This project aims to answer a critically important question of public policy: Does effective child support enforcement lead to a change in the incidence of abortion across the United States?
Using state-level data collected from 1978–2003 from a variety of sources, we employ fixed effects regression analysis to examine whether financial security as measured by five types of child support enforcement effectiveness impacts abortion outcomes.
We find that child support enforcement effectiveness decreases the incidence of abortion as measured by the abortion rate, but not the abortion ratio.
Income transfer policies such as child support enforcement can affect certain fertility outcomes such as abortion rates across the states.
Residential property tax protests have drawn public debate, but relatively little is known about who protests, the outcomes of protests, and consistency among local review boards. This study examines these topics among 171,228 homeowners of Tarrant County, Texas who filed a protest between 2001 and 2009.
Using data from an appraisal district in Texas, this study examines market differences, housing types, and appraisal board outcomes over time to assess the degree to which market predictors contribute to differences in protest rates and outcomes in 40 municipalities.
Protest rates tend to change little over time and hold within a narrow range. A small percentage of protests conclude with a full hearing; decisions tend to favor protestors.
Contrary to public opinion, protests are not surging. For protestors, market value within their communities emerges as a better predictor of filing a protest than simply market value of individual properties.
This study examines how schools situated in different “contexts of reception” go about the critical task of engaging and supporting immigrant parents.
Using data from the 2003–04 National Center for Educational Statistics’ Schools and Staffing Surveys, we estimate regression models to test the effects of cultural brokers, teacher training, and professional development on school policies and practices specifically designed to engage and support immigrant parents as well as more traditional, school- and home-based parent involvement programs.
We find cultural brokers and school attributes are more strongly associated with the type and magnitude of parent involvement programs in established destinations, whereas teacher training and in-service professional development are most consistently associated with these policies in new destination schools. We also find a strong association between minority principals (African American or Latino) and parent involvement programing in new destinations, suggesting that principals of color are taking an active role in addressing the needs of immigrant and minority parents.
As the U.S. population becomes increasingly multicultural, these findings have important policy implications for both federal and local governments.
Objectives. In contemporary U.S. elections there is no shortage of allegations concerning election fraud. These claims are, however, based in large part on anecdotal evidence, unsubstantiated assertions, or the study of reported complaints. The absence of a general methodology to actively search for evidence of election fraud has resulted in policy arguments devoid of empirical data and systematic analyses. Methods. In this article, we present a general methodology to study contemporary election fraud based on the Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) process. We then apply this approach to a case study of a particular type of fraud. Results. After examining approximately 2.1 million votes cast during the 2006 general election in Georgia, we find no evidence that election fraud was committed under the auspices of deceased registrants. Conclusion. In this article, we have introduced a general methodology for the scientific study of election fraud. We urge social scientists to make use of such a framework to investigate the prevalence of different types of fraud across varying election cycles and jurisdictions.
]]>Universities increasingly emphasize the importance of leadership skills, but budget shortfalls in public high schools threaten the availability of leadership opportunities for many youths. Few studies, however, have examined the impact of high school leadership experience on key economic outcomes. This study narrows this gap by estimating the causal impact of leadership in high school on educational attainment measured several years later.
The article uses data from the National Education Longitudinal Study. To address selection bias, the effect of high school leadership is estimated using ordinary least squares, propensity score matching, and instrumental variables models.
Every estimation method and model specification examined implies that high school leadership has a large, positive impact on postsecondary educational attainment.
This article indicates the impact of high school leadership is, at a minimum, nontrivial. This result implies decisions regarding financial cutbacks for extracurricular activities should not be taken lightly.
We test the hypothesis that exile politics—measured by support for anti-Castro policies—contribute to the overwhelming preference for the Republican Party among South Florida's Cuban Americans.
Logistic regression is used to analyze six surveys conducted in South Florida between 1995 and December 2008.
Among Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County, measures of exile politics account for a recent downward shift in Republican registration, as well as for much of the variation in Republican registration by race and age. Also, measures of exile politics partly explain differences between Cubans and non-Cubans with regard to partisan preference.
Although some scholars argue that domestic issues have taken a back seat in guiding party preferences for Miami's Cubans, a decline in support for anti-Castro policies appears to have created a greater opening for domestic concerns in the 2008 election cycle.
