The Kids Are All Right

February 23, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Poster presentations have long been a part of academic conferences. At the ESS today, in the Grand Ballroom, seventy undergraduates put up posters summarizing their work. Some of the posters were syntheses based on library research, but several of the students had done their own original work. These kids were better than all right, and there was a quite a diversity of method.


Sara Tomczuk (The College of New Jersey) has worked summers on Long Beach Island (“down the shore”). Motels, stores, and restaurants there bring girls from Eastern Europe to work, paying them far less than they would pay Americans. Sara interviewed some of these girls about the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of these arrangements.

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Erin Pollard (Ursinus) used official records and persistent telephoning to dig out information about the racial composition of private and public schools in five cities.

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Christa Vanet (Penn State, Abington) observed interactions between the homeless and the non-homeless.

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Tamaria Green and Regine Saintilien (The College of New Jersey) did a case study of a toxic waste dump slated to be located near a school. They got their information from the DEP, from their own attendance at a variety of meetings, even from Google-eye overhead photos of the area.

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Skye MacKay (University of New Hampshire) did a survey to find correlates of having been tested for HIV. Interesting, the largest beta was for age, not number of sexual partners.

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The graphics were often impressive, especially for those of us who remember the hand-drawn posters of the previous century. But even more encouraging was listening to so many students who were truly excited about their work – the process of research as well as the results.

A Roomful of Ethnographers

February 22, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

It was snowing on the Eastern Sociological Society meetings. Sociologists stood in the shelter of the Roosevelt Hotel.

Inside, in a small conference room, I found day two of the Miniconference on Tally’s Corner Forty Years Later. Ethnographers talking ethnography. They had some questions about what Liebow might have missed or how his interpretations might be incomplete. But all agreed the book is a classic, and they all had their well-thumbed copies.
Liebow was a tall white guy who hung around with black streetcorner men in Washington DC in the early 1960s. And he himself said that things had so changed by the end of that decade that the same project would have then been impossible.

And now? Most of people in that conference room today agreed that the major changes are crime and drugs. For the men in Tally’s Corner scuffling by with dead-end jobs, the streetcorner was a respite, a comfort, a haven for “identity reconstruction,” as Al Young put it. But now, the street is a place of anxiety, tension, and fear. Al quoted one of his informants on his way to a night shift job who was confronted by a few ten-year-olds on the bus.

“What are you ridin’?” asked one of the kids (what gang are you with?).

“I’m riding the Madison bus to work,” he said.

The kid hit him on the head with a beer bottle, and the man was so enraged that in a flash he had thrown the kid down and was on the verge of stabbing him with the 7-inch knife he carried for protection at that hour.

Reuben May, whose Living Through the Hoop is an ethnography of kids in a small Georgia city, had a similar take. Choices for these kids have narrowed. Either they’re inside the gym, or outside on the corner “slinging rock.”

(The panel: left to right, Reuben May, Deidre Royster, Katherine Newman, Al Young, Mitch Duneier.)

I’m sorry I missed Part I of this miniconference yesterday. I was told that Mitch Duneier reported on correspondence he’d come upon between Liebow and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose “Moynihan Report” came out after Liebow had done his research but before the publication of Tally’s Corner. The letters provide some backstory for both publications. And Herb Gans was in the conference room that day to add his own personal recollections of these men at that historic moment.

Unique Week

February 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I guess social scientists have a preference for generalization, for relationships among variables that travel well, that obtain in several settings. We’re puzzled by the unique. So I was struck by two blog posts this week.

Chris Uggen cites a column in Runner’s World magazine to the effect that when you take up long-distance running, your times improve steadily for the first seven to ten years; after that, it’s all downhill. Or is it uphill? Whatever, your times get slower. But – and here’s the interesting part– the curve applies no matter how old you are when you start. The forty-year-old who started running at age twenty is long past his peak, while the sexagenarian who started at fifty is in his prime.

Chris, who himself runs respectable marathons, speculates that this age-invariant pattern may be unique to running. (Well, not quite. He implies that the curve of frequency of sex in a relationship may also be age-invariant.)

Meanwhile, over at The Monkey Cage, Jennifer Hochschild has an interesting finding on skin tone among African Americans and Hispanics. It’s a variable that correlates with just about everything social, economic, and psychological But Jennifer is a political scientist, and she was interested in political correlates. And she couldn’t find them. She held the data upside-down and shook it vigorously, threatening worse if it didn’t give her what she wanted, all to no avail. “Perceptions of discrimination against oneself or one’s racial or ethnic group, strength of group identification, partisanship or ideology, organizational membership”– nothing correlated.

“We finally realized that it was the very lack of pattern that was the interesting finding.”

Her finding of no finding didn’t just violate the academic preference for pattern. It was also politically incorrect – so much so that one audience member at a conference called it “bullshit research.” Not nice, but it’s refreshing to know that academic conferences have hecklers. It makes us seem a shade less stodgy.

Contexts - Colors and Consciousness

February 17, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I can’t remember the blog where I came across these optical illusions (a sign that I'm reading too many blogs), but the link is here. Apparently these are well known even outside perception-biz circles – even the teenager-in-residence here had seen them – but they were new to me.
The two lettered squares, A and B, are actually the same shade of gray.
Here’s another.


The “blue” tiles on the top face of the left cube are the same color as the “yellow” tiles in the top of the right cube.

It’s hard to believe – after all, seeing is believing. But you can go here and see these and other illusions of color, brightness, and form along with masks that block out everything but the relevant squares. Unfortunately, it happens instantly, and all you can do is toggle back and forth between the masked version and the fully unmasked version. So it’s not so convincing.

Better to do it gradually.

I copied the top illusion into Paint and started using the Eraser. After a bit of erasing the shading difference was only slightly diminished. (Yes, I know my eraser technique is sloppy, but I never keep inside the lines either when I do my coloring books.)

But after only a bit more erasing, the illusion became clear.

(It’s harder to do with the cubes because the target squares are so small that you have to do a lot of very careful erasing. When you do, you see that both the apparently yellow and blue squares become gray.)

I’ve got to show this to my class on Monday, I thought.

“But what’s the sociological significance?” asked the voice on my right shoulder.

“To hell with significance,” said the voice on my left shoulder. “Just take a few minutes at the start of class – the time some people spend calling the roll – just to show them something interesting.”

Waste time with cool stuff, or teach sociology?

Then I realized that in fact there was a sociological message – contexts. Whatever intrinsic qualities things may have, we invest them with meaning (and color), and we derive that meaning (or color) from their contexts.