Race and Gender Inequality in Homeownership: Does Place Make a Difference?*

Abstract Racial differences in homeownership have long been a topic of sociological study. Previous studies, however, neglected to consider differences in levels of homeownership between nonmarried black and white women in the context of place. Accordingly this paper focuses on the interaction between place, race, and gender and its impact on homeownership for nonmarried persons. The study employs the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) and logistic regression analysis to address the following questions: Has the racial differential in homeownership for nonmarried women changed from 1970 to 1990? How do place, race, and gender interact to determine the levels of homeownership for nonmarried women? The findings reveal that, although black women were less likely than white women to own homes, the racial differential declined dramatically in rural areas over the two‐decade period. The overall trend of decline was opposite to that for urban areas.     

‘Did You See That Guy in the Wheelchair Down the Pub?’ Interactions across Difference in a Public Place

Most research undertaken on interactions between able-bodied people and people with physical disabilities has focused on the way that people with disabilities are de-humanised during the interaction process. Little attention has been given to the possibility that able bodied people are unsure of how to go about interacting with people with disabilities (Soder, 1990). Looking is a complex business. This paper reports a qualitative study of interaction in public places with Elton, a young person coping with cerebral palsy. Participants were observed and filmed in a caféand a public bar. Elton and I were the only participants aware of the camera attached to his head rest. Elton and the other participants used visual symbols to assess approachability, status, ability, attractiveness, and quality of character. The difficulty in each encounter is that it is shaped by people's interpretation of the other, arrived at by their own projections of meaning attached to the 'form' of the body. There were also tensions in the process of looking: in particular, around eye contact, and the desire to avoid appearing to stare.     

Economic Reform in the Czech Republic: Economic Strain,Depression, Hostility,and the Difference Gender Makes*

The Czech Republic is changing rapidly and its current economic transformation is a strain on Czech families. In this study, the connection between economic strain and individual well-being is investigated via mailed questionnaires from 234 households in the Czech Republic. For Czech women, depression rises more with economic strain than does hostility, while Czech men become more hostile than depressed in the face of economic strain. For women, social support is a buffer between economic strain and hostility, whereas self-esteem is a buffer for depression. For men, both self-esteem and social support exacerbate hostility in the context of economic strain.     

RESIDENTIAL INTERRACIAL EXPOSURE AND ISOLATION INDICES: Mean versus Median Indices, and the Difference It Makes

Interracial exposure and isolation ( p *) indices have been widely used in studies of residential racial segregation. However, a recent pilot study raised serious issues about the use of these indices, because they are based on the mean statistic, which may yield misleading results in the case of skewed distributions, as is often the case with census tract racial compositions. An alternative median exposure index ( p *- md ) is proposed, and mean and median indices of white-to-African-American and African-American-to-white exposure, as well as white and African-American isolation, are compared for the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. The analysis shows that the mean and median measures produce different results, and that most of these differences are maximized in those areas that are most segregated and, especially for African-American-to-white exposure, in areas where the largest number of African Americans live. This creates significant problems in the interpretation and use of mean exposure and isolation indices, and in most cases, the median index yields a result more representative of the residential neighborhood situation of the majority of whites and African Americans. A particular problem with the mean exposure indices currently in common use is their tendency to overstate the degree of neighborhood-level interracial contact in U.S. metropolitan areas, and, in so doing, to understate the impact of racial housing discrimination.     

The Production of Difference and Maintenance of Inequality: The Place of Young Goan Men in a Post‐Crisis UK Labour Market

This article examines the ways in which young migrant men are constructed as potential employees in a British town where service sector employment, often on a casual or precarious basis, dominates the bottom end of the labour market. Low‐wage jobs in many British towns are now constructed as feminized, low waged and demanding personal skills of empathy and servility. In this context, young men, and especially young men of colour, including recent in‐migrants, are at a disadvantage, constructed by employers, agencies, co‐workers and customers as less eligible workers than ‘locals’. We use the experiences of young men from Goa as a lens though which to trace the ways in which expectations and experiences when looking for employment produce a hierarchical division of labour in precarious jobs at the bottom end of the service sector.     