We examine the effects of interest community density on generalist interest organizations. A core element of population ecology theory is competitive exclusion, which suggests two hypotheses. First, through niche partitioning of the issue space among similar organizations and the comparative advantages of specialist organizations, generalists in heavily populated systems struggle to secure members more than their counterparts in less densely populated ones. Second, surviving generalists narrow the scope of their lobbying activities to fewer issues on which they hold comparative advantage.
We test both hypotheses through regression analysis of data on the mobilization and lobbying focus of U.S. state Chambers of Commerce.
Both participation in state Chambers and the number of bills that Chambers track decline as the business interest community becomes more densely populated.
We conclude that even state Chambers—the old bulls of the lobbying pasture—are powerfully influenced by competition among business interest organizations.
We determine whether Americans have reevaluated opinions toward southerners following the transformation of the region in the decades following the civil rights movement, focusing specifically on how opinions toward southerners vary across racial and regional groups.
We use both descriptive and multivariate methods to evaluate opinions toward southerners using American National Election Study (ANES) data from 1964 to 2008.
Opinions toward southerners have increased dramatically over time. People living in the South display more positive feelings toward southerners than individuals residing outside the region, although the gap is much smaller today than in previous decades. In addition, southern blacks' opinions toward southerners have improved dramatically. These trends hold even when controlling for a host of other factors.
Being a southerner is no longer a pejorative in the minds of many Americans. Blacks, in particular, have reevaluated their opinions of southerners as a group.
This article seeks to analyze varying collateral-consequences policies—laws restricting the rights and privileges of people who have had contact with the criminal-justice system, particularly those with conviction records—in the American states.
State policies in eight areas are examined, coded, and combined into an eight-point scale, which then serves as the dependent variable for a regression analysis. The analysis models such restrictions as products of ideological and partisan, racial, and criminal-justice-based predictors.
Neither Democratic Party influence nor crime levels appear to influence significantly state collateral-sanctions levels; more liberal citizen ideology predicts slightly more lenient policies, while harsher restrictions accompany rising state incarceration rates. Racial variables press in opposite directions: within the model, scores rise as a state's black population increases, but fall as the percentage of African Americans in the state legislature rises.
Formally creatures of civil rather than criminal law, these “collateral” restrictions appear to possess important affinities with other punitive policies in the United States, yet also resist unambiguous linkage to ideological, criminal-justice, and racial predictors.
We examine how acculturation experiences such as discrimination and social acceptance influence the daily psychological well-being of Latino youth living in newly emerging and historical receiving immigrant communities.
We use data on 557 Latino youth enrolled in high school in Los Angeles or in rural or urban North Carolina.
Compared to Latino youth in Los Angeles, Latino youth in urban and rural North Carolina experienced higher levels of daily happiness, but also experienced higher levels of daily depressive and anxiety symptoms. Differences in nativity status partially explained location differences in youths’ daily psychological well-being. Discrimination and daily negative ethnic treatment worsened, whereas social acceptance combined with daily positive ethnic treatment and ethnic and family identification improved, daily psychological well-being.
Our analysis contributes to understanding the acculturation experiences of immigrant youth and the roles of social context in shaping adolescent mental health.
This study attempts to isolate instructor-specific measures that may be sources of grade inflation and to measure their relative importance.
We estimate a fixed-effects model, using by far the most extensive data set related to grade inflation ever assembled. Our data comprise 48,038 courses taught by 1,871 distinct instructors at a large public university over a two-decade period.
Our results suggest that female faculty members are the most likely to inflate grades, while ethnicity has a lesser effect.
Characteristics of instructors, in particular gender, affect the degree of observed grade inflation, controlling for student- and department-specific effects.
We report on a nation-wide study conducted for federal land-management agencies. Congress mandated a new annual pass for recreational access to U.S. public lands.
To assist policymakers in setting a price for the new pass, we administered a national telephone survey with more than 2,000 respondents. Using “contingent valuation” methods, we model willingness to pay for the pass at different prices. Our research design lets us estimate and adjust for hypothetical bias.
We show that survey respondents (especially those least familiar with the hypothetical good) tend to overstate their true willingness to pay.
We present the results and describe how our conclusions were used by policymakers to set the price of the new pass at $80. We also demonstrate the external validity of our findings by comparing the projected pass sales from our model to subsequent actual sales.
This article explores gender differences in attitudes about the seriousness of the environment as a problem in China using the “2008 China Survey.”
We use generalized ordered logit models to analyze survey respondents’ environmental attitudes.
