Housing and neighborhood quality among undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants

Extensive research has documented the challenges that undocumented immigrants face in navigating U.S. labor markets, but relatively little has explored the impact of legal status on residential outcomes despite their widespread repercussions for social well-being. Using data from the 1996–2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to impute documentation status among Mexican and Central American immigrants, we examine group differences in residential outcomes, including homeownership, housing crowding, satisfaction with neighborhood and housing quality, problems with neighborhood crime/safety, governmental services, and environmental issues, and deficiencies with housing units. Results from our analysis indicate that undocumented householders are far less likely to be homeowners than documented migrants, and also live in more crowded homes, report greater structural deficiencies with their dwellings, and express greater concern about the quality of public services and environmental conditions in their neighborhoods. In comparison to native whites, undocumented migrants’ residential circumstances are lacking, but their residential outcomes tend to be superior to those of native-born blacks. Overall, our results highlight the pervasive impact of legal status on stratifying Mexicans’ and Central Americans’ prospects for successful incorporation, but also underscore the rigidity of the black/nonblack divide structuring American residential contexts.     

Disaggregating a social-psychological model of educational attainment

This paper gives an extended empirical treatment of the estimation and interpretation of a block-recursive social-psychological model of socio-economic achievement which is applied to a cohort of male Wisconsin high school graduates. We draw attention to the substantive distinction between the interpretation of measures as causes and effects of the concepts which they represent and illustrate the advantages of disaggregating the components of composite variables. New empirical insights are obtained in the course of the analysis.     

Neighbourhood effects on educational attainment of adolescents,buffered by personality and educational commitment

Research has repeatedly shown that neighbourhood disadvantage negatively influences individual educational outcomes. However, the great variation in outcomes indicates substantial unobserved heterogeneity. Looking at the rates of obtaining a basic educational qualification, the hypothesis is that individual traits of adolescents can buffer neighbourhood effects. First, adolescents with a more resilient personality may be better able to cope with neighbourhood adversity. And second, educational commitments might buffer adolescents from negative neighbourhood influences. These hypotheses are tested employing survival analysis, using six wave panel data, containing information on ten years of adolescents’ lives. The results show that resilients experience no negative influence of neighbourhood disadvantage, while both undercontrollers and overcontrollers do. And, the stronger adolescents’ educational commitments, the less they experience the negative effect of neighbourhood adversity. In sum, neighbourhood effects are found, but not for everybody.     

A tale half told: State exclusionary and inclusionary regimes,incarceration of fathers,and the educational attainment of children

Paternal incarceration leads to educational disparities among children who are innocent of their fathers’ crimes. The scale and concentration of mass paternal incarceration thus harms millions of innocent American children. Current individuallevel analyses neglect the contribution of macro-level variation in responses of punitive state regimes to this social problem. We hypothesize that state as well as individual level investment in exclusionary paternal incarceration diminishes the educational attainment of children, although state inclusionary investment in welfare and education can offset some – and could potentially offset more - of this harm. Understanding intergenerational educational attainment therefore requires individual- and contextuallevel analyses. We use Hierarchical Generalized Linear Models to analyze the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health. Disparities in postsecondary educational outcomes are especially detrimental for children of incarcerated fathers located in state regimes with high levels of paternal incarceration and concentrated disadvantage. This has important implications for intergenerational occupational and status attainment.     

Parental family income and the socioeconomic attainment of children

Like others before us using different data, we find significant effects of parental family income on the completed schooling and wage rates of adult children using intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We explore various hypotheses regarding these effects, finding substantial support for the economic hypothesis that income, regardless of its source, is invested by parents in their children; mixed support for the hypothesis that fathers serve as role models for their sons; and no support for the welfare dependency hypothesis. Rather than serving as positive role models, working mothers appear to have significantly less successful sons.     

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.     

