Sociological QuarterlyPub Date : 2026-01-01Epub Date: 2026-02-12DOI: 10.1080/00380253.2026.2622465
Mariana Amorim, Megan Doherty Bea, Asude Aydagul
{"title":"\"It's a Last Resort. But It's a First Resort\": A Relational Perspective of Payday Loan Use.","authors":"Mariana Amorim, Megan Doherty Bea, Asude Aydagul","doi":"10.1080/00380253.2026.2622465","DOIUrl":"10.1080/00380253.2026.2622465","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the United States, there is widespread use of payday loans, a high-cost credit product, among lower-income populations. Existing literature suggests that structural constraints like limited banking access or behavioral factors like lack of financial knowledge explain why so many individuals use these costly services. Yet neither explanation sufficiently captures the complexity of decision-making around using payday loans. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with payday loan borrowers, this study reframes payday loan borrowing as a future-oriented strategy that balances immediate financial needs, social relationships, and long-term aspirations. The interviews advance a relational account of decision-making, revealing how borrowers use payday loans to work toward an aspired future self-one that is self-reliant, with savings, good credit, and strong, tension-free relationships with friends and family. Findings highlight why individuals may make financial decisions that diverge from recognized \"best practices.\"</p>","PeriodicalId":48007,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Quarterly","volume":"67 2","pages":"386-412"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13246145/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148213030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Guest, Family, or Roommate? How Framing Guides Private Hospitality of Ukrainian Refugees in Poland","authors":"Marta Skowrońska","doi":"10.1080/00380253.2025.2538168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2025.2538168","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48007,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Quarterly","volume":"67 1","pages":"27-55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147910608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Deana A. Rohlinger, Christian Vaccaro, Brian McKernan, Maria C. Ramos
{"title":"Political Claimsmaking and Emotional Expression","authors":"Deana A. Rohlinger, Christian Vaccaro, Brian McKernan, Maria C. Ramos","doi":"10.1080/00380253.2025.2479520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2025.2479520","url":null,"abstract":"Research on emotional stimuli in politics often overlooks how citizens use emotion when engaging politicians. We begin to address this gap in the literature by examining the relationship between frames, emotion, and sentiment in individual claimsmaking. Our analysis proceeds in two steps. First, we use Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to classify sentiment and frames in 153,288 emails sent to Governor Jeb Bush about the Terri Schiavo case. We find that the religious frame increases the likelihood that an email is positive, while the legal and medical frames lower that likelihood. Then, we qualitatively analyze 999 randomly chosen emails from the corpus to understand how individuals use emotions in their claimsmaking. We find that individuals use emotion to modify frames in ways that signal their understanding of a target's authority relative to other actors. Individuals used positive emotions with the religious frame to signal their approval of Bush's actions. In contrast, individuals used negative emotions with the legal frame to convey their disapproval of other actors, such as Terri's husband, who were seen as misusing their authority and endangering Terri's life. We conclude with a discussion of how scholars might better understand the role of emotion in individual claimsmaking.","PeriodicalId":48007,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Quarterly","volume":"66 3","pages":"496-515"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147877873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unconventional Work, Conventional Problems: Gig Microtask Work, Inequality, and the Flexibility Mystique","authors":"Reilly Kincaid, Jeremy Reynolds","doi":"10.1080/00380253.2023.2268679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2023.2268679","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTGig work platforms often promise workers flexibility and freedom from formal constraints on their work schedules. Some scholars have questioned whether this “formal flexibility” actually helps people arrange gig work around non-work commitments, but few studies have examined this empirically. This paper examines how hours spent in microtask work – a form of gig work with high formal flexibility – influence work-to-life conflict (WLC) relative to conventional work hours, and how these relationships differ by workers’ gender and financial situation. Fixed-effects regressions using panel data from workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform (MTurk) suggest that microtask work hours are just as closely associated with WLC as conventional work hours. Moreover, microtask work disadvantages the same groups as conventional work (i.e. women and financially struggling workers). Only financially comfortable men seem immune from