Finding Subgroups for Surveys

This article reports on an experiment comparing two methodsfor selecting national samples of blacks. The experiment wascarried out as part of the 1982 General Social Survey (GSS).One sample was selected using area probability sampling withthe selection probability for an area proportional to the sizeof its black population. The other sample was selected by samplingextra dwelling units in areas selected for the regular GSS.Although comparable in other respects, the two methods differedsharply in costs and statistical efficiency. The sample selectedfrom the special black frame proved less expensive to interviewand required fewer screening interviews in order to locate householdswith black members. The sample selected in the same areas asthe regular GSS sample exhibited a smaller "design effect"—probablybecause fewer respondents were selected from each sample area.The decision to use one method or the other to sample rare subgroupswould depend on several factors, including the degree to whichthe subgroup is segregated, the amount of savings possible throughpiggybacking, and the relationship between screening and interviewingcosts.     

Sociology,narrative, and the quality versus quantity debate (Goethe versus Newton): Can computer-assisted story grammars help us understand the rise of Italian fascism (1919–1922)?

At the heart of this article is a structural approach to narrative, based on the work of Propp, Labov, van Dijk, Halliday, and others. The article highlights the structural features of narrative—basically, the organization of the genre around the semantic template actor-action-actor (syntactically rendered as subject-verb-object but where, in narrative, the subject is typically a social actor and the verb a social action) and the modifiers of each element of this triplet, such as time and space of action—and shows how to implement this structure in a computer environment and how to use this methodological tool in socio-historical research (namely, the rise of Italian fascism, 1919–22). But, taking a cue from Halliday’s cover jacket of his An Introduction to Functional Grammar, with its representation of a color circle, the paper takes the reader on an intellectual journey from Newton to Goethe—and the quality versus quantity debate—to Goethe and Propp, to end, back home, with Simmel and Weber.     

Sampling and Estimation in Hidden Populations Using Respondent‐Driven Sampling

Standard statistical methods often provide no way to make accurate estimates about the characteristics of hidden populations such as injection drug users, the homeless, and artists. In this paper, we further develop a sampling and estimation technique called respondent‐driven sampling, which allows researchers to make asymptotically unbiased estimates about these hidden populations. The sample is selected with a snowball‐type design that can be done more cheaply, quickly, and easily than other methods currently in use. Further, we can show that under certain specified (and quite general) conditions, our estimates for the percentage of the population with a specific trait are asymptotically unbiased. We further show that these estimates are asymptotically unbiased no matter how the seeds are selected. We conclude with a comparison of respondent‐driven samples of jazz musicians in New York and San Francisco, with corresponding institutional samples of jazz musicians from these cities. The results show that some standard methods for studying hidden populations can produce misleading results.     

Collective violence as social control

Collective violence is often social control: self-help by a group. It typically defines and responds to conduct as deviant. When unilateral and nongovernmental, it appears in four major forms—lynching, rioting, vigilantism, and terrorism—each distinguished by its system of liability (individual or collective) and degree of organization (higher or lower). Following Donald Black's paradigm of pure sociology, the central assumption is that collective violence varies with its location and direction in social space—the conflict structure. I offer ten propositions that predict and explain the likelihood and severity of collective violence in general and the four forms of collective violence in particular. Conflict structures with a high degree of relational distance, cultural distance, functional independence, and inequality between the adversaries are associated with collective violence in general. Each of the four forms depends on the degree of social polarization between the parties as well as the continuity of the deviant behavior to which the violence responds. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 1992, and the Centennial Congress of the International Institute of Sociology, University of Paris (Sorbonne), Paris, June 1993.     

Of yarmulkes and categories: Delegating boundaries and the phenomenology of interactional expectation

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this article delineates a process through which members of an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles unintentionally delegate boundary work and membership-identification to anonymous others in everyday life. Living in the midst of a non-Jewish world, orthodox men are often approached by others, both Jews and non-Jews, who categorize them as “religious Jews” based on external marks such as the yarmulke and attire. These interactions, varying from mundane interactions to anti-Semitic incidents, are then tacitly anticipated by members even when they are not attending to their “Jewishness”—when being a “Jew” is interactionally invisible. Through this case, I argue that, in addition to conceptualizing boundaries and identifications as either emerging in performance or institutionally given and stable, the study of boundaries should also chart the sites in which members anticipate categorization and the way these anticipations play out in everyday life.     

Construct Validity and Error Components of Survey Measures: A Structural Modeling Approach

Measurement errors can have profound effects on statisticalrelationships, and better information on the quality of measuresseems needed. This study uses a new technology—structuralmodeling of data from special supplements to regular surveys—togenerate estimates of construct validity, method effects (amajor source of correlated error), and residual error (mainlyrandom error) for a broad set of measures obtained from fivenational surveys and an organizational survey (total respondents= 7,706). Analysis of these estimates suggested that a typicalsurvey item, when administered by a respected survey organizationto a general population sample, can be expected to yield 50–83percent valid variance, 0–7 percent method effects variance,and 14–48 percent residual variance. Multivariate analysisshowed that over two-thirds of the variation in measurementquality could be explained by 13 survey design characteristics;characteristics of respondents explained a small additionalportion. Results provide: (a) information on design conditionsassociated with better (or worse) measurement quality, (b) empiricallybased suggestions for improving measurement quality in futuresurveys, and (c) a set of coefficients for predicting the qualityof measures not studied here.     

