Social ForcesPub Date : 2025-06-16DOI: 10.1093/sf/soaf081
Luis Edward Tenorio
{"title":"How public benefits make citizens in Latino mixed-status families: self-efficacy, institutional engagement, and concerted citizenship cultivation","authors":"Luis Edward Tenorio","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf081","url":null,"abstract":"Experiences with public benefits can shape recipients’ feelings (belonging) and enactment of citizenship (e.g., political, civic, or economic behaviors). However, we know less about how undocumented and lawful permanent resident (LPR) immigrants fit within this paradigm. This study, based on in-depth interviews with forty working-poor undocumented and LPR Latina immigrant mothers, reveals striking ways in which mothers described the meanings they attached to the benefits received and the social processes their experiences with benefit programs informed. Many mothers described an increased sense of self-efficacy as mothers and as immigrants, expanded notions of government responsiveness, and shifts in how they understood the citizenship (broadly conceived) of their children based on their experiences with benefits. This was even reported among mothers who used programs often seen as stigmatizing or who had challenges arise in petitioning for benefits. Moreover, mothers conveyed these meanings spurring legal, economic, and civic behavioral adaptations in their lives, deepening their engagement as citizens. They also described how the meanings derived from benefits use produced changes in their parenting practices, describing structuring their children’s time and engagement with institutions, as well as fostering reasoning skills and attitudes meant to benefit their children’s long-term integration. I term such practices concerted citizenship cultivation. For children with legal citizenship, concerted citizenship cultivation focused on developing comfort and entitlement within US institutions, socializing interactions with authority figures, and promoting expanded engagement in society. For children who lacked legal citizenship, concerted citizenship cultivation focused on developing positive identity and deepening engagement within protective institutions.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"142 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144304679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ForcesPub Date : 2025-06-16DOI: 10.1093/sf/soaf068
Inés Martínez Echagüe
{"title":"Equality takes work: a process to understand why women still do most of the household labor","authors":"Inés Martínez Echagüe","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf068","url":null,"abstract":"In the United States, widespread support for gender egalitarianism in the household contrasts with the pattern that women continue to do more household labor than men in different-sex relationships. Existing scholarship has revealed the ways in which different-sex couples justify these unequal arrangements. However, we know little about why women do more labor even when they have egalitarian goals and few structural constraints. I address this question by examining whether and how couples attempt to achieve equality and why they so often fail. Data from 40 in-depth interviews with members of 20 cisgender, different-sex, college-educated couples show that, because unequal household labor patterns are so entrenched, having an egalitarian division of labor itself requires work. I theorize and provide evidence for a process I call “equality work,” the work of creating an egalitarian division of labor, which often falls on women. Equality work includes anticipating inequality, strategizing to avoid it, monitoring equality, speaking up about inequality, fixing unequal outcomes, and withholding work. When men don’t strive for equality, women preserve the relationship by doing the labor their partners do not and revising their ideals. Equality work helps us better understand why women do most of the household labor; paradoxically, doing less requires that women work as well. These findings suggest that women are not passively accepting unequal household arrangements but striving to change them.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144296110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ForcesPub Date : 2025-06-11DOI: 10.1093/sf/soaf075
Marissa E Thompson
{"title":"“Paper, practice, ancestry, culture”: Racial frames and contested racial/ethnic census categories","authors":"Marissa E Thompson","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf075","url":null,"abstract":"How do individuals and groups frame their appeals to change official racial/ethnic categories and explain their perceptions of the underlying boundaries that such categories reflect? This article draws from the case of revisions to the 2030 U.S. census categories using the universe of the over 20,000 public comments submitted to the federal government in response to proposed changes. Using an integrated computational text analysis and qualitative approach, I find that three sets of strategies characterize the general deployment of racial frames across comments. The first describes the broader characteristics that are perceived to define a given category; the second grapples with the historical and contemporary nature of racial/ethnic boundaries; and the third situates the placement of a given group in the existing racial order. I then examine the use of these strategies in reference to the proposed Middle Eastern and North African category and to the existing Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino categories. Finally, I examine the resonance of particular frames and strategies by illustrating the extent to which they were submitted on behalf of organizations or duplicated widely by individual actors. Together, this study advances our broader understanding of the dynamic nature of racial/ethnic categories and the boundaries that they are perceived to represent.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144269392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ForcesPub Date : 2025-06-11DOI: 10.1093/sf/soaf076
Liudmila Listrovaya
