Totally 80s Sociology!

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I came across a New York Times article from 1985 that interviewed a handful of well known sociologists about the future of their profession and discipline. I found it fascinating because, on one hand, it was totally ‘80s. It discussed some of the central issues that cropped up in American sociology in the mid-1980s. In particular, it emphasized the quantitative/qualitative split that generated conflict in some sociology departments; the article referenced Paul Starr’s failed Harvard tenure attempt for reputedly being insufficiently scientific.

On the other hand, the issues, conflicts, and central concerns of American sociologists a quarter-century ago strongly resemble those of the early 21^st century (poverty, education, occupations, causes of human suffering etc.).

[As a member of the KU community, you’re able to access this article through Lexis/Nexis or New York Times Historical, both are accessible through the KU Library Databases page. Here’s the cite: The New York Times April 28, 1985, Section 4; Page 7, Column 1; “Debating the Direction of the Discipline: Sociologists examine an issue that's very close to home."]

Of the sociologists profiled in the article, I think William Sewell did the best job of explaining sociology to news readers (news readers then and now):

The mainstream of sociology is empirical and quantitative. And I would guess about 85 percent of sociologists are of that persuasion. But that doesn't mean they have no use for theoretical issues. The divisions aren't all that clear, and they've existed ever since I've been a sociologist, for about 50 years.

The big movement in the last 15 years or so has been the rise of ''complex multivariate'' styles of research. All it means is that there are many variables that help to explain social behavior, and that they must be taken into account. And to take them into account requires big samples, large data bases.

Say that you're trying to develop a social policy for increasing equality of educational opportunity. Well, you have to know why some people receive less education than others. So you have to investigate such things as an individual's social origins, the occupation and education of his or her family, how rich or poor they were. You'd want to know what effect race and sex have on educational opportunity. How much does intelligence matter?

To put all these factors together you need statistical techniques that tell you which make the most difference and which handicaps are amenable to policy changes. Then the policy-makers can target their programs. We've always had that style of research, but with the coming of large-scale computers and large sample surveys, it's been possible to do many more of those kinds of studies. And as our younger scholars have learned those techniques, it has taken away from the more purely theoretical kinds of operations.

-- Brian

Facebook & Research Ethics: The 411 on the IRB

I didn’t expect the NYT Facebook article to generate a negative reaction in the letters-to-the-editor section, and I certainly didn’t think it would come from fellow social scientists. Writer Donna Gaines decried “the reckless intrusion of adults into one of the few remaining sacred spaces where young people congregate for the creation of subculture, meaning and community.” She called for “a serious and lengthy conversation among scholars and youth activists about power and rights of access.” It’s a fine sentiment, but none of the research projects discussed in the article posed the ethical questions about which she’s concerned. The Harvard team, for instance, is mining Facebook to look at big trends, not individual kids. To my mind, the letter is simply obnoxious hand-wringing because it assumes that these ethical debates and conversations aren’t happening among researchers, a state of affairs to which the letter-writer has no evidence. I’m sure the researchers interviewed in the original article would have had a lot to say if Stephanie Rosenbloom (the article’s author) had asked them about ethics and responsibilities.

Donna Gaines has had an eclectic career, and she’s best known for her ethnography of suburban kids, Teenage Wasteland. Both of her books received popular and (some) academic praise, but they aren’t standard sociology insofar as they mix journalism and memoir. I think of her as more of a “pop sociologist” because she isn’t affiliated with a research university, doesn’t teach sociology, and she writes for a popular audience instead of an academic one. Most of her paid work derives from journalism and consulting. I don’t mean “pop sociologist” as an insult. Barbara Ehrenreich is another author I consider a “pop sociologist,” but I have a tremendous amount of respect for her work. I read one of her books as a high school student one summer and it probably played a small role in pushing me toward a sociology career. So, there’s nothing inherently wrong with working outside of a university and being a pop sociologist.

Colleges and universities have what are called Internal Review Boards (or “IRB”). If you pursue sociology at KU, you’ll learn more about research ethics and the role of IRBs in SOC 310. KU has its own Human Subjects Committee with an Internal Review Board. IRBs regulate and give approval to research on human subjects. Do you want to explore the views of college-aged men and women about sexual abstinence? You have to write a proposal and submit it to the IRB. They’ll consider such issues as: Will the students be anonymous? Will the researcher ask any potentially damaging or overly-intrusive questions? Are there any risks associated with participating in the research? Is the researcher fully informing the interview subjects about the project and their role in it?