Quantifying the Third Sector in Portugal: An Overview and Evolution from 1997 to 2007

This article presents a global overview of the third sector in Portugal drawing on data from a linked employer–employee database—“Quadros de Pessoal,” which is based on a compulsory annual inquiry to organizations, making it a better source of information than those based on sample surveys and estimates. This study advances on previous overviews by providing more updated numbers for organization size, age, gross revenue and employment levels, as well as their distribution across the ICNPO third sector activity classification. The evolution of these variables from the period 1997 to 2007 is also analyzed. The Portuguese third sector has been fast growing, with revenues amounting to 5.64% of Portugal’s GDP and employment representing 4% of the country’s employment in 2007. It is mainly composed of very small organizations, with diminutive revenues. Perhaps its most striking features are the uneven distribution of employment and revenue and the strong concentration on social services.     

WHO GETS THE NEWS? ALTERNATIVE MEASURES OF NEWS RECEPTION AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH

This article investigates patterns in audience reception of16 news stories that received prominent media coverage in thesummer and fall of 1989. Using a national sample of Americanadults, it compares education, self-reported rates of mediause, interpersonal communication, and prior levels of generalpolitical knowledge as predictors of individual differencesin recall of current news events. Results indicate that respondents'background level of political knowledge is the strongest andmost consistent predictor of current news story recall acrossa wide range of topics, suggesting that there is indeed a generalaudience for news and that this audience is quite sharply stratifiedby preexisting levels of background knowledge. Thus, in surveyresearch applications that require estimates of individual differencesin the reception of potentially influential political communications,a measure of general prior knowledge—not a measure ofnews media use—is likely to be the most effective indicator.The article further concludes that the tendency of individualsto acquire news and information on a domain- or topic-specificbasis fails to undermine the value of political knowledge asa general measure of propensity for news recall.     

African American Men and the Experience of Employment Discrimination

The economic marginalization of African American men has been studied in a variety of contexts, from trade union exclusion, to joblessness, to disparate wages and mobility. Discrimination is often inferred as an influential mechanism, yet seldom directly examined in its own right. Drawing on a unique sample of verified workplace discrimination cases, this article analyzes forms and processes of discrimination that African American men face in employment. Our results denote the prevalence of discriminatory firing, with on-going racial harassment and discriminatory promotional and hiring practices also quite evident. In-depth immersion into case materials highlights the centrality of racial stereotyping and significant discretion on the part of gatekeepers within organizational environments-discretion in the use of “soft skills” criteria to exclude and debilitate mobility, and in selective (or even targeted) use of seemingly neutral organizational policies and sanctions. Moreover, harassment on the job—something that conventional workplace inequality research has overlooked—is quite problematic and well-represented in these data. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for the conceptualization of inequality reproduction and that pertaining to race, status, and the workplace in particular.     

The Impact of Legal Status on Immigrants’ Earnings and Human Capital: Evidence from the IRCA 1986

The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), the largest amnesty in U.S. history, took effect in 1986 and legalized all immigrants who arrived before 1982. The IRCA creates a discontinuity, according to the year of entry, in the probability of having legal status. Therefore, I use the regression discontinuity approach to study the impact of legality on immigrants’ labor market outcomes and human capital. Using Californian Latino immigrants from Census 1990, I find that the 1975–81 arrivals, on average, outperform the 1982–86 arrivals in male wages, female employment probability, and male English-speaking ability. These findings are not due to a general trend in U.S. labor market conditions because the same analysis, using refugees, Puerto Rican migrants and U.S.-born Latinos—three comparison groups without legality issues—indicates no difference in outcomes between the 1975–81 and 1982–86 cohorts. However, the advantage of Latino immigrants of the earlier cohort over the later cohort diminishes in Census 2000.     

Response Styles in Telephone and Household Interviewing: A Field Experiment

Two independent groups from the Los Angeles metropolitan areawere sampled and interviewed—one was sampled by a formof random digit dialing and interviewed by telephone; the otherwas sampled on an area probability basis and interviewed face-to-facein households. Few sociodemographic differences were found betweenthe telephone and household samples, suggesting that the twomethods sampled essentially the same population. There weredifferences in the quantity and quality of the data obtained,however, and the telephone sample had more missing data forfamily income, more acquiescence, evasiveness, and extremenessresponse bias on attitude questions, and more responses to checklists.     

What’s so special about Euclidean distance?

