Why Has Safety Improved at Rail‐Highway Grade Crossings?

The number of collisions and fatalities at rail-highway intersections in the United States has declined significantly over the past 30 years, despite considerable increases in the volume of rail and highway traffic. This article disaggregates the improvement into its constituent causes. Negative binomial regressions are conducted on a pooled data set for 49 states from 1975 to 2001. The analysis concludes that about two-fifths of the decrease is due to factors such as reduced drunk driving and improved emergency medical response that have improved safety on all parts of the highway network. The installation of gates and/or flashing lights accounts for about a fifth of the reduction. The development in the 1970s and early 1980s of the Operation Lifesaver public education campaign, and the installation of additional lights on locomotives in the mid 1990s, each led to about a seventh of the reduction. Finally, about a tenth is due to closure of crossings resulting from line abandonments or consolidation of little-used crossings.     

Atypical Working Hours: Consequences for Childcare Arrangements

This paper analyses the care arrangements of those dual‐earner couples and lone‐parent families who are under strong pressure because of atypical and unpredictable working hours. In these situations, the parents have to invent day‐to‐day, week‐to‐week solutions for the care needs of their children, mobilizing all available formal and informal resources. The objective is to understand the different ways in which families manage such atypical working hours in three different countries (Finland, France and Portugal). What are the main strategies of the parents in facing this pressure? Do these include negotiations between the parents on the division of tasks, mobilization of ex‐partners, grandparents, brothers and sisters, neighbours, and the different solutions offered by the formal resources? In the first part of the paper, we present the challenges and consequences of atypical working hours for families and institutions in Europe, in particular in Finland, France and Portugal. We then analyse some of the childcare arrangements as well as the impact of the provision of childcare services.     

The Road to the Top: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Mobility in the Elite Labor Market of College Basketball Coaching

We examine how career paths, job performance, affiliation ties, and race combine to affect who secures top jobs in an elite labor market. Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, we show that examining these traits in conjunction, rather than in isolation, reveals novel insights into how one reaches the top of an occupation. Specifically, we document how factors coalesce in various ways to propel a coach to or from the top of NCAA Division I basketball. Results are particularly informative regarding race and social ties, as the importance of these conditions depend on signs of success. These findings illustrate the importance of context and perception in occupational advancement and suggest the analytic benefit of viewing job applicants as attribute clusters when examining advancement at the highest levels of an occupation.     

Race-of-interviewer effects and survey questions about police violence

ABSTRACT

This research uses binary logistic regression to test for a connection between the race of interviewer and race of respondent on five questions in the General Social Survey about the use of physical force by the police. Results indicate two instances of race-of-interviewer effect: (1) black respondents were more likely to voice disapproval about whether the police can strike a citizen trying to escape when speaking to a black interviewer, and (2) white respondents were less likely to voice approval of police striking an adult male citizen in the presence of a black interviewer. Secondary findings indicate that education is consistently significant regardless of race of respondent and the survey question, while social class, sex, age, and region are significant in only limited scenarios.     

Predicting social influence with faction sizes and relative status

Building on a recent theoretical development in the field of sociological social psychology, we develop a formal mathematical model of social influence processes. The extant theoretical literature implies that factions and status should have non-linear effects on social influence, and yet these theories have been evaluated using standard linear statistical models. Our formal model of influence includes these non-linearities, as specified by the theories. We evaluate the fit of the formal model using experimental data. Our results indicate that a one-parameter mathematical model fits the experimental data. We conclude with the implications of our research and a discussion of how it may be used as an impetus for further work on social influence processes.     

