"[Sociology] may not have the ear of presidents but may actually do a better job of explaining what has gone wrong in large swaths of the United States and other advanced nations in recent years."... Read more about What if Sociologists had as much influence as Economists?

People living in the United States today live lives that are sicker and end earlier than people living in other high-income countries.  The facts are described in two recent reports [https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13497/us-health-in-international-perspective-shorter-lives-poorer-health and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK62369/] sponsored by the National Academy of Science. Jason Beckfield has joined sociologists, demographers, and epidemiologists in ongoing efforts to explain the growing US health disadvantage, and he recently published a new study in Social Science & Medicine that shows US life expectancy would be approximately 3-5 years longer if the US were not a social policy laggard.

... Read more about We are sicker when we live in stingier societies

Peter V. Marsden has won the Lazardsfeld Award from the ASA Section on Methodology.  The award, which will be presented at the ASA in Seattle is for a career of distinguished scholarship. 

Progress towards gender equality was substantial on many fronts in the decades leading up to the 1990s. Since then, movement towards gender equality has slowed. The gender wage gap has narrowed at a slower pace in the past 20 years, and the same can be said for occupational sex segregation. Postindustrial societies show variation in these patterns and in the consequences that ensue.... Read more about Gender Equity and Low Fertility in Postindustrial Societies

Between 1989 and 2009, six Latin American nations passed total abortion bans.  Women in these countries are now denied abortions under every circumstance, even when a pregnancy may put their lives at risk.  In El Salvador, the passage of a total abortion ban was additionally followed by a steep rise in the incarceration of women for the “aggravated homicide” of their “newborns,” often with 30-40 year prison sentences.  Pro-life proponents argue vociferously that these extreme incarcerations are appropriate punishments for women who birthed healthy, full term babies and then killed them to avoid their motherly duties.  Pro-choice proponents, in contrast, argue that these incarcerated women committed no crime, but rather suffered from poverty, limited medical support, and obstetrical emergencies.... Read more about Salvadoran Mothers Incarcerated for Stillbirths

Why do some people live long lives, while others die prematurely? What does the accident of birth in one place rather than another tell us about how human-designed social institutions write the rules of life and death? Why are race, class, and gender stronger social determinants of health in some places and times, and weaker in other times and places? With seed-grant support from the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public health, Jason Beckfield has launched a new project that uses comparative sociology to answer these questions.... Read more about Death by Design: A Global Approach to Social Inequalities in Health

Why are so many young people in certain regions of the postindustrial world delaying marriage and children, or not moving forward at all on either front?  Southern European and East Asian countries now universally have birth rates that are far below what is required to naturally replace their populations. This is leading to rapid population aging and the specter of lowered economic productivity. To unravel the reasons behind historically unprecedented low birth rates, Mary Brinton (Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology) is leading a team of international collaborators in a five-country comparative study of gender equality and fertility.... Read more about Explaining Low Fertility in Postindustrial Societies

Mary C. Waters (M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology) and Jean Rhodes, (Frank L. Boyden Professor of Psychology at University of Massachusetts, Boston) have been awarded a three year Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research for The RISK study—Resilience in Survivors of Hurricane Katrina. This is a longitudinal study of 1,019 largely female African American poor people in New Orleans. They were part of a study of community college students that began a year before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005. So the study includes two waves of pre-disaster data on physical and mental health, social support, social trust, socioeconomic status and many other indicators.... Read more about The RISK Study: Long Term Resilience and Recovery from Disasters

In recent years, many public and private institutions in cities have begun to collect large-scale electronic records on a wide range of behaviors and patterns of communication.  The advent of what some call “big data” provides a new set of opportunities to paint a comprehensive picture of cities, which has the potential to transform theoretical models of urban governance and social behavior.

Robert J. Sampson (Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences) is Principal Investigator on a grant from the National Science...