Bibliomancy Meme

Eszter at Crooked Timber posted an interesting exercise. The task: Grab the nearest book that is at least 123 pages long, open the book to page 123, find the 5th sentence on the page, type the following three sentences, then tag five people. I'm not going to tag anyone, but welcome the three of you who read this blog on occasion to do the same exercise.

I looked above my monitors and the first book on my shelf is, Erving Goffman's Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Page 123 takes me to the essay, "Alienation From Interaction."

What the individual takes to be immodesty in others may present itself in many forms: immodest individuals may seem to praise themselves verbally; they may talk about themselves and their activity in a way that assumes greater interest in and familiarity with their personal life than the individual actually possesses; they may speak more frequently and at greater length than the individual feels is fitting; they may take a more prominent "ecological" position than he thinks they warrant, etc.

One interesting source of other-consciousness is to be found in the phenomenon of "over-involvement." During any conversation, standards are established as to how much the individual is to allow himself to be carried away by the talk, how thoroughly he is to permit himself from becoming so swollen with feelings and a readiness to act that he threatens the bounds regarding affect that have been established for him in the interaction.

2 Clarifications on Laud Humphreys

As I posted a few days back, the stories about Larry Craig have revived interest in Laud Humphreys' controversial book, The Tea Room Trade.

Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Education (and Crooked Timber) offered a detailed book review of a recent Humphreys biography. Based on this review, I grabbed our library's copy of the book and read it Friday morning (minus the appendices, the book is about 100 pages). Two things presented in the biography struck me was being worth comment:

1. Alvin Gouldner assaulted Humphreys in retaliation for posting an unflattering posters portraying the professor as a bird that "feeds on underdogs." Humphreys told a New York Times reporter that he thought Gouldner's 1968 article in the American Sociologist, "was an unfair personal attack on leading exponents of what some term 'underdog sociology,' and an oblique attack on certain members of the sociology department at Washington University." Later in the Times piece we read, "Professor Gouldner, who called Mr. Humphreys a 'peeping parson,' contends that the altercation had been precipitated by the former clergyman's anger at his article."
   
   Ah, Sociology... You can't make this stuff up. But this confirms that I was wrong before; the stories of Gouldner beating up Humprheys for his "unethical research practices" do not hold water.
   
   
2. More interestingly, the biographers went to Humphreys's tearoom and examined the physical space. They conclude there is no way that he could have ascertained the detail of these encounters reported in his book as a non-participant observer. That is, he could not have observed the nuanced details of this ritual as a watch queen. This leads the biographers to conclude that he was engaged in as a participating observer.
   
   The biographers address the ethical implications of this, specifically that when Humphreys appeared to do his "survey", it's entirely possible that the subjects recognized him and felt compelled to answer his questions in fear of being outed. But there are some substantive implications as well. If he was an active participant in the tea-room trades, his work could be understood as normalizing advocacy. That is, an effort to communicate to heterosexuals that they should not fear this activity; that *we* have come up with ways to protect your innocence. Perhaps this is more wishful rhetoric than scientific reporting?

I haven't thought this through all the way yet, but it's an interesting question to follow. I know that advocacy research or participatory action research is popular within some areas of the field, but I have my reservations about it. I'll leave it at that for now. The only other impression I took away from the book was that Humphreys did not seem to be a terribly pleasant human being, at least to those he disagreed with.

Operationalizing evangelicals

I offered most of the following as a comment to Brad Wright's thoughts on the negative stereotypes of evangelicals. I'm posting it here too expand a bit and solicit opinions. I still toy with the idea of resurrecting my research program on understanding the evangelical identity movement.

Brad came across a video titled "why evangelicals are scary," that portrays all evangelicals as narrow dogmatic creationists. He wonders why it is acceptable to paint evangelicals with a broad brush when it is obviously not socially acceptable to do the same to other identity groups:

Imagine the response if other groups were similarly denounced. How about:
"Why Muslims are Scary"
"Why Jews are Scary"
"Why African-Americans are Scary"
"Why Asians are Scary"
"Why Disabled People are Scary"
"Why Gays are Scary"
"Why (fill in the blank) are Scary"

I offered the following in the comments:

The scariness of evangelicals is rooted in a complex social alchemy.

(1) No one really knows what evangelical means. Sure, there are theologians like Carl F. Henry who define evangelical as a theological orientation that is distinct from fundamentalism. There are others who frame evangelical more as a social identity only loosely based on theology. This later group participates in identity politics... one is an evangelical if...

• he or she attends a certain kind of church (the people they hang out with)
  
• engages in certain kinds of behavior (voting, small group, whatever)
  
• refrains from certain behaviors (drinking, smoking)
  
• and the the list could go on.

In this case evangelicals span all kinds of finer distinctions. Political leaders like Falwell, Dobson, and the icon formerly known as Ted Haggard cynically exploit this identity movement for political power. And lets not kid ourselves about those leaders and their role. No matter what they call themselves, they are not ministers. They are political hacks. They have done a great disservice to people of faith and drive a wedge between the community of believers and those of us looking in from the outside.