{"title":"Strategic non-engagement: new Russian political migrants and the effects of extraterritorial spillover of authoritarianism","authors":"Liudmila Listrovaya","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf076","url":null,"abstract":"This research investigates the ways in which authoritarianism constrains the transnational political engagement of recent Russian emigrants, a group known as relokanti. The study centers on three interconnected social roles of relokanti: as citizens of Russia, as family members of those who remain in Russia, and as migrants navigating life in Georgia. Drawing upon twenty in-depth interviews alongside secondary data, the research reveals that despite residing in a host country with greater democratic freedoms and possessing biographical characteristics often associated with political activism, relokanti deliberately refrain from engaging in political expression, even within the private sphere of family interactions. I conceptualize this strategic withdrawal from all transnational political action as silence after exit—a form of political non-engagement shaped by the indirect yet pervasive effects of the extraterritorial spillover of authoritarianism. Findings of this work contribute to the literature on diaspora and transnational political action by centering cases of political disengagement and underscoring the importance of incorporating constraint into our understanding of political life of migrants under authoritarian reach.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"137 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144269391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ForcesPub Date : 2025-06-10DOI: 10.1093/sf/soaf078
Kevin Drakulich, Christian Law
{"title":"Who watches the watchmen? intersectional threat and public opinion about policing the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests","authors":"Kevin Drakulich, Christian Law","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf078","url":null,"abstract":"When Americans protest the police, how should the police treat the protesters? Police exert social control on behalf of the state and have been implicated in the maintenance of inequalities, yet are also tasked with managing protests, even protests of the police. So, how do citizens feel about possible restrictions to their right to protest, a critical feature of a functional democracy? While the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were largely peaceful, some Americans supported the use of repressive “law and order” responses. Amid simultaneous movements for racial equality (Black Lives Matter) and gendered equality (#MeToo), an intersectional threat perspective encourages us to consider the potentially unique reactions of people who perceive simultaneous threats to multiple privileged identities. We theorize that support for aggressive policing approaches to racial justice protests acts as a synchronized performance of race and gender, enforcing the symbolic boundaries that undergird structural inequalities. Specifically, we suspect that perceived threats to male privilege will also be relevant to these views, at least among those who also perceived threats to white privilege. Using data from the 2020 American National Election Study survey—shortly after the mass protests of the spring and summer of that year—we find a conditional relationship for perceived gender threat, which appears relevant to views of policing the Black Lives Matter protests only among those who also perceive threats to white privilege. We discuss implications for understanding public comprehension of other social phenomena, particularly during multiple overlapping civil rights movements.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144260666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ForcesPub Date : 2025-06-09DOI: 10.1093/sf/soaf074
Lazarus Adua, Brett Clark
{"title":"Another elephant in the room? how energy-intensive lifestyles may undermine the fight against climate change","authors":"Lazarus Adua, Brett Clark","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf074","url":null,"abstract":"Climate change represents a major threat to the world, yet policy responses to it have been tepid and ineffective. Recent dire warnings and more frequent climate-related extreme weather events have stirred greater interest in more assertive responses, mostly around two beloved “solutions or policy areas”—transitioning to renewable energy and energy efficiency improvement. This study investigates whether these solutions lessen carbon emissions. More crucially, it scrutinizes whether they are resilient against consumptive lifestyles, an elephant in the room often ignored by governmental decision-makers. Dynamic fixed effects modeling of cross-national longitudinal data shows renewable energies offer opportunities for reducing carbon emissions, but energy intensity prevents us from realizing their full environmental benefits. We find evidence in our analysis that energy intensity as well as other socioeconomic factors are suppressing the influence of renewable energies on carbon emissions. The analysis also shows that the relationship between national energy-intensity, which taps inefficiency, and carbon emissions is moderated by energy-intensive lifestyles (energy use per capita). This finding suggests reducing energy intensity may offer some reductions in carbon emissions, but such efforts must be paired with reductions in energy consumption per capita.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144238065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ForcesPub Date : 2025-06-05DOI: 10.1093/sf/soaf069
H Jacob Carlson, John R Logan, Jongho Won
{"title":"The changing spatial pattern of metropolitan racial segregation, 1900–2020: the rise of macro-segregation","authors":"H Jacob Carlson, John R Logan, Jongho Won","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf069","url":null,"abstract":"This paper tracks 120 years of Black-white segregation in US metropolitan areas. We draw on comprehensive Census data at consistent small-scale geographies to study segregation trajectories in 219 metropolitan areas since 1900. We update past research to show that total segregation in metropolitan areas peaked around 1960 and has now fallen below its 1930 level. Our major focus is on the spatial components of segregation. We show that two types of macro-segregation—increasing racial disparities between cities and their surrounding areas and rising segregation between communities within suburbia—became substantial only after 1950 and have remained at a similar level since 1960. At that time, micro-segregation (separation between neighborhoods in cities and in suburbia) had begun to fall. Multivariate analyses over time show how suburban fragmentation, socioeconomic differences between Black and white workers, and changes in the size of the Black population were associated with these trends in each component of segregation. The durability of segregation today is largely due to macro-segregation, which by 2020 accounts for nearly half of total metropolitan segregation.