Social ProblemsPub Date : 2023-07-08DOI: 10.1093/socpro/spad033
Richard Lofton
{"title":"“I was called everything but a student”: Blackness and the Social Death of Student Status","authors":"Richard Lofton","doi":"10.1093/socpro/spad033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spad033","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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 of student status within America’s collective consciousness. Through the voices of Black youth, this article provides evidence that Black students in Baltimore have not been fully granted the immunity of student status. Instead, Black youth participants describe harm in their schools and neighborhoods, as well as a tenuous relationship between Blackness and “studentness.”","PeriodicalId":48307,"journal":{"name":"Social Problems","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49120584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ProblemsPub Date : 2023-06-30DOI: 10.1093/socpro/spad027
Matthew Baggetta, Ricardo A. Bello‐Gomez
{"title":"Can You Sing Your Way to Good Citizenship?: Recreational Association Structures and Member Political Participation","authors":"Matthew Baggetta, Ricardo A. Bello‐Gomez","doi":"10.1093/socpro/spad027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spad027","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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 effects. We find that selection dynamics are the primary driver of the relationship between recreational associations and member political activity. We also find some evidence that associations foster new political activity in members through an interpretive mechanism—but not through developmental mechanisms. Recreational associations with more-participatory structures and broader organizational identities lead some members to interpret their recreational activity as publicly-oriented. Adopting publicly-oriented interpretations is related to certain kinds of new political activity. The results suggest that, overall, recreational associations are having little impact on political participation; when they do, they do so not by teaching participants how to do civic work but by altering how members think about civic life.","PeriodicalId":48307,"journal":{"name":"Social Problems","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48010267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ProblemsPub Date : 2023-06-24DOI: 10.1093/socpro/spad032
Jordan Zvonkovich, Jeffery T. Ulmer
{"title":"Segregation and Group Threat: Specifying Hispanic-White Punishment Disparity","authors":"Jordan Zvonkovich, Jeffery T. Ulmer","doi":"10.1093/socpro/spad032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spad032","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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 is segregation, yet research on social contexts and criminal sentencing has largely ignored this feature of local social structure. However, segregation might condition the effects of minority population size on dominant group threat responses in social control. Focusing on Hispanic-White segregation, we assess competing hypotheses regarding segregation’s role in conditioning Hispanic-White punishment disadvantage. Pennsylvania, which has recently undergone significant population change related to these processes, presents a unique and valuable context for study. Analyses of statewide sentencing data from 2013–2017 along with Census and American Community Survey data, reveal that Hispanic-White residential segregation seems to foster greater Hispanic punishment disadvantage. Moreover, segregation specifies the association between local Hispanic population size and Hispanic-White incarceration disparity. In counties with both greater than average Hispanic population share and greater segregation, Hispanic defendants faced even greater incarceration disparities.","PeriodicalId":48307,"journal":{"name":"Social Problems","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44384408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ProblemsPub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1093/socpro/spad026
Britany J Gatewood, B. Muhammad, S. Turner
{"title":"Breaking Generational Curses: Success and Opportunity among Black Children of Incarcerated Parents","authors":"Britany J Gatewood, B. Muhammad, S. Turner","doi":"10.1093/socpro/spad026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spad026","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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 without considering racial implications. Using a critical race theoretical perspective, this study highlights the counternarrative of success by analyzing 59 in-depth interviews. Findings center on the ways adult Black children of incarcerated parents define success, which differs from middle-class, Eurocentric definitions of economic success, college graduation, marriage, and children as the success indicators. Success in relationships, community, education, and mental health emerged as the themes that define success. Findings show that their relationship with others (including their incarcerated parent), giving back to the community, educational experiences, and improving their mental health were indicators that they have “made it.” With support from their personal networks, they can succeed despite institutional and structural barriers. This study may assist policymakers, organizations, and schools with shifting societal perceptions to tailor resources for Black children of incarcerated parents to help invest in their futures.","PeriodicalId":48307,"journal":{"name":"Social Problems","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45428918","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ProblemsPub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1093/socpro/spad013
S. Bowen, A. Hardison-Moody, Emilia Cordero Oceguera, Sinikka Elliott
{"title":"Beyond Dietary Acculturation: How Latina Immigrants Navigate Exclusionary Systems to Feed Their Families","authors":"S. Bowen, A. Hardison-Moody, Emilia Cordero Oceguera, Sinikka Elliott","doi":"10.1093/socpro/spad013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spad013","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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 interviews conducted over a five-year period, refute the idea of a unidirectional process in which immigrants abandon dietary customs from their home countries. Instead, we show how food decisions are complex, contradictory, and contextual. Latina immigrant mothers embraced and resisted parts of dominant food cultures. They strategically took risks and made tradeoffs to ensure that their families had enough food and the right kinds of food. However, political and economic structures limited their access to food and impeded their ability to autonomously make food decisions. We argue that an unequal and industrialized food system, restrictive and punitive immigration policies, and narrowly-defined food assistance programs infringe on immigrants’ ability to feed their families. By excluding and othering immigrant families, these structures reduce immigrants’ autonomy and perpetuate inequalities, contributing to what previous studies have described as dietary acculturation.","PeriodicalId":48307,"journal":{"name":"Social Problems","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45478988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ProblemsPub Date : 2023-06-21DOI: 10.1093/socpro/spad030
Steven H. Lopez, Lindsey M. Ibañez