Distinctions in the making: A theoretical discussion of youth and cultural capital

The aim of this paper is to address the dynamics of contemporary cultural capital by interrogating what counts for young people as valuable cultural resources. Considerable support is given in later scholarship for Bourdieu’s model of the social space, as the overall volume of economic and cultural capital combined is regularly found to be the most important axis of opposition, just as in Bourdieu’s work Distinction. Yet, while Bourdieu found the second axis to be structured by an opposition between those with cultural rather than economic capital, and vice versa, many later studies instead find oppositions between the young and the old to structure the second axis. Up till now, this finding has not been adequately addressed. In this paper, we hold that considering age-related inequalities offers a powerful way of interpreting recent developments in order to understand the changing stakes of cultural capital, and also their interaction with the intensification of inequalities in economic capital. After a theoretical clarification of the relationship between cultural capital and youth, we will synthesise research on young people and explore the significance of youthful cultural consumption. We will pragmatically focus on the 15–30 years old and put a particular accent on Norwegian studies in our review, as they are the most sophisticated in this genre. Four areas are explored: the restricted role of classical culture; the appeal of popular culture; digital distinctions, and moral-political positions as markers of distinction.     

The status and factions theory of influence

We review a relatively new theoretical research program on the joint effects of status and the distribution of opinions on social influence. The status and factions theory of influence combines sociological insights about status generalization with psychological research on how the distribution of opinions promotes social influence. To date, several published studies support the logic of the theory, including how the effect of status varies with the distribution of opinions and the intervening theoretical mechanism. The former has been replicated a number of times, but only one study to date has truly tested the mechanism. Uncertainty reduction has been found to explain some of the joint effects of status and the distribution of opinions on social influence, but there is room for improvement. Consequently, after we discuss the existing literature, we identify additional mechanisms that may be worth pursuing in the future and also some applications of the theory's utility.     

Making sense of middle-class politics: a secondary analysis of the 1987 British general election survey

In the past decade the Nuffield class schema has become the established way of operationalising social class measures in survey analyses. This paper carries out secondary analysis of the 1987 British General Election Survey to analyse the relationship between voting patterns and middle-class groups. It argues that the Nuffield class schema actually obstructs a proper understanding of the relationship between class and politics, and that in order to develop an adequate account of middle-class politics it is necessary to develop an alternative theoretical perspective drawing on the new sociology of the professions, and on the sociology of state formation. The paper concludes with some tentative remarks on the changing characteristics of middle-class politics.     

Capitals, assets, and resources: some critical issues

This paper explores the potential of Bourdieu's approach to capital as a way of understanding class dynamics in contemporary capitalism. Recent rethinking of class analysis has sought to move beyond what Rosemary Crompton (1998) calls the 'employment aggregate approach', one which involves categorizing people into class groups according to whether they have certain attributes (e.g. occupations). Instead, recent contributions by Pierre Bourdieu, Erik Wright, Aage Sorensen, and Charles Tilly have concentrated on understanding the mechanisms that produce class inequalities. Concepts such as assets, capitals and resources (CARs) are often used to explain how class inequalities are produced, but there remain ambiguities and differences in how such terms are understood. This paper identifies problems faced both by game theoretical Marxism and by the rational choice approach of Goldthorpe in developing an adequate approach to CARs. It then turns to critically consider how elements of Bourdieu's approach, where his concept of capital is related to those of habitus and field, might overcome these weaknesses. Our rendering of his arguments leads us to conclude that our understanding of CARs might be enriched by considering how capital is distinctive not in terms of distinct relations of exploitation, but through its potential to accumulate and to be converted to other resources. This focus, we suggest, sidesteps otherwise intractable problems in CAR based approaches.     

Using freedom of information requests to facilitate research

The Freedom of Information Act (FOI) is a powerful tool for social researchers. However, these researchers have yet to harness the full potential of FOIA. Drawing on a number of studies using FOIA as a method of obtaining data, this article identifies the potential uses of FOIA and the limitations in its use, offering important advice on research design for studies which use FOIA both in the UK and abroad. The section ‘The role of freedom of information in research’ outlines the provisions of the UK FOIA and the section ‘How to make a request for information’ outlines the costs and benefits of utilising FOIA as a data collection tool. In sections ‘The risks and rewards of FOIA’ and ‘Combining FOIA and other methodologies,’ the article considers the place of FOIA within mixed methodology and cross jurisdictional studies, demonstrating the central role that FOIA can play in research.