While being a “pop” anything is not necessarily a liability, if Gaines actively participated in a university community she wouldn’t assume that sociologists ignore the “many compelling ethical and methodological issues” posed by researching Facebook. The IRB process and Human Subject Committees force sociologists and other social scientists to confront these issues when studying anything involving living humans. Gaines writes: “Before we proceed as scholars, let us first be citizens.” Fine; show me that we aren’t.

Okay, so I wasn’t thrilled about what Gaines had to say and have now expended more words writing about it than her original letter. All the same, let’s think about if we were on an IRB and received a proposal from a young sociologist wanting to study and write a book about Facebook. What will we allow her to do? (Collect information about social network nodes and connections? Collect personal information – age, race, sex – on individual users?) What will we prevent her from doing? (Using real names? Printing information about relationships? Printing information about employment?)

-- Brian

More Facebook Sociology

Did Megan Hirt’s Jayplay article inspire the New York Times to write a story about how Facebook has become an academic Disneyland for social network analysis? Hey, it’s possible. This morning’s NYT article, “On Facebook, Scholars Link Up with Data,” examines how sociologists and other social scientists use Facebook (the 6^th most trafficked web-site in the U.S.) for their research. The article cites the “Facebook Friends” study I referenced earlier, as well as some other Facebook-centered research projects. As one of the editors of the American Sociological Review (the top sociology journal in the U.S.) noted in the article, “For studying young adults, Facebook is the key site of the moment.”

In Unit II, I will discuss Pierre Bourdieu’s contribution to studies of inequality. In a sentence, Bourdieu complicated Marx’s map of inequality by adding social capital and cultural capital to the mix. Social capital describes the strength and quality of one’s social network. A 5^th grader with strong social capital will have friends with whom to pass notes about the weird new kid (who has no social capital). If I’m a social scientist that wanted to study bullying behavior, social capital would be an important variable to consider, and Facebook would be one way to understand the flows of social capital in American schools.

The New York Times article describes Facebook as “a petri dish for the social sciences — sociology, psychology and political science — that particularly excites some scholars, because the site lets them examine how people, especially young people, are connected to one another, something few data sets offer, the scholars say.” The article quotes Harvard professor Jay Kaufman: “One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste. Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?” Another Harvard sociologist (Nicholas Christakis) writes: “We’re on the cusp of a new way of doing social science. Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.”

From the article: “In other words, Facebook — where users rate one another as ‘hot or not,’ play games like ‘Pirates vs. Ninjas’ and throw virtual sheep at one another — is helping scholars explore fundamental social science questions.”

I think this means it's time for me to update my profile!

-- Brian

Brains, Race, & IQ

This Dec. 9 op-ed piece in the New York Times by University of Michigan psychology professor Richard Nisbett makes a lot of smart points about race and IQ. He states that “the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic.” His article discusses a number of psychological studies that lend support for his overall argument.

-- Brian

Facebook: Artificial Friends or Helpful "Weak Ties?"

Megan Hirt has an engaging and well-written essay about Facebook in the Dec. 2007 Jayplay. She quoted from a number of Facebook users and she talked to several scholars, including KU sociologist Bill Staples: “In today’s culture, we like to see ourselves and see others—a combination of exhibitionism and voyeurism. Facebook is the perfect example of how these two come together.”

The article also quoted from John Grohol, a psychologist, who muses “We feel like it’s bringing us closer to the person, but this is an artificial connection.” I would have liked to have seen some evidence, though, to back up that claim. A team of researchers led by Nicole Ellison conducted a study of Facebook users, and their work was eventually published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Their article (“The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends:’ Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites”) suggests some social benefits of Facebook. They write:

Returning to our original research question, we can definitively state that there is a positive relationship between certain kinds of Facebook use and the maintenance and creation of social capital. Although we cannot say which precedes the other, Facebook appears to play an important role in the process by which students form and maintain social capital . . . Our participants overwhelmingly used Facebook to keep in touch with old friends and to maintain or intensify relationships characterized by some form of offline connection such as dormitory proximity or a shared class.