{"title":"Marketing the Self vs. Preserving the Self: Resisting Downward Mobility in the New Economy","authors":"Steven H. Lopez, Lindsey M. Ibañez","doi":"10.1093/socpro/spad030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spad030","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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. Self-marketers are willing to reinvent themselves to pursue opportunities wherever they perceive the best payoffs. By contrast, self-preservers, drawing on affective commitments to particular kinds of work, limit their searches to their current occupation. In this paper, we show how the neoliberal economy buffets and preys on both types of job seekers and how bounded rationality and asymmetric information problems leave self-marketers vulnerable to downward mobility via cons, scams, and predatory business models. But self-preservation searches contain their own pathways to downward mobility: descents into low-wage work that begin as temporary measures often become permanent. Thus, even though self-marketers and self-preservers embrace very different job search strategies, neither flexibility nor passion offers protection against downward mobility in the post-Great Recession economy. We conclude with some reflections on how these two job search orientations may help us better understand current labor market upheavals.","PeriodicalId":48307,"journal":{"name":"Social Problems","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49367435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ProblemsPub Date : 2023-06-17DOI: 10.1093/socpro/spad029
R. Bränström, J. Pachankis
{"title":"Structural Stigma and 7-Year Improvement in Life Satisfaction among Diverse Groups of Sexual Minority Individuals: A Repeated Cross-Sectional Study across 28 Countries","authors":"R. Bränström, J. Pachankis","doi":"10.1093/socpro/spad029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spad029","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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 minority respondents (2012: n=82,668; 2019: n=96,576) living in 28 European countries, this study analyzes the association between change in structural stigma from 2012 to 2019 and change in life satisfaction among sexual minority individuals during the same period. Results showed that life satisfaction had improved among sexual minority individuals in all countries between 2012 and 2019 (β = 0.33, 95% confidence interval: 0.30, 0.36), but the improvement was stronger among those living in higher-stigma, compared to lower-stigma, countries and more as a function of changing laws than attitudes. Changes also varied by relationship status; the strongest improvement in life satisfaction as a function of decreased structural stigma was found among partnered sexual minority individuals. The findings support the relevance of structural stigma for sexual minority individuals’ life satisfaction and call for further research to understand the differential impact of structural stigma across sexual minority subgroups.","PeriodicalId":48307,"journal":{"name":"Social Problems","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48080095","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ProblemsPub Date : 2023-06-15DOI: 10.1093/socpro/spad024
Baptiste Brossard, Melissa Roy, Julia Brown, Benjamin Hemmings, Emmanuelle Larocque
{"title":"On the Social Existence of Mental Health Categories: The Case of Sex Addiction","authors":"Baptiste Brossard, Melissa Roy, Julia Brown, Benjamin Hemmings, Emmanuelle Larocque","doi":"10.1093/socpro/spad024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spad024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Mental health categories can circulate in societies regardless of whether they are recognized by medical professionals. This article asks why some labels are adopted en masse to commonly characterize some forms of distress, while other labels remain confined to specialist spheres. Contrasting with many examples of medicalization, “sex addiction” offers a heuristic case study because it was only after its exclusion from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1994 that it became widely used to pathologize sexual excess in Western cultures. To understand how this and other categories acquire such popularity, it is necessary to account more explicitly for the multiple social appropriations of these categories within various non-medical fields and examine how they circulate between these fields. Drawing on two years of qualitative data collection from North American and Australian social institutions of non-medical therapy, law, the media, and religion, this article proposes a theoretical and methodological framework for studying the “social existence” of mental health categories such as sex addiction.","PeriodicalId":48307,"journal":{"name":"Social Problems","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ProblemsPub Date : 2023-06-07DOI: 10.1093/socpro/spad025
Rebecca D. Gleit
{"title":"Brokers and Boundary Managers: School Expulsions amid the Non-Punitive Turn","authors":"Rebecca D. Gleit","doi":"10.1093/socpro/spad025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spad025","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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 to successfully serve as brokers for all their constituents, forcing decisions about how to allocate their limited resources. Staff navigate these constraints by strategically managing the boundaries of the institution, redefining who gets to remain a member and who they will continue brokering for. I describe how and when these exclusions occur and show that students from less advantaged backgrounds are at higher risk of expulsion because they depend more on the school for resources than their privileged peers. Further, informal methods of exclusion become favored in this non-punitive pivot, meaning that official data likely undercount the number of students forcibly removed from their schools. As institutions take on more resource brokering amid the turn towards non-punitiveness, the decisions of boundary managers – those actors with the power to enroll and expel members – become increasingly consequential for the allocation of public resources.","PeriodicalId":48307,"journal":{"name":"Social Problems","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48713135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ProblemsPub Date : 2023-06-06DOI: 10.1093/socpro/spad028
Calvin Rashaud Zimmermann, E. Cannady
{"title":"More than Teacher Bias: A QuantCrit Analysis of Teachers’ Perceptions of Young Black Boys’ Noncognitive Skills","authors":"Calvin Rashaud Zimmermann, E. Cannady","doi":"10.1093/socpro/spad028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spad028","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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 examine racial/ethnic disparities in teacher perceptions of boys’ noncognitive skills. We find evidence of teacher racial-gender bias that casts young Black boys as more often exhibiting poorer noncognitive skills as compared to their non-Black peers. Interestingly, we find no difference between teachers’ ratings of Black and non-Black boys’ interpersonal skills. We analyze our findings using sociological theories of racism. By doing so, we provide a Du Boisian framework for interpreting evidence of racial bias in education. We also discuss the implications of our paper for contextualizing racial biases in other social institutions.","PeriodicalId":48307,"journal":{"name":"Social Problems","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41581556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}