Social Forces; a Scientific Medium of Social Study and Interpretation

Birth weight is a robust predictor of valued life course outcomes, emphasizing the importance of prenatal development. But does birth weight act as a proxy for environmental conditions in utero, or do biological processes surrounding birth weight themselves play a role in healthy development? To answer this question, we leverage variation in birth weight that is, within families, orthogonal to prenatal environmental conditions: one's genes. We construct polygenic scores in two longitudinal studies (Born in Bradford, N  = 2008; Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, N  = 8488) to empirically explore the molecular genetic correlates of birth weight...

We assess the relationship between gentrification and a key form of displacement: eviction. Drawing on over six million court cases filed in 72 of the largest metropolitan areas across the United States between 2000 and 2016, we show that most evictions occurred in low-income neighborhoods that did not gentrify. Over time, eviction rates decreased more in gentrifying neighborhoods than in comparable low-income neighborhoods. Results were robust to multiple specifications and alternative measures of gentrification...

The slogan "Breast is Best" has been popularized by medical organizations and parenting networks to extoll the benefits of breastfeeding, yet the causal effects are widely debated. Our study contributes to the debate by examining whether breastfeeding has differential effects based on the propensity to breastfeed, which is also known as causal effect heterogeneity. Prior studies attempt to isolate the causal effect of breastfeeding by netting out confounding characteristics, but we argue that the effects of breastmilk are unlikely to operate in a vacuum...

Does anti-Black racism harm White Americans? We advance hypotheses that address this question within the neighborhood context. Hypotheses are tested with neighborhood and survey data from a probability sample of White residents of Nashville, Tennessee. We find that regardless of neighborhood crime rates or socioeconomic compositions, Whites report heightened perceptions of crime and danger in their neighborhoods as the proportion of Black residents increases. Perceived neighborhood danger, in turn, predicts increased symptoms of psychophysiological distress...

During the twentieth century, state health authorities in California recommended sterilization for over 20,000 individuals held in state institutions. Asian immigrants occupied a marginalized position in racial, gender, and class hierarchies in California at the height of its eugenic sterilization program. Scholars have documented the disproportionate sterilization of other racialized groups, but little research exists connecting the racist, gendered implementation of Asian immigration restriction to the racism and sexism inherent in eugenics...

Bereavement is a risk factor for poor health, yet prior research has not considered how exposure to parental death across the life course may contribute to lasting social isolation and, in turn, poor health among older adults. Moreover, prior research often fails to consider the racial context of bereavement in the United States wherein Black and Hispanic Americans are much more likely than White Americans to experience parental death earlier in life. The present study uses longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS; 1998-2016) to consider linkages of parental death, social isolation, and health (self-rated health, functional limitations) for Black, Hispanic, and White older adults...

Substantive racial integration depends on both access to cross-race friendship opportunities ( demographic integration ) and the development of stable and rewarding social relations ( social integration ). Yet, we know little about the relative stability of cross-race friendship nominations over time. Cross-race friendships are also experienced within social contexts, where other individual, dyadic, and contextual factors may simultaneously affect whether such ties persist. Based on longitudinal network data on over 2,000 students in multiple communities, we test whether cross-race friendships are more or less stable than same-race friendships...

Previous research has established that people shift their identities situationally and may come to subconsciously mirror one another. We explore this phenomenon among survey interviewers in the 2004-2018 General Social Survey by drawing on repeated measures of racial identification collected after each interview. We find not only that interviewers self-identify differently over time but also that their response changes cannot be fully explained by several measurement-error related expectations, either random or systematic...

The formative work of Jane Jacobs underscores the combination of "eyes on the street" and trust between residents in deterring crime. Nevertheless, little research has assessed the effects of residential street monitoring on crime due partly to a lack of data measuring this process. We argue that neighborhood-level rates of households with dogs captures part of the residential street monitoring process core to Jacobs' hypotheses and test whether this measure is inversely associated with property and violent crime rates...