microtask hours’ association with WLC. This suggests that the benefits of gig work’s formal flexibility are often elusive. We argue that platforms like MTurk promote a flexibility mystique: the illusory promise that gig work empowers workers to set their own schedules and earn decent income without disrupting their personal/family lives. The gig economy’s expansion may thus do little to bring work-life balance to the masses or alleviate inequalities at the work-life nexus.KEYWORDS: Flexibilitywork scheduleswork-life conflictgendergig work Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. We use “work-to-life conflict” rather than Greenhaus and Beutell’s (1985) original term “work-family conflict” because the original concept is too narrow to appropriately capture the scope and heterogeneity of both non-work demands and workers themselves.2. Wald tests comparing coefficients for non-gig and microtask hours in Model 2 confirm that they are not statistically different from each other (p = .95).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by [Grant # 2105-32350] from the Russell Sage Foundation. Any opinions expressed are those of the principal investigator(s) alone and should not be construed as representing the opinions of the Foundation.Notes on contributorsReilly KincaidJeremy Reynolds Dr. is Professor of Sociology at Purdue. He studies how workplaces contribute to inequality. He is particularly interested in the extent to which people can arrange their paid work schedules to accommodate life outside of work and in what happens when they cannot. Dr. Reynolds is a former winner of the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Work-Family research, and his work has been supported by funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. His research has appeared in leading journals including American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Work and Occupations, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Journal of Family Issues.Jeremy ReynoldsReilly Kincaid is a PhD candidate i","PeriodicalId":48007,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Quarterly","volume":"102 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135809346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Darren E. Sherkat, Derek Lehman, Nabil Bill Julkif
{"title":"Mooring Christian Nationalism: How Religious Institutions, Participation, and Beliefs Inform Christian Nationalism","authors":"Darren E. Sherkat, Derek Lehman, Nabil Bill Julkif","doi":"10.1080/00380253.2023.2263495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2023.2263495","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTChristian nationalism has been linked to a variety of political and social outcomes in the contemporary United States, however little research has investigated factors that give rise to it. Most scholars examining Christian nationalism contend that it is unmoored from extant social institutions, and even oppositional to institutional Christianity. This claim is associated with earlier research arguing for the declining influence of denominations, and particularly mainline Protestantism. In contrast, social movement theory views Christian nationalism as an ideological outgrowth of religious organizations, structured by exclusivist religious beliefs, and reenforced through religious participation. Using data from the General Social Survey (GSS) this investigation examines how religious and political factors inform subscription to Christian nationalism and explores how religious and political commitments are connected. In general, the findings support the expectations of the social movement perspective. Christian nationalism is strongly predicted by ties to sectarian Protestantism, religious participation, and fundamentalist beliefs, and it is not embraced by secular and non-Christian Americans.KEYWORDS: Christian nationalismreligionpolitics Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. A large and growing body of studies have examined the effect of United States Christian nationalism on varied outcomes such as: opposition to same sex marriage (Perry and Whitehead Citation2015b); support for Donald Trump (Baker, Perry, and Whitehead Citation2020b; Perry, Whitehead, and Grubbs Citation2022; Samuel et al. Citation2021; Whitehead and Perry Citation2020a); views about and behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic (Corcoran, Scheitle, and DiGregorio Citation2021; Perry, Whitehead, and Grubbs Citation2020, Citation2021a; Whitehead and Perry Citation2020b); opposition to pornography (Perry and Whitehead Citation2020); support for abusive police behavior (Perry, Whitehead, and Davis Citation2019); opposition to immigration and negative views of immigrants (McDaniel, Nooruddin, and Faith Shortle Citation2011; Samuel, Rackin, and Froese Citation2021; Sherkat and Lehman Citation2018; Shortle and Keith Gaddie Citation2015); tolerance of racists (Davis and Perry Citation2021); opposition to science (Baker, Perry, and Whitehead Citation2020a); punitive attitudes (Davis Citation2018); perceptions of discrimination against Christians (Perry, Schnabel, and Grubbs Citation2022); support for racist family policy (Perry and Whitehead Citation2015a, Citation2015b) and ignorance about American political history (Perry et al. Citation2022).2. While the use of a single item to tap Christian nationalism may not be ideal, there