Partner selection and social capital in the status attainment process

Why is individual success so strongly affected by parental socioeconomic status? We argue that parental socioeconomic status affects the socioeconomic status of one's romantic partner, thereby partially determining one's own social capital and socioeconomic status. Censored-inflated structural equation models using data from the NEtherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study (NELLS) and British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) confirm these relationships, while cross-lagged analyses suggest that they may be causal in nature. The strong tendency for people to have a romantic partner that reflects their socioeconomic origin shows how far the influence of the parental home stretches and why it does so.     

Skin color,sex, and educational attainment in the post-civil rights era

We assess the relationship between skin color and educational attainment for native-born non-Hispanic Black and White men and women, using data from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study. CARDIA is a medical cohort study with twenty years of social background data and a continuous measure of skin color, recorded as the percent of light reflected off skin. For Black men and women, we find a one-standard-deviation increase in skin lightness to be associated with a quarter-year increase in educational attainment. For White women, we find an association approximately equal in magnitude to that found for Black respondents, and the pattern of significance across educational transitions suggests that skin color for White women is not simply a proxy for family background. For White men, any relationship between skin color and attainment is not robust and, analyses suggest, might primarily reflect differences in family background. Findings suggest that discrimination on the basis of skin color may be less specific to race than previously thought.     

Self-esteem and self-efficacy in the status attainment process and the multigenerational transmission of advantage

Despite considerable evidence of the importance of self-esteem and self-efficacy for agentic, goal-oriented behavior, little attention has been directed to these psychological dimensions in the status attainment literature. The present research uses data from the longitudinal, three-generation Youth Development Study (N = 422 three-generation triads) to examine the extent to which adolescent self-esteem and economic self-efficacy affect adult educational and income attainment, and whether these psychological resources are transmitted from one generation to the next, accumulating advantage across generations. We present evidence indicating that both self-esteem and economic self-efficacy are implicated in the attainment process. Adolescent economic self-efficacy had a direct positive effect on adult educational attainment and an indirect effect through educational plans. The influence of self-esteem on adult educational attainment was entirely indirect, through school achievement. We also find evidence that economic self-efficacy was transmitted from parents to children. We conclude that future research should more broadly consider psychological resources in attainment processes from a longitudinal multigenerational perspective.     

Prestige versus socioeconomic status in the attainment processes of American men and women

This paper demonstrates the consequences to the researcher of choosing to analyze social mobility data with a prestige scale rather than with a socioeconomic index. First, the low intergenerational correlations reported for the International Prestige Scale are rejected when they are shown to be compatible with inadequate models of the processes of status inheritance. Second, the Duncan socioeconomic index is shown to be the preferred measure of status transmission in that it suffers from less random error than does the International Prestige Scale, particularly among men. Third, the occupational attainment processes of American men and women are described with socioeconomic scoring, and these findings are contrasted with those which obtain with prestige coding.     

Age, period, cohort and educational attainment: The importance of considering gender

Over the past century, the United States has experienced substantial population-wide gains in educational attainment - increases driven largely by processes of cohort succession. Focusing on the adult population age 25-54, we show that there has been (1) a significant attenuation of the historical increases in educational attainment, and (2) a shift in the processes underlying educational change that differs by gender. Our analysis points to a significant turning point in population-wide educational levels, and from a research perspective, has implications for how one interprets findings when using education as a control variable.     

The declining influence of family background on educational attainment in Australia: The role of measured and unmeasured influences

The paper examines changes in the influence of family background, including socioeconomic and social background variables on educational attainment in Australia for cohorts born between 1890 and 1982. We test hypotheses from modernization theory on sibling data using random effects models and find: (i) substantial declines in the influence of family background on educational attainment (indicated by the sibling intraclass correlations); (ii) declines in the effects of both economic and cultural socioeconomic background variables; (iii) changes in the effects of some social background variables (e.g., family size); (iv) and declines in the extent that socioeconomic and social background factors account for variation in educational attainment. Unmeasured family background factors are more important, and proportionally increasingly so, for educational attainment than the measured socioeconomic and social background factors analyzed. Fixed effects models showed steeper declines in the effects of socioeconomic background variables than in standard analyses suggesting that unmeasured family factors associated with socioeconomic background obscure the full extent of the decline.     

