggests that people share durable cultural repertoires regarding the meaning of the good life and good society. Deploying a large number of qualitative interviews
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Racial Exclusion by Bureaucratic Omission: Non-Enumeration, Documentary Dispossession, and the Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-01-20 Amanda R Cheong
This article traces the bureaucratic bases of the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Rohingya activists to elucidate the political struggles and competing archival logics surrounding their disenfranchisement and displacement. I explain a curious shift in the past decade in Myanmar’s approach to managing the Rohingya population, whereby longstanding strategies
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Asian Americans’ Racialized Incorporation into the Political Field Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Chen Liang
I use Asian Americans’ political participation to examine how the racialization of Asian Americans manifests in the political field, and how such processes shape Asian Americans’ racialized experiences and identity. Based on interviews with 95 Asian American political candidates and organizers in Houston, Texas, the findings show that, regardless of respondents’ motivation for participating in politics
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Does Workplace Discrimination Contribute to Sex Work for Trans and Nonbinary Workers? Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Jesse Ezra Shircliff, Brook Hutchinson, Christy Glass, Mario Suárez, Gabe H Miller, Guadalupe Marquez-Velarde
Workplace discrimination contributes to economic precarity for trans individuals, and some evidence suggests that barriers to formal employment may contribute to engagement in sex work. This study examines whether particular types of workplace discrimination – including blocked access to jobs and termination due to trans status – represent a pathway into sex work for trans and nonbinary workers conditional
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Digital Platforms and the Maintenance of the Urban Order Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-12-09 Armando Lara-Millán, Melissa Guzman-Garcia
Neighborhood digital platforms – such as Nextdoor, Citizen, Neighbors, anti-crime Facebook groups, Ring surveillance technology, and 311 see-click-fix applications – are recent entrants into urban life. Existing accounts suggest they help build intra-community relationships, but that they also amplify paranoia, racism, and carceral impulses of American homeowners. We ask: how is the new technology
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Genetic Racialization: Ancestry Tests and the Reification of Race Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Amina Zarrugh, Luis Romero
While there has been a significant increase in the availability of DNA testing to identify one’s ancestry, we know little about the implications of these services for everyday social meanings of race and ethnicity. Scholarship about ancestry testing generally focuses on the significance of DNA testing for individual consumers who lack access to genealogical history, often due to systemic racism and
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Navigating Spatial Enclosures: Race, Place, and School Policing Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Terry Allen, Kimberly Gomez
Law enforcement’s increased presence in U.S. public schools has significantly affected Black students’ access to opportunities and their overall safety. Limited attention has been paid to the broader context in which school policing operates, extending beyond school buildings and embedded in larger neighborhood dynamics. We develop a theory of “spatial enclosures” to describe how policing manifests
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Inaction, Silence, Focus, and Power: Identifying and Assessing Folk Theories of the Racism of Omission Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-11-25 Evangeline Warren, Lauren Valentino
Recent scholarship has advanced a concept of racism operating through omission. Omission captures both inaction and action, highlighting how systems of oppression rely on inertia in addition to discriminatory action to perpetuate inequality. Yet little is known about how laypersons understand the role of omission in propagating racism in the United States. Building on this premise, we employ a mixed-methods
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Policing the California Outercity: Drivers of Police Spending in a Changing Metropolis Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Ángel Mendiola Ross
This paper explores the intersection of two major trends in the United States over the last forty years: a substantial investment in local law enforcement and the diversification of suburbia. While previous research on police spending has focused almost exclusively on large central cities, this study broadens this perspective to assess how these dynamics play out in outer-ring suburbs. I construct
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Adolescent Cybervictimization in 31 Countries: The Gender Gap, Gendered Opportunity, and the Contextual Influence of Gender Stratification Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-10-03 Rustu Deryol, Rachel L McNealey, Pamela Wilcox
This study examined the gender gap, gendered opportunity, and the contextual influence of gender inequality and women’s absolute status with respect to online stalking victimization and online image-based victimization (IBV) among youths in 31 countries. Descriptive analysis allowed for comparison of prevalence of online stalking and IBV across gender. We estimated sex-specific hierarchical logistic