In this study, we integrate diverse structural, social psychological, and relational perspectives to develop and test a comprehensive framework of the processes that make early pregnancy a socially stratified phenomenon. Drawing on rich panel data collected among a sample of 940 18- to 20-year-old women from a county in Michigan, we estimate nested hazard models and formal mediation analyses to simultaneously elucidate the extent to which different mechanisms explain disparities in early pregnancy rates across maternal education levels-a key indicator of socioeconomic status...

In adolescence, teens manage close friendships while simultaneously evaluating their social position in the larger peer context. Conceptualizing distinct local and global network structures clarifies how social integration relates to mental wellbeing. Examining local cohesion and global embeddedness in the context of key factors related to mental health, such as gender and friends' depression, can further distinguish when the structure and content of social integration relate to higher and lower depressive levels...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

As mass layoffs, downsizing, and corporate restructuring have become standard organizational practices, professional work is becoming less stable. We examine the effects of this turbulence on gender inequality through a case study of layoffs in the oil and gas industry. Using a longitudinal survey that followed a cohort of recently hired scientists and engineers at a multinational oil and gas company from 2012-2016, we find that a major reduction-in-force during our study resulted in significant gender disparities in firm departures...

Schools can approach the task of sorting students to privileged learning opportunities in different ways, potentially creating distinct and durable educational inequality regimes. We test this idea by exploring variation in socioeconomic inequalities in advanced mathematics course-taking across California middle schools during a statewide algebra-for-all initiative. This case provides unique insight into local stratification processes since the state pressured schools to boost advanced course enrollments but provided little guidance about how to do so...

At all levels of socioeconomic status, Black Americans can expect to live shorter and sicker lives than their White counterparts. This study advances the perspective that anti-Black stigma from Whites precludes Blacks from reaping the full health rewards of higher status, particularly within the context of neighborhoods. To test this hypothesis, I merge census data with rich survey and biomarker data from the Nashville Stress and Health Study, a representative sample of Black and White adults from Davidson County, Tennessee (n = 1,252)...

This article investigates White, Black, and Hispanic men's and women's access and midlife labor market returns to college quality. To do so, we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979 Cohort (NLSY-79), merged with college quality information from the Barron's Admissions Competitiveness Index. Although prior research has investigated similar dynamics in access and returns to higher education, this work typically excludes Hispanics and does not assess enrollments at community colleges and other less competitive colleges where Black and Hispanic enrollments tend to cluster...

Social demographers and historians have devoted extensive research to patterns of racial segregation that emerged under Jim Crow and during the post-Civil Rights era but have paid less attention to the role of slavery in shaping the residential distribution of Black populations in the United States. One guiding assumption has been that slavery rendered racial segregation to be both unnecessary and impractical. In this study, I argue that apart from the master-slave relationship, slavery relentlessly produced racial segregation during the antebellum period through the residential isolation of slaves and free people of color...

Socioeconomic inequalities in health and well-being are large, beginning early in childhood and accumulating over the life course, but they also vary widely across rich developed nations. Despite this well-known cross-national variation, research has yet to examine why children's health disparities might be larger or smaller based on national policy contexts and macroeconomic conditions. Parental health and well-being suffer under high work-family or economic strain, which may directly impact children's health inequalities by family social class...

Despite remarkable educational gains of minorities, ethnoracial wage inequality persists and has even expanded among highly educated workers. Conventional explanations for this inequality are primarily derived from comparing workers across different educational levels and are less salient for understanding inequalities within the highly educated workforce. This study examines a previously overlooked source of ethnoracial inequality among highly educated workers: vertical mismatch between workers' educational level and the education requirements for their occupation...

The time that parents spend teaching and playing with their young children has important consequences for later life achievement and attainment. Previous research suggests that there are significant class inequalities in how much time parents devote to this kind of developmental childcare in the United States. Yet, due in part to data limitations, prior research has not accounted for how class inequalities in family structure, assortative mating, and specialization between partners may exacerbate or ameliorate these gaps...