Life course transitions in early adulthood and SES disparities in tobacco use

A huge literature has documented adult socioeconomic disparities in smoking but says less about how these disparities emerge over the life course. Building on findings that smoking among adolescents differs only modestly by parental SES, we utilize a life course perspective on social differentiation to help explain the widening disparities in smoking in young adulthood. Our theory suggests that achieved socioeconomic status and the nature and timing of adult role transitions affect age-based trajectories of smoking and widen disparities in adult smoking. The analyses use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which follows a representative national sample over four waves from ages 11–17 in 1994/1995 to 26–34 in 2007/2008. The results show divergent age trajectories in smoking by parental education and that achieved socioeconomic status and life course roles in young adulthood account in good part for differences in the age trajectories. The findings demonstrate the value of the life course perspective in understanding processes of increasing stratification in health behavior and health during the transition to adulthood.     

The social and genetic inheritance of educational attainment: Genes,parental education,and educational expansion

Recently, several genome-wide association studies of educational attainment have found education-related genetic variants and enabled the integration of human inheritance into social research. This study incorporates the newest education polygenic score (Lee et al., 2018) into sociological research, and tests three gene-environment interaction hypotheses on status attainment. Using the Health and Retirement Study (N = 7599), I report three findings. First, a standard deviation increase in the education polygenic score is associated with a 58% increase in the likelihood of advancing to the next level of education, while a standard deviation increase in parental education results in a 53% increase. Second, supporting the Saunders hypothesis, the genetic effect becomes 11% smaller when parental education is one standard deviation higher, indicating that highly educated parents are more able to preserve their family's elite status in the next generation. Finally, the genetic effect is slightly greater for the younger cohort (1942–59) than the older cohort (1920–41). The findings strengthen the existing literature on the social influences in helping children achieve their innate talents.     

Not a lonely crowd? Social connectedness,religious service attendance,and the spiritual but not religious

Using the 2006–2014 General Social Survey and 2006–2012 Portraits of American Life Study, I find that on three dimensions of social connectedness: social interaction frequency, core discussion network size, and number of close ties, that religious service attenders are more connected than religious non-attenders and then either spiritual nor religious, but there are few differences between attenders and the spiritual but not religious. Difference-in-differences and fixed-effects models show little evidence that switches between categories are associated with changes in connectedness, and additional models show that prior social connectedness explains only a small amount of future switches. This paper challenges assumptions that the non-religious are a homogenous group lacking the benefits provided though the social networks of religious congregations and has implications for research on what it means to be spiritual, measuring religion and spirituality, and understanding the role of formal organizations in social life.     

Social media processes in disasters: Implications of emergent technology use

This article seeks to extend social science scholarship on social media technology use during disruptive events. Though social media's role in times of crisis has been previously studied, much of this work tends to focus on first-responders and relief organizations. However, social media use during disasters tends to be decentralized and this organizational structure can promote different types of messages to top-down information systems. Using 142,786 geo-tagged tweets collected before and after Hurricane Sandy's US landfall as a case study, this article seeks to explore shifts in social media behavior during disruptive events and highlights that though Sandy disrupted routine life within Twitter, users responded to the disaster by employing humor, sharing photos, and checking into locations. We conclude that social media use during disruptive events is complex and understanding these nuanced behaviors is important across the social sciences.     

Social control,social learning,and cheating: Evidence from lab and online experiments on dishonesty

Varying the conditions of the decision-making environment we offered participants the opportunity to increase their payoff by undetectable lies. In addition to a baseline treatment, in which subjects rolled a die in private and showed a high extent of dishonest behavior, we increased the degree of social control by a novel treatment in which subjects played in randomly assigned pairs of two. The presence of others proved to substantially, but only temporarily reduce dishonest behavior. Furthermore, one treatment group received feedback on unethical behavior of participants in a similar experiment. Knowing that others betrayed in the experiment facilitated social learning and led to a higher prevalence of cheating. Finally, increasing the degree of anonymity by re-running the experiment online increased the extent of norm transgressions slightly.     

Understanding the links between education and smoking

This study extends the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between education and smoking by focusing on the life course links between experiences from adolescence and health outcomes in adulthood. Differences in smoking by completed education are apparent at ages 12–18, long before that education is acquired. I use characteristics from the teenage years, including social networks, future expectations, and school experiences measured before the start of smoking regularly to predict smoking in adulthood. Results show that school policies, peers, and youths’ mortality expectations predict smoking in adulthood but that college aspirations and analytical skills do not. I also show that smoking status at age 16 predicts both completed education and adult smoking, controlling for an extensive set of covariates. Overall, educational inequalities in smoking are better understood as a bundling of advantageous statuses that develops in childhood, rather than the effect of education producing better health.     