In this paper, we provide an application-oriented characterization of a class of distance functions monotonically related to the Euclidean distance in terms of some general properties of distance functions between real-valued vectors. Our analysis hinges upon two fundamental properties of distance functions that we call “value-sensitivity” and “order-sensitivity”. We show how these two general properties, combined with natural monotonicity considerations, lead to characterization results that single out several versions of Euclidean distance from the wide class of separable distance functions. We then discuss and motivate our results in two different and apparently unrelated application areas—mobility measurement and spatial voting theory—and propose our characterization as a test for deciding whether Euclidean distance (or some suitable variant) should be used in your favourite application context. We would like to thank an editor and especially two anonymous referees for very useful comments which helped us to improve the paper substantially.     

The Content of Survey Introductions and the Provision of Informed Consent

Information disclosed to potential respondents in survey introductionswas examined in a sample of 78 introductions obtained by mailfrom AAPOR members. The following information was disclosed:research organization, in 86 percent of the introductions; interviewer,82 percent; research topic, 81 percent; sponsor, 45 percent;confidentiality, 42 percent; survey purpose, 26 percent; futuredata use, 24 percent; anonymity, 24 percent; sampling technique,21 percent; survey length, 13 percent; statement that participationwas voluntary, 10 percent; sample size, 4 percent; and consentsignature requirement, 4 percent. Mail surveys (and to a lesserextent those by academic institutions and on sensitive topics)provided more introductory information. For ethical reasons,such as providing informed consent, as well as methodologicalreasons, professional norms about providing information in surveyintroductions need to be examined.     

Global and everyday matters of consumption: on the productive assemblage of pharmaceuticals and obesity

This article analyzes changing formations of global and everyday culture—particularly those associated with health, medicine, and consumption—through a concrete investigation of the development and use of anti-obesity medications. The first half of the article elucidates some of the new local-global connections being forged between fat bodies and global orders by situating the production and circulation of a new class of such medications within a sociotechnical assemblage that includes, among other elements, scientific research, transnational corporations, overweight individuals and populations, and the internet. The second half of the article explores the forms of local and everyday pharmaceutical practice associated with these medications. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with medication users, I demonstrate that while biomedical models focus on the physiological and psychological effects of drug interventions, the significance of the medications in practices of everyday life is largely socio-spatial. I suggest that these medication provide a means of protecting individuals from a hostile modern environment—the obesogenic landscape of hyperconsumption—and argue that the practices associated with the use of obesity medications can be understood as part of the work of accommodating and reproducing contemporary consumer and capitalist culture.     

Neither clear nor present: The social construction of safety and danger

Perceptions of safety and danger are “intersubjective”—products of social construction, collective agreement, and socialization. While objective danger certainly exists, perceptions of danger do not derive directly from observation of the empirical world. The objective environment provides only inconsistent and ambiguous information, permitting ample room for socially constructed beliefs. Three cognitive frameworks—the Cautious, Confident, and Neutral frameworks—organize perceptions of safety and danger. Each framework begins with a default assumption about safety and danger and “marks” certain items as different from this default. In shaping expectations, these frameworks also contribute to perceptions of horror, humor, excitement, and fear. Finally, I use these frameworks to analyze the psychological concept “phobia” as a sociological phenomenon.     

Is Pollution 'A White Thing'? Racial Differences in Preadults' Attitudes

Clear and consistent differences between blacks‘ and whites’attitudes toward environmental issues were found in a stratifiedrandom sample survey of 2,012 Florida preadults. Blacks weremuch less likely than whites to consider environmental qualitya serious problem worthy of community concern, to favor environmentalgoals, and to define pollution in complex terms; regressionanalysis showed that these differences persisted even when factorsthought to explain racial differences in attitudes—SES,years of education, exposure to information, actual and perceivedpollution levels, sense of efficacy—were taken into account.Evidence suggests that even among children, racial differencesin attitudes are not spurious, but indicate a divergence betweenthe black and white subcultures in interpretations of publicissues     

Visual sociology and sociological vision,revisited

Visual sociology has two main interests: picture-making by researchers (or their subjects) in the course of sociological fieldwork, and pictures made by social actors in the context of everyday life. Focusing on the latter interest and based in three social aspects of images—that they are produced in general societal settings and specific institutional settings, and are a kind of discursive practice—three approaches to the sociology of visual material are illustrated.     

Establishing the Preliminary Validity of Spiritual Eco-Maps with Native Americans

The use of validated instruments is particularly important with populations of color such as Native Americans. Drawing upon the concept of social validity, this mixed method study validates an existing qualitative spiritual assessment instrument—spiritual eco-maps—using a sample of recognized experts in Native American culture (N = 50). The study identifies: (1) the degree of cultural consistency, strengths, and limitations of the spiritual eco-map concept, and (2) how the questions designed to help operationalize the concept might be improved to be more valid, relevant and consistent with Native culture. The results suggest that spiritual eco-maps are relatively consistent with Native American culture as long as they are operationalized appropriately. The paper concludes by providing a more culturally valid question protocol along with suggestions for administering the instrument in a culturally competent manner.