Stress Hormone Changes and Marital Conflict: Spouses’ Relative Power Makes a Difference

We investigated the impact of relative marital power on 72 newlywed couples’ endocrinological responses to marital conflict. Marital power was determined by comparing spouses’ reports of dependent love for one another. Less powerful spouses displayed elevated adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) responses to a conflict discussion. Shared power appeared to have a beneficial effect on wives’ but not husbands’ ACTH responses. Spouses’ cortisol levels declined over time, except for wives who were less powerful and for husbands who shared power with their wives. Conflict behaviors did not differ as a function of this marital power index. These data suggest that relative levels of general emotional power in relationships may play an important role in spouses’ physiological responses to marital conflict.     

Digital Inequality and Place: The Effects of Technological Diffusion on Internet Proficiency and Usage across Rural,Suburban, and Urban Counties*

Recently researchers have made efforts to reconceptualize digital inequality into discrete levels. These levels reflect access to and diffusion of technologies, proficiency in Internet usage, and propensity to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by information and communication technologies for assistance in daily life. We assess the utility of this approach for studying digital inequality across rural, suburban, and urban counties. Based on data from a 2005 nationally representative random sample telephone survey of 2,185 adults, the results provide mixed support for using this approach to studying digital inequality. In particular, we find that rural residents use Internet technologies less for assistance in helping with economics and other daily activities when compared with individuals from suburban and urban areas; however, our results suggest that this relationship is the product of the slow diffusion of advanced technologies to rural areas. The implications of these findings for understanding this under‐theorized form of inequality are discussed, and we make contributions to this literature through empirically addressing issues of digital capital.     

Continuity and Change in Place Stratification: Spatial Inequality and Middle‐Range Territorial Units*

Abstract Sociologists have produced large, well‐known literatures on inequality across geographic territory at two ends of the spatial scale continuum, within the city and across nation‐states. In this paper, I discuss a different scale of focus, subnational stratification processes across middle‐range spatial units, those between the city and nation‐state. While characterizing much contemporary rural sociological research, this approach to spatial inequality does not tend to be seen as a coherent tradition that cross‐cuts substantive areas. First, I discuss why attention to subnational inequality, rural regions, and middle‐range spatial units are important to social science understanding of stratification processes. Second, I provide an overview of contemporary research traditions in rural sociology which, taken together, form a distinct and innovative approach to spatial inequality. Third, I draw from my own work to explain how factors affecting socioeconomic inequalities across middle‐range territorial units may be conceptualized and provide two sets of empirical examples. Finally, I discuss what should be done in terms of furthering rural sociology's regional approach to spatial inequality.     

Gender,Space, and Place

ABSTRACT

The boundary between home and work was very blurred in early modern England. Domestic production was an essential element of early modern life and many families had servants and apprentices living and working with them under the same roof. But, to date, little investigation has been conducted into the impact that these practices had on the character of domestic space and how experience varied between different household members. This article attempts to redress the balance by focusing on the ways in which early modern middling householders organized eating and sleeping in the spaces that they shared with their servants. It argues that fixed social patterns were not inscribed upon early modern homes. Rooms were multifunctional; their use and meaning constantly shifted. Moreover, lack of space in most households meant that separation or segregation according to rank or gender was not possible or practical. Nonetheless, the organization of space for these everyday activities played an important role in the expression of the social, age, and gender hierarchies that ordered the early modern domestic world.     

Splitting the Marital Home: Gendered Property Division and Postdivorce Foreclosure

Divorce proceedings often involve splitting the marital home and contested claims over property and other assets. This case study examines the divorce–foreclosure nexus through key informant interviews, analysis of divorce files and foreclosure notices, and a review of court records on debt, remarriage, and criminal offending. We found that property disposition is a gendered process, with men receiving the marital home 1.7 times more often than women, even though they had more court debt, job instability, and criminal offending than their wives. Male defendants who hired an attorney received the house 85% of the time (52% for women defendants with an attorney). In postdivorce, men were more likely than women to remarry, have second mortgages, and to reoffend. We conclude that “equal” rather than “equitable” property division would reduce women’s structural disadvantage in divorce settlements and postdivorce home ownership.     