Our results indicate that there is indeed a “gender gap” in environmental attitudes in China, but the pattern is reversed from what has been generally found in previous work conducted in the United States and Europe. Chinese men, not women, show a greater concern about environmental problems and the seriousness of the environmental degradation in China. Further, we find that this gender gap is based largely in the substantial economic and educational differences between men and women in contemporary China.
This study emphasizes the mediating influence of socioeconomic variables in explaining gender attitudes toward the environment in China. Our findings suggest that in different contexts, women may be faced with difficult decisions between immediate economic necessities and long-term environmental concerns. The observed environmental gender gap in China will likely persist unless further economic development results in improved access to education and economic conditions for Chinese women.
Objective. Universities often promote their diversity as a selling point, but are students of different races at these universities integrated socially? Using theories on social energy, I examine racial segregation among university students.
Methods. Quantitative data were collected on student residence patterns and social groupings formed at lunch tables at a case study university. In addition, interviews were conducted with 25 students.
Results. Students are substantially more segregated than chance predicts. Blacks and Hispanics are particularly segregated. Interviews reveal that these students spend large amounts of social energy coping with prejudice and discrimination as well as functioning in a student culture they find unwelcoming and foreign.
Conclusions. Social energy drains on minority students from discrimination and an unwelcoming campus culture reduce energy left for interracial interaction, making these racial groups more segregated. The study highlights the need for understanding segregation as a function of the interaction of out-group preferences, in-group preferences, and the larger social context.
This study examines how commitment to sectarian Protestant religious groups and fundamentalist beliefs in the inerrancy of the Bible influence basic scientific literacy.
I analyze data from the 2006 General Social Survey (N = 1,780), which included a 13-point examination of scientific facts and reasoning. Ordinary least squares regression models are estimated to determine the impact of religious affiliations and beliefs net of other control variables such as race, gender, education, income, region, and rural residence.
Analyses show that sectarian Protestants, Catholics, and people with fundamentalist beliefs in the inerrancy of the Bible have significantly lower levels of scientific literacy when compared with secular Americans. Religious differences are identifiable in multivariate analyses controlling for other demographic factors.
Religion plays a sizeable role in the low levels of scientific literacy found in the United States, and the negative impact of religious factors is more substantial than gender, race, or income.
Examine variables relating to support for science in the United States to determine whether a rejection of Darwinian evolution is related to support for government funding of science.
Ordinal logistic regression using questions from the 2006 General Social Survey.
A rejection of human evolution is significantly related to support for science even after controlling for a variety of variables.
Beliefs regarding human evolution have a unique effect on attitudes regarding government support for scientific research that do not merely channel religion and/or politics. Debate today over evolutionary theory revolves around what constitutes good science. Those who reject Darwinian evolution may do so because of the messages critical of scientists and the scientific method. A possible consequence of this controversy is lower support for science.
Many have wondered why U.S. women continue to shun certain STEM fields, including science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This study investigates this question and examines the pathways that women and men follow in attaining their STEM bachelor's degrees.
Using NELS 88-00 and the postsecondary transcript data, the descriptive analysis examines gender differences in the three stages of the STEM pipeline: expected college major, first major, and bachelor degree major. The multivariate analysis examines the outcomes of STEM degree attainment, the subfields attainment and the pathways in a series of logical steps.
Drawing from the pipeline model and its associated cumulative disadvantage theory, and the alternative framework of revolving door theory, analyses from this study indicate that men are more likely than women to follow the complete persistence pathway to attain STEM degrees, but women are as persistent as men once they expect a major in STEM as high school seniors. High school achievement, attitudes, and course taking are related to the subfields attainment, as well as the pathways of the STEM degree attainment.
Taken together, the results are more aligned with revolving door theory and support the contextual variability in the salience of gender to understand gender differences in attaining STEM fields.
The current study examines upstream engagement initiatives using the issue of nanotechnology as a case study.
A series of logistic and OLS regression analyses explore data from a laboratory experiment on information-seeking behavior, knowledge, and willingness to engage with the issue of nanotechnology in the future.
Our results fail to offer evidence of positive relationships between anticipated discussion and learning and the willingness to engage with the issue of nanotechnology in the future. In addition, our results show that anticipated discussion with opposing others actually encourages individuals to seek out an editorial or opinion piece first as opposed to a news item.