Their research also suggests that Facebook permits students to develop and expand their “weak ties.” Years ago, sociologist Mark Granovetter used sophisticated statistical analysis to show how people we “kind of know” are often more important for our social lives than previously thought – hence his famous article “The Strength of Weak Ties.” Granovetter concluded that we don’t necessarily find jobs from our BFF, but we often find them from a “friend of a friend” or a “friend of a friend of a friend.” Likewise, it’s not a stretch to think of “Facebook friends” as social capital, and the corresponding sense of social belonging we feel is hardly “artificial.” Grohol might be right that the Facebook phenomenon is redefining the word “friend,” but I don’t share his pessimism.

- Brian

Imagining Social Change

Back in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, a 5MB hard drive weighed over a ton and cost $3,200 a month to lease. Now, we comfortably store 400 times that capacity on the 2GB flash drives attached to our key chains. In the middle of the 20^th century, people imagined what life would be like at the cusp of the 21^st century, and some of them were remarkably accurate. Through snopes, I found this 2-minute video from the early 1960’s. It’s fascinating! The creators accurately anticipated email (an “electronic correspondence machine”) and online shopping. They didn’t anticipate the drastic social changes that occurred in the 1960’s and 1970's that increased women’s political and economic power. They predict technological change, but social stasis; men are breadwinners who make the money and pay the bills, and wifey goes shopping and cares for the home. It’s like the creators of The Jetsons projecting 1950’s gender stereotypes onto the space age.

So, what’s going to happen in 2057? And why can we wrap our heads around technologies that are 50 years down the road, but we can’t conceive of social arrangements outside the present?

- Brian

Sociology in the News

Harvard sociologist Bruce Western has studied the US prison system for many years, examining how imprisonment exacerbates economic inequality in various ways. He’s used his sociological research to assist and develop programs for inmates, with an aim to reduce the alienating effects of incarceration such that prisoners will become productive members of society when released and less likely to commit new crime. Western & his research program exemplify a core element of sociological inquiry: sociology as a critique of the status quo.

“The Right Way to Handle Former Inmates.” New York Time November 29, 2007.

from the article: "Created in 1999 in Brooklyn, ComAlert was recently the subject of a state-funded study carried out by the district attorney’s office in collaboration with Bruce Western of Harvard, a sociologist and criminal justice expert. The program is still evolving and is far from perfect. But the study shows that former inmates are more likely to get jobs and keep jobs — and more likely to remain out of jail — if they undergo a rigorous regime of counseling and drug treatment while participating in a companion program that offers them immediate work experience and job training."

- Brian

The Fools Quest for Biological Determinants

A friend who teaches Communication Studies at a different university forwarded me this story. Sociology, as a whole discipline, is skeptical of explanations for intelligence rooted in biological and genetic sources. Earlier efforts to link intelligence to genetics produced studies that seemed to justify present-day social inequality based on supposed differences in genetically-based intelligence, leading to various crackpot and racist conclusions.

“Genetics=intelligence” stories historically turn out bad for women and minorities, but sociologists reject them because (among other reasons) the quest asks the wrong questions. Case in point: Dr. Plomin and his search for the magic intelligence gene or genes. His team of researchers has a huge sample (7,000) from which they identified 37 variants in 6 genes. “But the individual effects of these genes was barely detectable.” Taken together the genes account for less than one percent of variation in intelligence.

What would a biological determinist conclude from the article? They just haven’t looked hard enough for the magic gene! Now, to be fair, mainstream print and television media routinely simplify and distort the goals and findings of research scientists, and it's possible that this research has a more immediate beneficent purpose in finding clues about mental retardation, genetically-based learning disorders, or something like that. But the way the author framed the story, and the quotations from the experts, suggests that the genetics/intelligence link is a foregone conclusion in their minds.

What do I conclude from reading this article? The researchers and the journalist reporting on their studies are asking the wrong questions about intelligence and about variations in intelligence across groups. Of course a gene cluster doesn’t account for any significant variation in “intelligence.” As a society, we reach agreements about what it means to be "intelligent," and different social groups (with varying levels of power and capacities for action) make distinctions about intelligence that reflect social criteria. Intelligence is a social construction.

Brian