Heritability,family, school and academic achievement in adolescence

We demonstrate how genetically informed designs can be applied to administrative exam data to study academic achievement. ACE mixture latent class models have been used with Year 6 and 9 exam data for seven cohorts of Polish students which include 24,285 pairs of twins. Depending on a learning domain and classroom environment history, from 58% to 88% of variance in exam results is attributable to heritability, up to 34% to shared environment and from 8% to 15% depends on unique events in students’ lives. Moreover, between 54% and 66% of variance in students’ learning gains made between Years 6 and 9 is explained by heritability. The unique environment accounts for between 34% and 46% of that variance. However, we find no classroom effects on student progress made between Years 6 and 9. We situate this finding against the view that classroom peer groups and teachers matter for adolescent learning.     

The social context of assimilation: testing implications of segmented assimilation theory

Segmented assimilation theory has been a popular explanation for the diverse experiences of assimilation among new waves of immigrants and their children. While the theory has been interpreted in many different ways, we emphasize its implications for the important role of social context: both processes and consequences of assimilation should depend on the local social context in which immigrants are embedded. We derive empirically falsifiable hypotheses about the interaction effects between social context and assimilation on immigrant children’s well-being. We then test the hypotheses using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Our empirical analyses yield two main findings. First, for immigrant adolescents living in non-poverty neighborhoods, we find assimilation to be positively associated with educational achievement and psychological well-being but also positively associated with at-risk behavior. Second, there is little empirical evidence supporting our hypotheses derived from segmented assimilation theory. We interpret these results to mean that future research would be more fruitful focusing on differential processes of assimilation rather than differential consequences of assimilation.     

Racial identity and the quality of life among blacks and whites in the U.S.

Social identity theory and research on mental health among racial minority groups suggest that a stronger, more positive racial identity will be related to a higher subjective quality of life. We investigate how ingroup closeness, ingroup evaluation, and ingroup bias are associated with happiness, positive affect about life, and generalized trust for blacks and whites, using partial proportional odds models. Data came from the 1996–2014 General Social Surveys (N = 6553). Ingroup closeness and more favorable ingroup evaluation had mostly positive associations with the quality of life dimensions. Contrary to what social identity theory would predict, ingroup bias was either unrelated or negatively related to them. Racial identity functions somewhat differently for blacks and whites. Ingroup evaluation and ingroup bias were related to greater positive affect about life for blacks but lower positive affect about life for whites.     

Friendship networks and the social structure of opportunities for contact and interaction

This paper explores the Partnermarktsurvey to analyze how the size and composition of individuals’ friendship networks are associated with the opportunities for contact and interaction provided by individuals’ immediate social environment. The size and composition of individuals’ social environment are strongly reflected in the size and composition of their network of friends. Several properties of an individual’s foci of activity help to transform mere contacts into opportunities for interaction. The paper suggests to combine macro-structural theory with micro-sociological theories about action and social capital.     

契约环境、社会资本与农合组织形式

本文把农合组织的行为抽象为农户和企业的二元博弈,分析了在契约环境和社会资本的影响下农合组织的产生、多样性及其内部治理结构的演化。研究结果表明:契约环境和社会资本之间是互补的,它们共同制约了农户和企业的策略选择;农合组织的存在性和差异性很大程度上取决于社会资本的大小,尤其是在契约环境较差时;契约环境的变动,会影响发起人和参与人的分成比例,即影响农合组织治理结构的演化。     

社会心态环境:培育与趋势

社会心态环境概念的提出及作出国内社会心态环境脆弱的判断,可以部分地解释近年来国内重大公共安全事件频发的原因,为社会稳定研究提供了一种分析框架。构建良好社会心态环境,必须重视社会心态环境建设的长期性和复杂性,加强对社会心态环境的干预;发挥社会心态积极作用;调整党和政府执政心态;在制度层面采取实质性措施,加强社会不良情绪的控制;关注社会底层政治心态;加强社会心态预警研究;调节心理认知,把心理疏导作为公共安全事件治理的重要内容之一。     

陆世仪的诗学思想与诗歌创作

陆世仪在诗学观念上主要继承的是儒家的诗教说,同时面对易代的社会环境,他又提倡孟子的知人论世说,强调借诗歌以“论人论世”,即注重诗歌抒发个人性情之真与记载社会时事的功能。这一诗歌阅读理论影响到陆世仪的诗歌创作,其诗前期主要表现了作为理学家的性情与学问,从而呈现出清新恬淡的诗歌风貌;晚年生活困顿,情感激烈,其诗歌则紧紧围绕自我人生之遭际与下层人民生活之痛苦而展开,呈现出沉痛隐微的风貌。易代之际的社会环境所造成的谐世与济世相交织的人生态度,也是形成其诗歌复杂面貌的原因。     