Our findings point toward important variations in the kinds of information-seeking behaviors likely to emerge from different conditions under which individuals may be motivated to learn more about emerging science issues, and provide practical insights into which kinds of information-seeking behaviors are most conducive to knowledge gain and issue engagement.
Following evolutionary psychology, we argue that physical stature matters in preferences regarding political leadership. Particularly, a preference for physically formidable leaders evolved to promote survivability in the violent human ancestral history.
We present two studies of original data to assess individual attitudes regarding the association between physical stature and political leadership. Analytical methods include ordered probit regression.
The findings are consistent with the evolutionary theory presented here. Study 1 indicates that individuals tend to prefer leaders with greater physical stature, while Study 2 indicates that males with greater physical stature are more likely to think of themselves as qualified to be a leader and, through this increased sense of efficacy, they are more likely to demonstrate interest in pursuing a leadership position.
Consistent with emerging evidence from other research perspectives, political behavior, in this case preferences regarding political leadership, is shaped by both environmental and evolutionary forces.
The impact of political efficacy on political participation has been established in numerous classical studies of political behavior. However, the effects of more general measures of efficacy on political efficacy and voter turnout have received almost no attention. Additionally, seemingly independent contemporary developments in the field of political science proposed that political participation is heritable. In this study, we propose to link the two literatures, highlighting one possible mechanism through which genetic inheritance of political behavior is possible in the absence of the evolutionary time horizons of voting behavior. We theorize that heritability of psychological dispositions, such as one's sense of control, is more plausible and indirectly, through political efficacy, could have an influence on one's decision to vote.
We test our hypotheses using a classical twin study design (ACE models) and Cholesky decomposition models on data from the MIDUS (first wave) and MNTPS twin surveys.
Empirically we find a relationship between general efficacy and turnout. We show that numerous operationalizations of efficacy are highly heritable and their covariance with turnout is predominantly driven by underlying additive genetic sources. On the other hand, environmental covariation between general and political efficacy and turnout is not significantly different from zero.
Our analysis contributes to a better understanding of how one's sense of control influences voting behavior. Our results provide sufficient evidence to claim that the covariation between these two traits can primarily be attributed to genetic factors. However, this is certainly not the only pathway that explains the heritability of voter turnout.
Contemporary scholarly debate emphasizes the importance of spouse selection on population stratification, typically focusing on the traits of spouses themselves. In this study spouses and their parents were analyzed to resolve the effects of direct spousal assortment from family background assortment on three social traits that spouses correlate the highest: education, church attendance, and political affiliation.
The data set is comprised of a core of spousal pairs and their parents assessed by self-report and a more extensive set of individuals on whom there are only ratings by relatives for educational attainment, church attendance, and political preference. Structural equation models were fitted to the observed polychoric correlations by diagonal weighted least squares.
For education and church attendance, assortment was based primarily on the traits of the spouses themselves, but models including independent assortment for the traits of parents-in-law gave a better fit. For political affiliation, assortment based on social background influenced by the traits of both parents gave a better fit.
The findings demonstrate that in humans, spousal similarity may reflect processes of selection and stratification that are more complex than commonly supposed in most models for family resemblance and social diversity.
To survey the contemporary literature in the social and biological sciences relevant to race that examines both the reality and the usefulness of the concept. Race is considered a major correlate of criminal behavior, and thus a fresh look at the concept is of obvious importance to criminologists and sociologists.
Social, genetic, medical, and criminology databases were keyword searched for articles on race that either addressed its existence/nonexistence or usefulness as a concept.
We find that biologist and social constructionists talk past one another and never venture beyond the comfort of their own positions. Genetic studies using very few chromosomal loci find that genetic polymorphisms divide human populations into clusters with almost 100 percent accuracy and that they correspond to the traditional anthropological categories.
There is much to gain by recognizing that these categories differ genetically, and that we can dispense with the term race in favor of some other term such as population or ethnic group and nothing would be lost except a word.
Sensitivity to disgust predicts social attitudes, but this relationship can shift depending on gender and whether response to disgust is measured through surveys or physiological tests. We are interested in exploring the relationship between gender, political preferences, and different measures of disgust.
We systematically evaluate these interrelationships by comparing self-reported disgust sensitivity and changes in skin conductance while viewing disgusting images, accounting for gender and attitudes toward gay marriage.