(2) The entire debate in what James Davidson Hunter once called Culture Wars pits true believers of mutually antagonistic worldviews in a debate that is doomed to escalate. What is ironic is that both of these sides gain strength through their perception of persecution. That the implications of this battle are for the meaning of life, the universe, and everything (hat tip to Douglas Adams) only intensifies their resolve. Just to take one example, evangelicals (as an identity movement) are threatened by same-sex unions. This undermines a core principle of their identity construct. At the same time, gays and lesbians see this reaction as a threat to their existence. Both sides feed on the persecution of the other as well as feel persecuted by their opposite. And the cycle continues on and on. Hunter was examining these dynamics two decades ago, Christian Smith studied this in the mid 90s, and little if anything has changed today.

So to come back to Brad's original point. The left's (for lack of a better term... Hunter used the term progressive to describe this constellation) singling out of evangelicals (defined loosely) is anchored to an institutionalized squabble that appears not to be leaving anytime soon. The other groups you mention are not as tightly connected to this construct. Now, if and when any of those groups gain marketshare in the identity politics arena, I suppose they will join the fray.

Could blogs replace the primary function of journals?

Yeah a naive question... but that's what I do.

Brad Wright is writing a series of posts on statistics and Christianity. He's currently focusing on variation in divorce rates across types of religious adherents. In the first data post (linked above) he uses General Social Survey data to show that folks who are actively religious are less likely to have ever been divorced than those whom have never been religious, or have stopped. His data are below:

Divorce rates by religious affiliation & attendance. General Social Survey, 2000, 2002, 2004 (N= 5,963)

58% Non-active Black Protestants
54% Non-active Evangelicals
51% No religious beliefs (e.g., atheists, agnostics)
48% Non-active other religions
47% Active Black Protestants
43% Average for all sample members
42% Non-active Mainline Protestants
41% Non-active Catholics
39% Jewish
38% Active other religions
34% Active Evangelicals
32% Active Mainline Protestants
23% Active Catholics

There's a causal time-order nit to pick with this analysis in that the GSS does not allow us to determine when a divorce occurred in the respondent's life course (e.g., before or after a religious conversion)... but the results are compelling none-the-less. These percentages diverge from the received wisdom that Evangelical Christians divorce at the same rate as everyone else (a received wisdom that I've cited in a Soc of Religion paper that was rejected 6 years ago and still sits in my file drawer begging for revision).

Now obviously this analysis is preliminary and tentative. But by posting this on his blog along with references to how he coded the data, Brad has invited folks to examine and comment. I believe that this is essentially what journals were designed to do before the days of publish or perish. They provided a forum for a scholar to work out an idea and let others comment (as they are). This is the way science should operate.

The utility of the ASR

The small sociological blogosophere has been stirred up lately over the Journal impact factors.¹ [I can hear the collective yawn of those readers who are not sociologists; I'm afraid to say this will not get any more interesting to you]. Within Sociology, three journals have historically been considered the big three.

1. The American Sociological Review.
2. The American Journal of Sociology.
3. Social Forces.

Jeremy kicked off a bruhaha by calling attention to the relatively low factor assigned to Social Forces. Now I could care less about these impact factors; generally these journals don't publish the kinds of work that I do. But in the the long thread of comments to these posts several people put forth assertions concerning what constitutes "good sociology" that has me thinking. The ideas to follow are provisional and incomplete, but I think there is something important to be said about methodological discourse within Sociology. I'm starting to write a working-paper on this, so I welcome constructive comments.²

In this post, I wish to focus on one key question:
Does ASR truly reflect the cutting edge of sociology?

Several comments in Jeremy's thread got me thinking about the value of ASR. First, the infamous assertion made by anonymous at 2:37 a.m.

they like to publish boring articles that only other sociologists care about ...public has no use for most of the rubbish printed in "the big three", but every once in a while a study relevant to public will be printed.... Minimal publication of qualitative findings and impression management that sociology is a "hard science" by printing numerous formulas that researcher got from the latest (spss, stata, sas) manual.

This commenter (correctly in my view) was taken to task for sweeping generalizations. However nestled inside the invective is a point worth considering... is the ASR relevant? A subsequent comment on thread suggests it is ignorant to even ask such a question. Well, in my view, the best way to pierce ignorance is through empirical investigation... so let the examination begin.

I have to admit, my knee jerk reaction to that question is no, the ASR has not been relevant (to general public OR general sociology) for a long time. I polled my colleagues and found only one reads the ASR with any regularity and that person said that s/he doesn't find much of practical use for his/her own work.³ A senior colleague told me that s/he toys with the idea of running a call for papers on "When did the ASR become unreadable and what should we do about it".