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City of Gauze: Medicine and the Governance of Urban Poverty Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-08-25 Josh Seim, Anthony DiMario
How is urban poverty governed? Scholarship emphasizes the significance of social assistance programs and criminal legal systems, but considerably less attention has been given to medical institutions. Drawing on contemporary and historical evidence across journalistic, bureaucratic, and academic texts, we conceptualize and compare three arenas for medically governing the poor in Los Angeles, California:
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Intensive Naming: Concerted Cultivation and Flexible Ethnicity among U.S. Middle-Class Mexican-Origin Parents Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-08-25 Christina A Sue
Selecting a name for a child represents an important symbolic and cultural decision. As social labels, names serve as identity markers that influence how their bearers are perceived and treated. Sociologists are increasingly taking advantage of the study of names, with most adopting a quantitative approach and analyzing names as outcomes. Less is known about the social meanings surrounding names and
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Narratives of Rehabilitation in a South African Prison Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-08-25 Anton Symkovych
How individuals incarcerated in the Global South engage with the official rehabilitative model remains largely under-documented. Through analysis of the narratives of men and women living in a large, medium-security correctional complex in Gauteng, South Africa, I argue that the grandiloquent official discourse of rehabilitation constitutes an important resource for those incarcerated. Highlighting
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College Choices, Choice Dilemmas: Black Advantaged Parents’ Views of Their Children’s College Options Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-08-04 Deborwah Faulk
Studies investigating college views largely neglect the Black advantaged and specifically the role of parents in the college search process. Drawing on interviews with upper, upper-middle-, and middle-class parents, this paper investigates how Black advantaged parents view their children’s college options. In an anti-black and credentialed society, parents contend with the consequences of where their
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Wealth and the Transition to Motherhood Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-07-22 Jessica Houston Su, Fenaba R Addo
Wealth, a significant dimension of inequality that captures both financial security and social position, shapes patterns of family formation. This study evaluates the role of wealth in the transition to motherhood. We argue that wealth is particularly relevant to when women become mothers, and whether their first birth is desired or undesired. Leveraging longitudinal panel data from the NLSY79 (n=2
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Social Triage and Exclusions in Community Services for the Criminalized Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-07-15 Marianne Quirouette
This article examines perspectives and practices related to social triage and the exclusion of criminalized and marginalized individuals in community services such as shelters, mental health, substance use, and court supports. Based on two years of fieldwork and interviews with 105 practitioners, I analyze narratives and practices related to working with people described as having (or being) complex
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Armed Citizens on the Border: How Guns Fuel Anti-Immigration Politics in America Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Emine Fidan Elcioglu
To make a nation on stolen land using enslaved labor, the early American state relied on gun and immigration policy to create a well-armed white settler population. This legacy continues to animate modern conservativism, which is staked on supporting gun-friendly and anti-immigrant policies. Despite this history and ongoing political reality, however, the sociology of migration has largely ignored
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“I was called everything but a student”: Blackness and the Social Death of Student Status Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-07-08 Richard Lofton
Using the conceptual tools of anti-Blackness and the Black habitus to analyze the interviews of 38 Black youth who lived and grew up in Baltimore City, this study contends that the negative associations placed on Black youth continue to dehumanize them and prevent them from the full embodiment of student status. This article explores Blackness and its relationship with the privileges and immunities
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Can You Sing Your Way to Good Citizenship?: Recreational Association Structures and Member Political Participation Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-06-30 Matthew Baggetta, Ricardo Bello-Gomez
What is the relationship of recreational associations to the political engagement of their members? We answer this question using multilevel data on 25 community choirs and the 1,032 members within them. Using structural equation modelling, we model the relationships between recreational association structures and member political participation through member experiences along with countervailing selection
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Segregation and Group Threat: Specifying Hispanic-White Punishment Disparity Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-06-25 Jordan Zvonkovich, Jeffery T Ulmer