What a Difference a Decade Makes: Reflections on doing ‘emancipatory’ disability research

This paper provides a broad-based overview of the development of emancipa tory disability research in the UK since its emergence in 1992. Drawing on personal experience in the field, the author responds to several important considerations that need to be addressed before considering adopting this controversial perspective. The paper is divided into two main sections. The first part provides a concise introduction to the thinking that underpins the concept of emancipatory disability research. The second section discusses key elements of this approach including the problem of accountability, the social model of disability, choice of methods and, empowerment, dissemination and outcomes. The paper concludes by suggesting that whilst there has been considerable progress over the last decade the future of emancipatory disability research remains precarious.     

Inequality,ethnic diversity,and redistribution

Seminal political economy models from Meltzer and Richard, among others, theorize that, in democracies, more inequality should lead to more redistribution. Most country-level empirical studies find weak support for this prediction. This paper makes two contributions to this debate. First, I identify some of the key shortcomings of previous tests and provide a new empirical analysis that corrects for these limitations. Using a dataset covering 89 developed and developing democracies, I find that inequality is associated with more redistribution. Second, I show that inequality’s effect on redistribution is weaker in democracies in which the poor – defined as the people with income below the median – are divided along ethnic lines than in those in which they are ethnically unified. Taken together, these results suggest that although economic inequality increases redistribution, the magnitude of the relationship is conditional on how inequality interacts with other social cleavages, such as ethnicity.     

Inequality aversion,impartiality and utilitarianism

Egalitarianism presents the problem of baseline-dependence: egalitarianism from where? No collective choice can be egalitarian for all choices of a baseline. So the question arises as to whether and how the egalitarian program can be weakened in order to be compatible with baseline-independence. I characterize the set of choices that satisfy a minimal degree of inequality-aversion, embodied in the generalized Lorenz criterion, independently of the choice of a baseline. It turns out that this set coincides with the Lorenz-Utilitarian set, the set of Utilitarian choices which are not Lorenz dominated for any choice of baseline. Either this set is empty or it coincides with the Utilitarian set (when this is a singleton). Moreover, I also characterize the full Utilitarian set by using a standard requirement of impartiality (the Suppes-Sen criterion).     

Inequality, Democratization, and De–Democratization

Reversions from democratic to undemocratic regimes have often occurred historically and continue to occur frequently. Both increases in categorical inequality across a regime's subject population and declines in the insulation of public politics from categorical inequality tend to de–democratize regimes. A general account of democratization and de–democratization yields a series of conjectures concerning the processes by which changes in categorical inequality threaten democracy.     

Academic Self-Efficacy,Dropping Out,and the Significance of Inequality

Increased academic self-efficacy can facilitate educational progress and success as well as minimize the risk of dropping out for adolescents. However, there are sex, racial, and ethnic disparities associated with the risk of dropping out of high school. What remains unknown is if increased academic self-efficacy can minimize sex, racial, and ethnic disparities linked to the risk of adolescents dropping out. This study utilizes data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 and incorporates multilevel modeling techniques to examine the impact of academic self-efficacy on dropping out. The results indicate that racial and ethnic minorities have relatively lower levels of academic self-efficacy; however, increased academic self-efficacy can ameliorate sex, racial, and ethnic dropout disparities. The implications of the evident sex, racial, and ethnic disparities in the relationship between academic self-efficacy and dropping out are discussed.     

Spatial Syntagma and Identity of a Place: Sensing,Relating to,and Knowing a Place

Place is a complex and multi-dimensional system capable of embracing different uses, interpretations, and even various definitions. As a notion, place is composed of a series of narratives, characteristics, relations, and socio-spatial values that altogether can be regarded as the spatial syntagma of a place. The livelihood of a place is much dependent on its interrelated socio-spatiality, whereby people are not only part of a place but are mutually related to it; to shaping its happenings and forming its identities. In this study, the major focus is toward understanding place and people's environmental knowledge of place. Through this theoretical approach, this article aims to explore the concept of spatial syntagma on the basis of three major aspects of “sensing a place,” “relating to place,” and “knowing a place.” Moreover, this study aims to emphasize the notion of a place as a socio-behavioral network (or system) and verify characteristics, qualities, and the spirituality of a place.