Everyday Sociology Blog

Sociology of Adoption

By Jonathan Wynn

I wasn’t really eager to write about adoption. It’s a little personal, and still new. And yet, I can’t help but to think about everything in a sociological way and so, over the past two years, I’ve been mulling over the issues, and thought it would be a useful way to think about the sociology of families.

Joshua Gamson’s book Modern Families details how today’s family is the product of complex societal changes that weave together incredibly intimate and complicated personal experiences with larger social forces (e.g., reproductive technologies, international policies, reproductive freedom, gay and lesbian family rights, geopolitical power, changes in work, delayed parenting, global inequalities and war). Adoption is one piece of the story of what being a family means today.

Money and Marriage

By Karen Sternheimer

Romantic rituals like Valentine’s Day emphasize marriage and relationships (often via commercial means), and social media posts often celebrate proposals and anniversaries. Marriage means many things to different people, particularly across place and time. But one thing is somewhat consistent: marriage is intertwined with money.

While it might be crude to think of marrying for money in the U.S. in the twenty-first century, financial factors are often part of the reason that people don’t marry (or don’t stay married). Why are the two so inextricably related, even as people may be most likely to marry for love and companionship today?

What’s in a Name?

By Jonathan Wynn

I’ve thought a lot about names since reading a chapter in Freakonomics called “A Roshanda by any other name,” over a decade ago. (Here’s an update in podcast form.) Perhaps some of you have had the paralyzing struggle of having to name a child (or being a parent) while also trying to think about sociology. It’s tough. Sociologist Dalton Conley, somewhat famously, named his daughter E and his son Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles Jeremijenko-Conley.

Names can say a lot. What were the reasons behind your name? Was your name popular? Is your name one you share with other family members? Do your professors do a terrible job pronouncing it? As Karen Sternheimer notes, it’s important to know someone’s name in class. But let’s lend some sociological insight onto the topic.

Household Labor: Inside a Sociologist’s Family

Schoepflin Housework

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By Todd Schoepflin

One of my favorite topics in sociology is how couples arrange the work of running a household. It’s constant work to cook, clean, do laundry, repairs, and so on. Mix in caring for children if you have them, and that’s even more work that has to be done.

Knowing how much work my wife and I do at home, I think often of single parents who do the work themselves. Conflict can arise for couples when the division of labor is unequal. One of the best known books in sociology is The Second Shift (1989), written by Arlie Hochschild. It’s a book that influenced me to think deeply about how to contribute to housework and childcare.

Most of the men in her study didn’t share the labor of completing household tasks. (Here’s a video of Hochschild talking about her research for the book.) As she explains, the second shift is all the work that has to be done at home for working parents. And her study showed that much of this second shift work was completed by women. Couples often argued about inequalities surrounding this work. She found that women spent more time doing housework and childcare, and that a lot of husbands were supportive of their wives working so long as their wives managed the household. Couples were happier when they truly shared housework and childcare—and this is something I keep in mind when it comes to the daily work of operating a household with my wife.

Millennials, Sex, and the Economy: The Sociological Imagination in Action

By Angelique Harris

Although the exact definition of a millennial may vary, roughly speaking millennials are those born between 1981 and 1996, and are between 22 and 37 years of age in 2018. This is the first generation to come of age after the technology boom, having grown up with the internet and mobile phones. This is also the generation most impacted by the economic downturn. many of them graduated from college and entered the workforce during and immediately after the Great Recession, thus impacting not only their lifestyles and career opportunities, but even career choices and college majors.

While the economy impacts everyone, it has had a particular impact on millennials’ lives. We know so much about the lives and experiences of millennials in part because of their use of social media to document their lives, preferences, and habits and because, as the largest demographic, they are a target audience for market research.

Families and Ancestry

By Karen Sternheimer

In one of my graduate school courses, we read a book called Families We Choose, Kath Weston’s 1991 study of how gay and lesbians create family ties. This was particularly enlightening in the 1990s, when the concept of LGBT families seemed like an oxymoron to many people. I had never given much thought to what constituted a family until reading that book.

I had an arguably narrow idea of the meaning of families then: one based on legal or biological ties, as I had known in my family. A few kids I went to school with had been adopted, and that was always a quiet curiosity, one that was typically only brought up rarely, and was seldom the topic of conversation. The meaning of families seemed to be very clear-cut.

Birth Rates: Who Will Replace Us?

By Karen Sternheimer

According to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the birth rate in the United States fell to an all-time low in 2016.

Births to teens also fell to an all-time low, down from 41.5 births per thousand in 2007 to 20.3 in 2016, a 51% decline. Birth rates also fell, albeit more modestly, for women in their 20s. By contrast, births to women in their 30s and 40s grew modestly. However, the birthrate for women 40-44 was 11.3 per thousand, and for women 45-49 it was .9, lower than any age group except 10-14-year-olds. Women 25-34 had the highest birthrates, at about 100 births per thousand.

What does this mean for our population overall?

Love and Sociological Theory

By Teresa Irene Gonzales

Earlier this term, I used Larson and Tsitsos’s (2013) “Speed Dating and the Presentation of Self” activity to get students to think about impression management and impression formation. The activity requires that half of the class stay seated, while others are tasked with switching seats/partners every three minutes. During each segment, students talk about anything they want. The activity enables students to practice analysis, participant-observation, and symbolic interactionism.

Partway through the activity, I modified the exercise and, after they switched partners, asked students to stare at the person across from them for one minute before talking. After about 30 seconds of nervous laughter and glances around the room, the students settled into staring. We then proceeded to finish the exercise without additional modifications.

Upon completion, and during our discussion component of the activity, several students mentioned that although staring at another classmate was “weird” and “made them uncomfortable,” it also created a connection between some of the participants. Students said that they felt closer and more trusting of the person they stared at. This trust enabled them to engage in deeper conversation and to feel an instant friendship with their staring partner.

Sociology and the Culture of Sex on Campus

By Lisa Wade

Associate Professor of Sociology, Occidental College

When new students move into their residence halls to start their first year of college, they become a part of an institution. In many ways, it is a “total institution” in the tradition of the sociologist Erving Goffman: an organization that collects large numbers of like individuals, cuts them off from the wider society, and provides for all their needs. Prisons, mental hospitals, army barracks, and nursing homes are total institutions. So are cruise ships, cults, convents, and summer camps. Behemoths of order, they swallow up their constituents and structure their lives.

Many colleges are total institutions, too. Being a part of the institution means that students’ educational options are dictated, of course, but colleges also have a substantial amount of control over when students eat, where they sleep, how they exercise, with whom they socialize and, pertinent to our topic today, whether and under what conditions they have sex.

Where Young Adults Live and Why

By Karen Sternheimer

If you want to move out of your parent(s)’ home, go to college. And be sure graduate.

A recent report by the Pew Research Center found that living with parents is now the most common living arrangement for young adults aged 18 to 34. Using census data going as far back as 1880, young adults in this age group are less likely to be living with a marital or romantic partner than in the past. They are also more likely to be living alone, with roommates, or heading a single parent household today than in previous years for which we have data.

In 2014, 32 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds lived with their parent(s). Living with parents in early adulthood had been common until the middle of the twentieth century; in 1940, 35 percent of people in this age group lived with parents, but by 1960 just 20 percent did. Why did the percent dip, and why has it risen since?