Evidence of racial disparity in punishment has been pervasive in the U.S. criminal justice system. Furthermore, a growing body of literature suggests that racial and ethnic disparities in criminal punishment, typically motivated by group threat perspectives, vary in relation to social and contextual conditions of court jurisdictions. One important factor relevant to minority threat and intergroup contact
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Beyond Dietary Acculturation: How Latina Immigrants Navigate Exclusionary Systems to Feed Their Families Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-06-24 Sarah Bowen, Annie Hardison-Moody, Emilia Cordero Oceguera, Sinikka Elliott
Previous studies of dietary acculturation explain how immigrants’ diets change over time, but they don't tell us why. In response to calls for additional research on the complex social processes that shape health disparities, this study uses an intersectional approach to examine the role of food in the daily lives of 23 Latina immigrants living in North Carolina. Our findings, based on semi-structured
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Breaking Generational Curses: Success and Opportunity among Black Children of Incarcerated Parents Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-06-24 Britany J Gatewood, Bahiyyah M Muhammad, Sydni Turner
Black children are disproportionately represented among the children of incarcerated mothers and fathers in the United States. Research has largely focused on negative life outcomes (e.g., incarceration, negative behaviors, school dropout rates) of these children. Recently, studies have begun to look at success; however, children of incarcerated parents are typically placed into a homogenous group
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Marketing the Self vs. Preserving the Self: Resisting Downward Mobility in the New Economy Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-06-22 Steven Lopez, Lindsey Ibañez
How do dislocated workers try to avoid downward mobility as they navigate insecure, nonstandard, and precarious work in the contemporary American economy? Should they embrace flexibility, or follow their passions? Drawing on in-depth, qualitative interviews with 56 displaced job seekers, we extend the job searching literature to distinguish two kinds of job searching: self-marketing and self-preservation
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Structural Stigma and 7-Year Improvement in Life Satisfaction among Diverse Groups of Sexual Minority Individuals: A Repeated Cross-Sectional Study across 28 Countries Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-06-17 Richard Bränström, John E Pachankis
Structural stigma toward sexual minority individuals, in the form of discriminatory laws and prejudicial population attitudes, varies widely across countries and is associated with psychosocial health outcomes. Yet, the association of changes in country-level structural stigma over time, as has recently characterized many European countries, with such outcomes is largely unknown. Using data from sexual
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More than Teacher Bias: A QuantCrit Analysis of Teachers’ Perceptions of Young Black Boys’ Noncognitive Skills Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-06-09 Calvin Rashaud Zimmermann, Emmanuel Cannady
Studies of racial bias document how racial meanings shape human perceptions and interactions in a variety of social institutions, including education. However, few sociologists connect quantitative evidence of racial bias to sociological theories of racism. Consequently, quantitative analyses of teacher racial bias are frequently decontextualized. This paper uses national data on kindergarteners to
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Brokers and Boundary Managers: School Expulsions amid the Non-Punitive Turn Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Rebecca D Gleit
Like many American institutions, K–12 schools are increasingly embracing a rhetoric of non-punitiveness and seeking to supply resources instead of imposing harsh punishment. Using ethnographic data from a diverse, suburban, well-resourced public high school, I explore how institutional actors manage this central role in the provision of goods and services. I find that school staff lack the capacity
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Hate as Backlash: A County-Level Analysis of White Supremacist Mobilization in Response to Racial and Gender “Threats” Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-05-08 Colleen E Mills, Margaret Schmuhl, Joel A Capellan, Jason R Silva
Given the resurgence and mainstreaming of the American far-right in recent years, there is an urgent need to better understand the etiology of recent white supremacist mobilization. In the current study, we investigate white supremacist mobilization primarily as a backlash against two threats perceived by white supremacists: racial threat and gender threat. This study extends the defended neighborhoods
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Buen Crédito y Buen Seguro: Legal Status and Restricted Access to Shelter among Low-Income Latina/o Renters in an Immigrant Gateway City Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-05-06 Steven Schmidt
Sociologists have shown how searches for rental housing reproduce inequalities by race/ethnicity and household income in the United States. Yet scholars know comparatively less about how legal status may also limit access to shelter. To address this gap, this article compares the housing careers of 30 low-income, undocumented/mixed-status, Mexican, Central American, and South American families with
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Grieving in the “Golden Cage”: How Unauthorized Immigrants Contend with Death and Mourn from Afar Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-05-06 Kristina Fullerton Rico