We find that although there is no physiological difference between genders, opponents of gay marriage conform to gender-role expectations in self-reports, with women reporting higher levels of disgust than males. For males, physiological response better predicts attitudes on gay marriage because there are physiological, but not self-reported, differences between supporters and opponents. Self-report and physiology both predict gay marriage attitudes for females.
Our findings suggest that combining traditional survey and physiological measures provides leverage in exploring questions related to social behaviors and their origins.
Group identity is a central concept in many social science disciplines. We investigate why people identify with groups and show favoritism to in-group members. We anticipate group identifications are substantially influenced by genes and social environments, likely working through stable personality traits.
Using twin study data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS I), we investigate the heritability of in-group identification and favoritism, as well as the extent to which the genetic bases of these orientations are shared with genetic underpinnings of personality traits, primarily focusing on the “Big Five”: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability/neuroticism.
Group identification is largely attributable to genetic factors. However, environments also affect group identification. The heritability of personality traits accounts for a modest portion of the genetic variation of group identification.
Our findings have implications for the study of collective action, identity politics, and the growing research program investigating social and political behavior genetics.
Segregation is considered to be a fundamental cause of race/ethnic disparities in health. However, very few studies have tested whether levels of segregation are related to health outcomes using multilevel data and appropriate methodologies. In this study, we investigate the relationships between two distinct dimensions of segregation and allostatic load to determine whether the experiences of individuals in segregated neighborhoods are related to allostatic load as a possible predisease indicator.
To test our hypotheses, we utilized publicly available data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III, 1988–1994. We utilized random-intercept hierarchical generalized Poisson regression models to conduct our multivariate analyses.
We find that inflammatory response is related to both the evenness and exposure domains of segregation. That is, both the unequal distribution of minority groups over areal units as well as the degree of potential contact between minority and majority group members are related to these predisease pathways.
In this study, we build on prior research by Massey (2004) to investigate the relationships between two distinct dimensions of segregation and allostatic load. Our results indicate that segregation is a significant predictor of allostatic load, net of individual-level characteristics.
In this article, we seek to better understand how a genomic vision of addiction may influence drug prevention and treatment. Though social influences on substance use and abuse (e.g., peer and family influence, socioeconomic status) are well documented, biomedical intervention is becoming increasingly technoscientific in nature. We wish to elucidate how emphasizing biological influences on substance use may lead to a vision of addiction as a phenomenon isolated within our bodies and neurochemistry, not lived daily within a complex social web of relationships and a particular political economy, including the tobacco industry, which aggressively markets products known to cause harm.
We explore the emerging view of addiction as a “disease of the brain” in open-ended interviews with 86 stakeholders from the fields of nicotine research and tobacco control. Interview data were analyzed using standard qualitative techniques.
Most stakeholders hold a medicalized view of addiction. Though environmental variables are understood to be a primary cause of smoking initiation, the speed and strength with which addiction occurs is understood to be a largely biological process. Though stakeholders believe that an increased focus on addiction as a disease of the brain is not likely to lead to widespread unrealistic expectations for cessation therapies, they remain concerned that it may reinforce teenagers’ expectations that quitting is not difficult. Finally, stakeholder responses indicate that genetic and neuroscientific research is unlikely to increase or decrease stigmatization, but will be used by interest groups to buttress their existing views of the stigma associated with smoking.
We argue that the main potential harms of focusing on biological etiology stem from a concept of addiction that is disassociated from social context. Focusing on genetic testing and brain scans may lead one to overemphasize pharmaceutical “magic bullet cures” and underemphasize, and underfund, more traditional therapies and public health prevention strategies that have proven to be effective. Genetic research on addiction may fundamentally change our conception of deviance and our identities, and may thus transform our susceptibility to substance use into something isolated in our biology, not embedded in a biosocial context.
We test whether the phrase “Freshman 15” accurately describes weight change among first-year college students. We also analyze freshmen's weight change during and after college.
This is the first investigation of the “Freshman 15” to use a nationally representative random sample, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). The data are analyzed using descriptive statistics, regression analysis, simulations, and longitudinal analysis.
Freshmen gain between 2.5 to 3.5 pounds, on average, over the course of their first year of college. Compared to same-age noncollege attendees, the typical freshman gains only an additional half-pound. Instead of a spike in weight during the freshman year, college-educated individuals exhibit moderate but steady weight gain during and after college.
Anti-obesity efforts directed specifically at college freshmen will likely have little impact on obesity prevalence among young adults.