Autonomy on the horizon: comparing institutional approaches to disability and elder care

Theory and Society - This article asks how people come to interpret themselves and others as autonomous given their multiple dependencies. We draw on a cross-case comparison of ethnographic studies...     

Beyond Being on Call: Time,Contingency, and Unpredictability Among Family Caregivers for the Elderly

This article explores contingency as a central yet underappreciated feature of care work. It does so by focusing on family elder care and the complex temporal interactions between caregiver, care receiver, and healthcare institutions in the U.S. context. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 19 family caregivers for an elderly relative, I show that their experience of time is, paradoxically, systematically unpredictable. It is shaped by three dimensions: uncertain futures (not knowing how long, or how much, they will have to care), conflicting rhythms (mediating between the temporalities of institutions and that of the elderly relative), and flooded time (ongoing expectations of interruption). Focusing on caregivers’ experiences of unpredictability highlights their exclusion from broader social temporalities and the obstruction of their possibilities to craft their own futures. I therefore suggest that the experience and management of contingency may constitute its own form of inequality and is a fruitful site for exploring the temporal relations between paid and unpaid labor. Also, sociological theories of time and labor may benefit from foregrounding care work to advance understandings of the complex and hierarchical interactions between multiple temporal orders in post‐Fordist economies.     

Assessing Individual and Group Differences in the Sense of Justice: Framework and Application to Gender Differences in the Justice of Earnings

This paper develops a framework for assessing interindividual and intergroup differences in the sense of justice. The framework enables estimation of all the justice quantities of interest - the principles of microjustice and macrojustice, the style of expression, and the firmness with which the principles of microjustice are held - as well as statistical testing for cross-individual and cross-group differences. To illustrate the framework, the paper investigates gender differences in the principles of justice with respect to earnings. Using data collected by Rossi′s factorial-survey method, we obtain respondent-specific estimates of (i) three principles of microjustice - the just base wage, the just rate of return to schooling, and the just gender multiplier-and the certitude with which they are held; and (ii) the principles of macrojustice - represented by seven measures of inequality. To assess gender differences in each of these eleven elements, we estimate a variety of models, utilizing ordinary least-squares estimators and, to correct for possible heteroskedasticity and endogeneity, generalized least-squares and two-stage/least-squares estimators; for the three estimated principles of microjustice, we also carry out hierarchical empirical-Bayes analyses.     

The Common Mathematical Structure of Disparate Sociological Questions

The chief attraction of mathematics is its beauty. It is customary, nonetheless, to catalog the usefulness of mathematics. Accordingly, this paper shows how aspects of three quite different sociological problems—assortative mating and the rise of gender inequality, the sense of justice, and economic and political upheavals and societal transformations—have an identical underlying mathematical structure. Thus, progress in understanding the three sets of phenomena is linked; any new result obtained for one problem will shed light on the other two.     

How I Became a Theorist

This essay tells the story of how the author became a theorist. It describes the central event—how one afternoon in the summer of 1976 the justice evaluation function jumped out of a regression equation—together with earlier theoretical influences and the new theoretical work it set in motion.     

The new immigrant survey pilot (NIS-P): Overview and new findings about U.S. Legal immigrants at admission

This paper provides an overview of the New Immigrant Survey Pilot (NIS-P), a panel survey of a nationally representative sample of new legal immigrants to the United States based on probability samples of administrative records of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The NIS-P links survey information about immigrants' pre- and post-immigration labor market, schooling, and migratory experiences with data available from INS administrative records, including the visa type under which the immigrant was admitted. Results indicate that the procedures followed for locating, interviewing, and reinterviewing respondents yielded representative samples of new legal immigrants and high-quality data. On the basis of data obtained from the first round of the survey, we present new information never before available on the schooling and language skills of new immigrants and their earnings gains from immigration.     

Using national recording systems for the measurement and analysis of immigration to the United States

This article considers the kinds of data required to increase scientific knowledge about US immigration and, in light of those requirements, assesses the principal currently available data sets and makes recommendations for improving the data environment. Study of US immigration phenomena requires data with 3 properties: 1) that they cover immigrants, sponsors, and nation-states; 2) that they measure and link the migration-relevant attributes of the immigrants, sponsors, and nation-states, including the visa histories of both immigrants and sponsors; and 3) that they capture the migration-relevant attributes in a longitudinal manner. The 2 principal data sources currently available for studying immigration--the US decennial censuses and the administrative records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service--fall far short of the data requirements dictated by current reasoning and models about the migration process. Current data sources do not permit, except under stringent assumptions, the estimation of models of such phenomena as earnings, language acquisition, marital behavior, and fertility behavior. The authors propose both a new data-collection effort and a set of enhancements to existing data sources. Perhaps the most efficient way to learn more about immigration would be to design and implement a new data-collection effort with great success. In the meantime, proposed enhancements to existing data sources could help fill some gaps in present knowledge.     

Sponsors,sponsorship rates and the immigration multiplier

"This article reviews the evidence pertaining to the extent to which U.S. immigrants actually make use of the family reunification entitlements of United States immigration laws, examining the two available studies which are based on probability samples of immigrant entry cohorts. It then provides new estimates of the characteristics of the U.S. citizen sponsors of immigrant spouses and parents.... With respect to the characteristics of sponsors, analysis of the information in the GAO [General Accounting Office] report indicates that 80 percent of the persons who immigrated in FY 1985 as the spouses of U.S. citizens were sponsored by native born U.S. citizens. In contrast, native born U.S. citizens sponsored only five percent of the parent immigrants. Additional findings on the country of origin and sex of the sponsored immigrants are presented."     

Migration and stratification

Migration and stratification are increasingly intertwined. One day soon it will be impossible to understand one without the other. Both focus on life chances. Stratification is about differential life chances - who gets what and why - and migration is about improving life chances - getting more of the good things of life. To examine the interconnections of migration and stratification, we address a mix of old and new questions, carrying out analyses newly enabled by a unique new data set on recent legal immigrants to the United States (the New Immigrant Survey). We look at immigrant processing and lost documents, depression due to the visa process, presentation of self, the race-ethnic composition of an immigrant cohort (made possible by the data for the first time since 1961), black immigration from Africa and the Americas, skin color diversity among couples formed by US citizen sponsors and immigrant spouses, and English fluency among children age 8-12 and their immigrant parents. We find, inter alia, that children of previously illegal parents are especially more likely to be fluent in English, that native-born US citizen women tend to marry darker, that immigrant applicants who go through the visa process while already in the United States are more likely to have their documents lost and to suffer visa depression, and that immigration, by introducing accomplished black immigrants from Africa (notably via the visa lottery), threatens to overturn racial and skin color associations with skill. Our analyses show the mutual embeddedness of migration and stratification in the unfolding of the immigrants’ and their children’s life chances and the impacts on the stratification structure of the United States.