In the past four decades, the United States has created a population of long-term unauthorized immigrants. As this population ages, issues of death and dying are increasingly salient. Though we know much about how families maintain close bonds despite geographic distance, death and dying remain undertheorized in transnational family scholarship. Yet the death of a family member can significantly impact
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Earning the Role: Father Role Institutionalization and the Achievement of Contemporary Fatherhood Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Rachel Brown-Weinstock, Sarah Gold, Kathryn Edin, Timothy Nelson
Fatherhood has become an achieved status among complex, disadvantaged families. Stepfathers may have an advantage over nonresident biological fathers in earning the father role; in-depth interview studies reveal that nonresident fathers are often stripped of the father label while stepfathers commonly achieve it instead. This stepfather advantage is surprising given extant institutionalization theory
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In the Name of Love: White Organizations and Racialized Emotions Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-04-27 Sarah Diefendorf, C J Pascoe
This article bridges the gap between insights from a theory of racialized organizations and insights from a theory of racialized emotions by asking what role these emotions play in organizations. Drawing on a combined four years of ethnographic data from two predominantly White organizations in the Pacific Northwest – a conservative evangelical mega-church and a progressive public high school – we
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Cisgendered Workspaces: Outright and Categorical Exclusion in Cisgendered Organizations Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-04-26 Angela Jones
Scholars have only begun exploring how cisgenderism and its byproduct, cissexism, shape organizational processes and how classification systems produce categorical exclusions that harm transgender and non-binary people in cisgendered organizations. Drawing from in-depth interviews with transmasculine and non-binary sex workers, I build on burgeoning research on categorical exclusion in cisgendered
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Latinxs and Racial Frames: The Evolution of Settler Colonial Ideologies in New Mexico Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-04-25 Casandra D Salgado
I leverage the case of Nuevomexicanos, New Mexico’s long-standing Mexican American population, to extend our understanding of how legacies of Spanish and American conquest—that is, double colonization—can inform Latinxs’ understandings of discrimination and race. I show that while most Nuevomexicanos reported experiences with discrimination, they often minimized their racialized experiences because
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Ethnicity, Imprisonment, and Confidence in Police and Courts: Evidence from an International Survey Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-04-16 Timothy L O’Brien
This article investigates the sources of ethnic disparities in confidence in police and courts. After reviewing studies of ethnicity and trust in legal authorities and comparative research on prisons, I argue that ethnic divides in confidence in police and courts are based on power imbalances between majority and minority groups and exacerbated by punitive legal systems. I test these claims using data
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Black Boys’ Perceptions of Depression and Mental Health: Findings from the YBMen Project Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-04-16 Ed-Dee G Williams, Allura Casanova, Daphne C Watkins
Despite growing research dedicated to investigating the mental health of Black boys, few directly examine experiences with their perceptions and understanding of mental health conditions such as depression. This study uses data from a social media-based intervention for Black males, the Young Black Men, Masculinities, and Mental Health project. In a focus group with 8th-grade Black boys, facilitators
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Is There an Idealized Target of Sexual Harassment in the MeToo Era? Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Chloe Grace Hart
Evidence suggests that Americans became more sympathetic toward people who experienced sexual harassment as the MeToo movement surged. Yet how comprehensive these shifts in public opinion have been remains unclear. I hypothesize that women who experience workplace sexual harassment are judged against the archetype of an idealized target of sexual harassment and deemed less credible when they fall short
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“I Thought This Was a Ghost Neighborhood”: How Youth Respond to Neighborhood Change Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Anna Rhodes, Allison Young, Jennifer Darrah-Okike
Relatively little scholarship centers the experiences of Black youth to understand how young people interact with their neighborhood contexts, evaluate the differences between neighborhoods, and adapt to new neighborhoods. Using interviews with 120 Black youth whose families moved from high-poverty central city neighborhoods into lower-poverty, more racially diverse suburban neighborhoods with the
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“We’re Better than Most”: Diversity Discourse in the San Francisco Bay Area Tech Industry Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Sigrid Luhr
Despite recent efforts to diversify their workplaces, tech companies remain predominantly White, Asian, and male—drawing on in-depth interviews with 50 tech workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, this article examines how these workers think about the term “diversity” with respect to their own companies. While previous research on diversity within organizations largely centers on Human Resource professionals