are substantial problems with the multi-item measure used in the Baylor data. Recent research finds a substantial lack of unidimensionality in the scale (Davis Citation2023; Jesse and Adler Citation202","PeriodicalId":48007,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Quarterly","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135570178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Labor Market Inequality, Debt, and the Consequences of Sub-Baccalaureate Higher Education","authors":"Alec P. Rhodes","doi":"10.1080/00380253.2023.2253315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2023.2253315","url":null,"abstract":"U.S. young adults in the 2000s and 2010s entered a national labor market that was highly stratified by education. While the socioeconomic consequences of a four-year bachelor’s degree are well documented during this period, less is known about the consequences of seeking a sub-baccalaureate credential. I analyze the employment, earnings, and student debt outcomes associated with several sub-baccalaureate experiences differentiated by enrollment, credential level, and for-profit attendance using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1997 Cohort. Using fixed-effects regression models, I find that certificates and associate degrees are associated with employment advantages relative to a high school diploma. However, young adults with some two-year college and no credential or a certificate have no higher earnings than those with a high school diploma. Sub-baccalaureate credentials can also be costly, as those who attend a for-profit college have more student debt than those who do not. Results shed light on labor market inequality among a large but understudied segment of higher education and underscore the importance of considering debt alongside labor market outcomes in analyses of the socioeconomic consequences of higher education.","PeriodicalId":48007,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Quarterly","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135814335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Juanita Vivas Bastidas, Maria Akchurin, Dana Garbarski, David Doherty
{"title":"How Local Perceptions Contribute to Urban Environmental Activism: Evidence from the Chicago Metropolitan Area","authors":"Juanita Vivas Bastidas, Maria Akchurin, Dana Garbarski, David Doherty","doi":"10.1080/00380253.2023.2250394","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2023.2250394","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTIn this paper, we examine how structural and social-psychological factors combine to motivate urban environmental activism. Specifically, we argue that residents’ everyday perceptions about environmental, social, and political conditions in their neighborhoods and cities are connected to their likelihood of involvement in environmental collective action. We use logistic regression models and original survey data from the 2021 Cook County Community Survey (n = 1,069) to investigate whether urban residents’ perceptions of the conditions where they live are associated with their likelihood of participating in protests or public meetings around environmental issues. Our findings show that, in the context of the Chicago metropolitan area, residents who perceive worse environmental conditions in their communities, feel a greater sense of belonging to their neighborhoods, and feel they understand local politics and have political power are more likely to mobilize. In contrast, those who are pessimistic about the future of their neighborhoods are less likely to act. The study suggests that participation in urban environmental collective action is partly explained by how people interpret the daily surroundings they routinely navigate and experience where they live.KEYWORDS: Environmental activismlocal perceptionsneighborhoodsurban AcknowledgmentsWe would like to thank the Loyola University Chicago’s Department of Sociology for funding Juanita Vivas Bastidas’s research assistantship with Maria Akchurin, which supported our collaboration on this paper. Next, we would like to thank Keyla Navarrete, Sophia Bardelli, Gabrielle Castro, Miranda Hertzog, Andrew Byrne, and other members of the Cook County Community Survey team for their feedback and encouragement during the development of the survey’s environment block. We would also like to thank audience members from the Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL), the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research (MAPOR), and the Midwest Sociological Society (MSS) for their comments and questions. Finally, we would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their time spent recommending helpful revisions to this manuscript. The Cook County Community Survey funding came from LUC Office of Research Services (ORS).Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Ethics DeclarationsThe Institutional Review Board at Loyola University Chicago approved the project (#3115).Supplementary dataSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2023.2250394.Notes1. A limitation of web-based surveys using quota sampling is that they may underrepresent respondents who are harder to reach or have a lower propensity to respond, such as older respondents, those without Internet access, and those who do not speak English.2. We ran our models with the complete dataset, including respondents who identified as non-binary and as Asia","PeriodicalId":48007,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Quarterly","volume":"205 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135395210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sad Puppies and SJWs: Symbolic Revolution and Challenges to Field Orthodoxy in the Struggle for Control of Science Fiction’s Hugo Awards","authors":"Gregory Goalwin","doi":"10.1080/00380253.2023.2252866","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2023.2252866","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In 2013 a group of science fiction authors launched a campaign to reform the Hugos, one of science fiction’s most prestigious awards. Dubbing themselves “Sad Puppies,” these activists sought to correct what they viewed as a political imbalance. Science fiction, they argued, had moved away from entertaining story telling in favor of heavy-handed message fiction meant to spread pernicious liberal values. This article draws on an analysis of internet posts by actors involved in the movement to examine the Puppies’ efforts to reform the science fiction field, reclaiming it as a space for conservative authors and fans. I argue that the leaders of the movement were able to build small fan communities into a larger social movement by framing the movement in such a way as to link their efforts to exogenous political and cultural debates occurring in proximate social fields. This analysis demonstrates the processes by which tournament rituals in popular culture can come to serve as contests of values, arenas within which larger political and cultural conflicts are waged.","PeriodicalId":48007,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Quarterly","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135982205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Grappling with Chance in a Changing World: Towards a Typology and Understanding of Fortune","authors":"Matthew L. Turnbough","doi":"10.1080/00380253.2023.2252897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2023.2252897","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The social changes tied to late modernity and an increasingly precarious labor market have facilitated the emergence of fortune as a potentially significant element for understanding contemporary society. This article approaches this contingent, individualized, secularized, and uncertain panorama from the perspective of the young adults tasked with navigating these societal transformations and the effects of a prolonged economic crisis. Based on a discourse analysis of 20 in-depth interviews and three focus groups with young adults in Spain, it examines how chance/luck is employed by these individuals. A typology is presented and discussed, consisting of four different relationships with fortune. In the participants’ narratives this paper finds a meritocratic approach, which involves an understanding that good luck is attained through individual initiative, but also relationships less concerned with human agentic power where it can be conceived as an explanatory or meaning making device, as a threat or as an element tied to hope. Consequently, the article seeks to address a gap in sociological research, which has tended to overlook the analytical relevance of fortune, arguing that it constitutes a central element to the symbolic frameworks of these vulnerable young adults as they make their way through a changing world.","PeriodicalId":48007,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Quarterly","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42632001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The New Class and Right-Wing Populism: The Case of Wisconsin","authors":"C. Goldberg, M. Movahed","doi":"10.1080/00380253.2023.2236662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2023.2236662","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT While previous scholarship highlights the importance of cross-class alliances between intellectuals and workers in past social-democratic and labor movements, the growth of right-wing populism may signal the breakdown of this political alignment today. We investigate the extent to which intellectuals and workers remain politically aligned through a case study of political developments in the state of Wisconsin, which pioneered social-democratic reforms in the US in the early twentieth century and then turned toward right-wing populism in the twenty-first century. We draw on Alvin Gouldner and Pierre Bourdieu to theorize intellectual-worker alliances. We then present historical evidence that an intellectual-worker alliance played an important role in the earlier period. Logistic regression analysis with survey data shows continued political antagonism between the state’s wealthiest and most highly educated citizens in the later period, as well as an enduring political alignment of highly educated and working-class Wisconsinites. Our results demonstrate that right-wing populism prevailed in Wisconsin despite an intellectual-worker alliance, not because the alliance broke down. We conclude with a discussion of what these findings imply about contemporary right-wing populism beyond Wisconsin.","PeriodicalId":48007,"journal":{"name":"Sociological Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42962711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}