Dynamic models and attainment in the workplace

The two most marked trends in recent stratification studies are: (1) the shift away from a statical approach to attainment and toward a dynamical representation of achievement, and (2) the shift away from the assumption that achievement is largely a matter of individual characteristics, and toward the view that achievement is the outcome of an employer-employee exchange of productive resources for earnings and status. This paper forges a link between these parallel trends by elaborating on previous formulations of dynamic models of achievement and applying the results to the analysis of earnings attainment in an internal labor market. The modeling section of the paper joins within a single framework the growing interest in ascertaining how a given structure of opportunity shapes achievement and in determining the different points in the career line at which individual background and resource variables impact attainment. Special attention is devoted to the problems facing researchers who wish to bring a dynamic conceptualization of achievement to cross-sectional or otherwise deficient data. Although the empirical application of the various models is largely meant to be illustrative, it is of interest in its own right because it goes substantially beyond previous efforts in this area.     

教学环境的教育机制及设计原则

所有的教学活动都是在特定环境中进行的 ,因此设计与教学活动相适应的教学环境是达到教育目标的必要条件。本文认为 ,应该把教学环境看作广义的教育场所 ,把课堂教学过程和环境教育结合起来 ,才能发挥其应有的教育功能。本文首先探讨了学校教学环境包含的内容 ,然后从理论上分析了教学环境的教育作用机制 ,最后从实践的角度探讨了教学环境设计的要领 ,以求对教育改革者有所裨益     

State activism and the hidden incentives behind bank acquisitions

A number of studies have shown that, as a result of the ambiguity of US legal mandates, organizations have considerable latitude in how they comply with regulations. In this paper, we address how the different agendas of the federal and state governments increase ambiguities in state-firm relations and how states are interested actors in creating opportunities for firms to navigate the federal legislation. We analyze the institutional forces behind bank acquisitions within and across state lines in order to illuminate the ways that US states take advantage of federal ambiguity and are able to shape corporate practices to their benefit. We specifically examine how patterns of bank acquisitions are shaped by the crucial relationship between the federal Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and a little-understood provision in the federal tax code that is implemented at the state level, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). The relationship is complex because, while the federal government uses the CRA to control bank acquisition activity, states promote use of the LIHTC, through which banks can address federal CRA concerns, and thereby promote bank acquisitions in their jurisdictions. Thus, our findings suggest that the implementation of social legislation at one level in a federal regulatory system undermines the mechanisms of social legislation at another level. We use archival research and in-depth interviews to examine the interaction between these institutional processes and formulate hypotheses that predict the ways in which bank acquisitions are constrained by banks’ CRA ratings and the way states in turn help banks overcome their CRA constraints. Quantitative analyses of all bank acquisitions in the United States from 1990-2000 largely support these hypotheses.     

论教育产品的生产经营

随着我国教育市场的逐步开放,我们必须重新审视我国的学校教育现状,重新认识教育产品的性质,构建学校经营的理念,从教育产品的生产流程、生产规模确定以及销售方面着手,搞好教育产品的生产经营,实现学校教育的跨越式发展,以利于我国教育市场的进一步完善。     

Reexamining the ethnic hierarchy of locational attainment: Evidence from Los Angeles

Because of a lack of data, the locational attainment literature has not incorporated documentation status into models examining group differences in neighborhood quality. I fill this void by using the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey, which permits the identification of undocumented respondents, allowing a reexamination of the ethnic structure of locational attainment in this important immigrant-receiving city. Results first suggest that while undocumented Latinos live in the poorest quality communities, blacks live in neighborhoods that are similar to native-born Latinos and better than foreign-born Asians and Latinos. Second, the effects of education are strongest for blacks, allowing the highly educated an opportunity to reside in communities that are of better quality than educated Latinos and Asians. Thus, undocumented Latinos replace blacks at the bottom of the locational attainment hierarchy, allowing educated blacks in Los Angeles to reside in better neighborhoods than blacks in the nation at large.