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Precarious Legal Patchworking: Detained Immigrants’ Access to Justice Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-03-10 Mirian G Martinez-Aranda
As immigration enforcement increases, so does the detention of immigrants facing the threat of deportation. Detained without the support of a public defender system—a feature of U.S. immigration law—immigrants face a complex immigration court that is adversarial and can produce dire consequences, including family and community exile, violence, or even death, if they are deported. This paper chronicles
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Too “Full of Gender” How Activists Conceptualize the Promises and Pitfalls of Gender-Neutral Identity Documents Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-03-09 Abigail C Saguy
The social movements literature identifies a dilemma that activists face between principles of affirming and deconstructing identity. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 85 activists from diverse political perspectives, this article shows that, in discussing identity documents (IDs), progressive activists took a practical approach that recognized both the advantages and drawbacks of recognition. They
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On Our Own: Social Distance, Physical Loneliness, and Structural Isolation in the COVID-19 Pandemic Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 Eric Klinenberg, Jenny K Leigh
The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic were defined by distance and isolation, raising concerns about widespread loneliness. Drawing on 55 in-depth interviews with residents of New York City who lived alone during the first wave of the pandemic, this article examines the experience of living alone and dealing with loneliness during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, asking: What are the
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Communication and Decision-Making Processes: Group-level Determinants of State Performance Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-02-27 Luiz Vilaça
Dominant explanations for variation in performance between state organizations focus on macro-level factors, such as political support, and meso-level factors, such as civil service capacity. However, these factors cannot account for why different groups within the same state organization perform better than others. I leverage a comparative analysis of state officials working under particularly challenging
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How Long Does Madness Take? Time and the Construction of Mental Illness in Community Mental Health Work Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-02-25 Owen Whooley
How do temporal understandings shape the construction of social problems and the work of addressing them? This article takes up a social problem with an explicit time dimension – severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI) – to advocate for a focus on time in the analysis of social problems. Drawing on interviews with community mental health workers (n=100) and observations of a police department and
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Live and (Let) Die – Shifting Legitimacies and Organizational Mortality in American Higher Education, 1944–2018 Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-02-17 Mike Zapp, Clarissa Dahmen
Sociologists of U.S. higher education have emphasized the sector’s historical expansion, which has limited the attention given to the dynamics of organizational closure. Drawing on an original dataset comprising colleges and universities across all sectors and tiers, we show how general expansion is tempered by 354 organizational closures between 1944 and 2018. Closures cluster in time between 1964
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To Align or Misalign?: Interpreting INGO-State Partnership in Cambodia Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-01-23 Mary-Collier Wilks
This article uses ethnographic and interview methods to compare two international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) implementing public health programs in Cambodia. Both INGOs formally adopt the same policy, developing state partnership, but implement this policy very differently. One INGO successfully aligns the policy with on-the-ground practice, while the other organization is unable and unwilling
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“When They Hand You Your Uniform, They Forget to Say, ‘Hand Me Your Soul’”: Incidents and Impacts of Institutional Betrayal in Canadian Police Services Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-01-23 Lesley J Bikos
This interdisciplinary study applies Erving Goffman’s sociological theory of the total institution and the psychological framework of institutional betrayal to better understand how ongoing gendered and racialized power structures are maintained in Canadian policing. An intersectional analysis of 116 in-depth interviews with police officers from 31 police services and an on-line, national survey (N
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Destroying Democracy for the People: The Economic, Social, and Political Consequences of Populist Rule, 1990 to 2017 Social Problems (IF 5.397) Pub Date : 2023-01-23 Wade M Cole, Evan Schofer
The recent populist wave has raised questions about the implications of populism for democracy. Some scholars express optimism that populism may be a source of democratic revitalization, bringing about sweeping changes in accordance with the majority will. More often, populism is viewed as a threat to liberal democracy, combining calls for radical change with disdain for core democratic institutions