藏族的饮食禁忌及其现代价值

藏族的饮食禁忌不是完全顺从宗教的行为,而是藏族与高原环境相适应的结果,是藏族在特定环境下的生存策略。藏族饮食禁忌虽然笼罩在藏传佛教的氛围里,但其中蕴含着宗教与社会发展相适应和善待动物、珍爱生命等与人类社会可持续发展原则相一致的现代价值。     

Perceived lack of control over life events: Antecedents and consequences in a discharged patient sample

This paper examines perceptions of control over the occurrence of life events among a group of psychiatric patients interviewed at two points in time. First, perceived lack of control is treated as an independent variable affecting psychiatric symptomatology. Results show that, controlling for baseline symptomatology, perceived lack of control is significantly associated with demoralization but random with respect to delusions-hallucinations. Second, when perceived control is treated as a dependent variable results show that variation in how life events are perceived is more a function of the events that occur than of the personal dispositions of individuals. These results are compared with recently reported data from the general population.     

How dominance hierarchies emerge from conflict: A game theoretic model and experimental evidence

We develop a game theoretic model of conflict and empirically test its predictions to study the emergence of social hierarchies in small groups. Previous research shows uncertainty about actors' ability may lead to more conflict; conflict demonstrates actors' ability and establishes relationships of dominance and submissiveness. Since we assume uncertainty regarding ability to be a crucial cause of conflict, we focus on the effects of different information conditions. We posit that actors know the distribution of abilities in their group and vary whether or not they know (1) their own ability and (2) their interaction partners' interaction histories. Our results from a laboratory experiment closely match qualitative model predictions. Most importantly, conflict produces information about actors’ ability, which reduces subsequent conflict. In an exploratory analysis we investigate to what extent gender, social value orientation, risk preferences and a competitive personality account for the quantitative discrepancies between model predictions and subject behavior.     

孔子仁道观的主要特性及其现代启示论略——基于当今加强公民道德建设的路径探析

孔子仁道观的建立源自对＂仁＂的阐发,具有主体性、社会互动性和超越性等特性,并广泛地涉及到道德主体、道德互动、道德判断、道德能力、道德修养、道德境界和道德健康等哲学命题,构起了内涵丰富的仁道观。基于当今公民道德面临的新情况、新问题,重新审视这些特性,对当今加强公民道德建设不无启迪,主要包括：尊重道德主体的主体性;充分发挥道德行为过程中的社会互动功能;努力提高道德能力;不断提升道德境界和积极培养道德健康等等。这些都是当今加强公民道德建设中值得关切的问题,应当努力的方向和可供选择的路径。     

政府加强对突发公共事件危机管理的对策研究

当前,社会环境日益复杂多变,突发公共事件频繁发生,严重影响社会正常秩序,威胁社会公众生命财产安全,同时也对政府管理能力提出挑战。介绍了突发公共事件的概念和属性,阐释了危机管理的内涵,探讨了政府加强突发公共事件危机管理的必要性,提出了具体的对策建议。     

现代化与小民族生存问题探讨

作者对近年国内流行的“小民族”概念从文化和社会环境的意义上进行界定,并对学界关于小民族生存发展问题的研究状况进行文献回顾和理论梳理,同时结合在鄂伦春族社会的田野工作,思考了社会环境与小民族生存的互动问题。     

晚清自治时期上海街头的警民冲突

晚清自治时期,自治官绅从租界引进了不少西方近代城市管理措施,以加强对居民日常行为的干预。但是,长期养成的旧习惯肯定非一日之功可以改变。于是,当租界当局、老城厢的自治士绅以警察强力推行新的行为规则时,国人仍以习惯行事,在租界街头就首先出现了居民与租界巡捕之间的暴力冲突;数十年后,曾经发生在租界街头的冲突又在老城厢重演,并成为当时老城厢居民生活中的一个值得注意的话题。在近代上海,不管是发生在19世纪后期租界街头的警民冲突,还是20世纪初在老城厢上演的街头闹剧,在某种程度上都反映了前近代与近代城市生活的差异,说明中国城市居民要适应近代城市生活,需要改变某些被视为理所当然的生活习惯,重新调适个人行为。在近代中国社会的急剧变革过程中,相对革命、立宪所导致的社会冲突而言,发生在人们生活领域中的冲突应该更能反映社会的变迁。