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144228472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Perpetual encounters: reconceptualizing police contact and measuring its relationship to black women’s mental health","authors":"Faith M Deckard, Shannon Malone Gonzalez, Yasmiyn Irizarry, Jaime Feng-Yuan Hsu","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf070","url":null,"abstract":"Research and media discussion of police contact routinely conceptualize it as time-constrained interactions between officers and civilians. However, extant literature documents preparation for encounters and post-encounter advocacy, which each challenge restricted understandings of contact and, importantly, its relationship to mental health. We introduce “perpetual encounters” to both theoretically and empirically move closer to the temporally unbounded and enduring way that police contact is experienced in black women’s everyday lives. Utilizing a novel, nationally representative dataset on their policing experiences, we explore how mental health is independently and conjointly associated with three dimensions of police contact: preparation, police stops, and advocacy against police violence. Beyond exemplifying how pervasive the police are in the day-to-day lives of marginalized communities, extending the scope of contact recognizes preparation as a significant threat to mental health and advocacy as a health-promoting activity. This study supports moving beyond discrete notions and measurement of police contact to process-oriented understandings and relational modeling.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"117 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144202187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ForcesPub Date : 2025-05-29DOI: 10.1093/sf/soaf062
Warren Lowell
{"title":"When are they insecure? Housing arrangements and residential mobility among families with children","authors":"Warren Lowell","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf062","url":null,"abstract":"A growing proportion of children live in unaffordable, overcrowded, or doubled-up housing, raising concerns among scholars of child wellbeing. These arrangements may affect children through increased exposure to insecure mobility such as frequent or reactive moves. Though scholars consider resource-strained arrangements insecure, the assumption that they lead to insecure mobility is quantitatively untested. Further, demographic theory suggests that these arrangements would lead to purposive moves, which are calculated adjustments to things like costs, space, or independence that have plausibly neutral or beneficial effects for children. I use individual-fixed effects regressions and restricted-access residential histories from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to assess how living in resource-strained housing predicts exposure to mobility outcomes for children. Consistent with literature on housing insecurity, severe cost burdens and doubling up with non-kin predict higher probabilities of either frequent or reactive moves, and severe overcrowding precedes moves to high-poverty neighborhoods. Aligned with a traditional view on mobility, analyses also suggest that cost burdens, overcrowding, and doubling up lead to purposive moves to less expensive housing, more spacious housing, and more independent housing arrangements, respectively. Together, these findings suggest that housing strains, in the absence of poverty, increase the likelihood of a set of moves that have generally ambivalent implications for children’s life chances. However, families in poverty may lack the resources necessary to make moves that address their housing needs and aspirations. These findings contradict long-held rules of thumb, suggesting a reconsideration of how we collectively define, study, and respond to insecurity.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"71 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144165147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social ForcesPub Date : 2025-05-28DOI: 10.1093/sf/soaf059
G Cristina Mora, Chelsea Daniels, Tianna Paschel
{"title":"What Lies between the Poles? Selective Uncertainty and Occluded Bias in Immigration Attitudes in California","authors":"G Cristina Mora, Chelsea Daniels, Tianna Paschel","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf059","url":null,"abstract":"Although much extreme discourse is found at the poles, we still know little about how individuals in the center make sense of immigration as “complicated” and even “too complex” to make sense of. Such issues are important to address if we are to better understand the contemporary landscape of bias and belonging and the character of attitudes in the middle. We examine the issue by drawing on a unique survey of Californians and illustrative, linked, in-depth interviews. Using latent class analysis we identify five distinct attitudinal classes, showing that three, constituting 40 percent of respondents, lie between consistently pro- and anti-immigrant stances. Our interviews reveal that rather than expressing undifferentiated views, those in the middle express patterned forms of selective uncertainty that, in turn, allow them to frame the issue differently. At an ideological level, selective uncertainty helps individuals to narrow the scope of immigration in terms of what is determinable, and thus rationalize political commitments with outgroup bias toward the undocumented. At a discursive level, selective uncertainty affords an opportunity to soften or occlude bias and create a distance from the poles, especially on the right. Taken together, our findings open up the “black-boxed” middle of immigration attitudes to reveal its distinct categorical characteristics and show how selective uncertainty allows individuals to make sense of their positions. We discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of our findings, including for understanding immigration attitudes as a field of positions more generally.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144165148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}