However, I had to acknowledge that my knee-jerk reaction is also anchored in ignorance. As a tenure-track person, my reading time is spent on stuff directly related to my research program. And though I work in a mainstream area of Sociology (Criminology and Social Control) this area of work is not proportionally represented in ASR (or so I assumed).⁴ I started going through this calendar year's issues of ASR. I brought two with me (the top two on my stack): (vol 71, Number 5, October 2006 & vol 71, Number 1, February 2006).
Here are the titles from Feburary's issue {71(1)}

1. Comparative Perspectives and Competing Explanations: Taking on the Newly Configured Reductionist Challenge to Society, by Troy Duster, NYU (2005 Presidential Address)
   
2. Widowhood and Race by Felix Elwert & Nicholas A. Christakis, Harvard
   
3. Networks, Race, and Hiring by Roberto M. Fernandez (MIT Sloan School of Management) & Isabel Fernandez-Mateo (London Business School)
   
4. Wealth, Race, and Inter-Neighborhod Migration by Kyle Crowder (Western Washington University), Scott J. South (SUNY Albany), & Erick Chavez (SUNY Albany).
   
5. Deterring Delinquents: A Rational Choice Model of Theft and Violence By Ross L. Matsueda (University of Washington), Derek A. Kreager (University of Washington) and David Huizinga (University of Colorado)
   
6. liBlack and White Control of Numbers Gambling: A Cultural Assets-Social Capital View, by Darrell Steffensmeir & Jeffery T. Ulmer, Penn State. ** Followed by a comment and reply which I don't address here.

So among the empirical papers in the first issue of 2006 (not counting Duster) we see two papers addressing demographic concerns (Elwert & Christakis; Crowder et al), two papers on networks and opportunity structures (Fernandez & Fernandez-Mateo; Steffensmeier & Ulmter) and a paper addressing rational-choice behavior (Matsueda et al).

Are these papers important and relevant?

Having only read the papers superficially, I answer in the affirmative.

Elwert & Christakis explore the widowhood effect (that one's probability of death increases significantly upon the death of one's spouse). Using an enormous dataset (n=410,272) they demonstrate that the bereavement effect varies by race.

"Whites married to whites suffer a large and enduring widowhood effect. By Contrast, blacks married to blacks do not suffer a detectable widowhood effect, possibly because they manage to extend the survival advantage of marriage into widowhood (pg 16)."

This on its face strikes me as incredibly useful and relevant. Unfortunately, as I read the article, I'm lost on the take-home point. (e.g., what would make this paper relevant for non-sociologists). The bulk of the article focuses on measurement and modeling. They offer a useful conjectures in the discussion that the lack of a bereavement effect among b/b couples:

On one hand, blacks may not experience a widowhood effect because, unlike whites, they never gained survival advantages from marriage in the first place. On the other hand, blacks may have gained survival advantages from marriage, but unlike whites, manage to extend this marital survival advantage into widowhood (pg 36)."

They lack the data to directly determine which alternative is correct, but deduce the latter. In this regard, the paper is limited by logico-deductive model. That is, while they make a compelling argument through reason and deduction, at the end of the day their conclusion is essentially an educated guess (conjecture) which requires further refutation and testing (falsification). [Which is not to say its wrong... but the problem could be approached inductively, to paraphrase Mitch Dunier...to use shoe leather... to go and talk to people who have lost their spouses and see what the common (or uncommon) coping mechanisms are (not that I want to get into the Dunier can of worms right now, I'll post on that squabble later)].

Crowder et al analyze Panel Study of Income Dynamics data merged with census track data to estimate "modest effects of wealth on these patterns of inter-neighborhood migration (pg 72)." The topic in and of itself is interesting and relevant (what factors perpetuate segregation or facilitate migration). But unlike the previous article, I don't find this paper terribly interesting or useful.... Whereas Elwert & Christakis got me thinking about their conclusions, after skimming this paper, my reaction was... that's it? I'm not sure what's really new here. [The authors would say that they've uncovered some nuances in the effects of wealth by race....great, I'm just not convinced that this is something that I should encourage my students to read. Having just criticized it, I do think this paper is refreshing for an ASR empirical piece in that its methods are generally comprehendable to anyone with a basic grasp of regression analysis (OLS and Logistic models). In contrast Elwert & Christakis develop a statistical argument that is much harder to follow.

I'm going to close out this post for now without really answering my own question. The short answer is that yes, the ASR has utility. But the new question is: utility for what? Provisionally, I think the ASR is useful in that it brings together papers from across the discipline that (are supposed to) say something we all (sociologists) need to think about. In the two paper that I reviewed in this post (not that I read either really carefully... apologies in advance if one of the authors stumbles by) one got me thinking while the other didn't. Thus, I need to revise my kneejerk reaction to the ASR. But these thoughts are still forming.

Perhaps I'll start a series of posts on ASR articles, if nothing else to think about the arguments and evidence more carefully.

===
1. The impact factor is a proprietary measure from ISI web of science. It is designed to measure how much influence (through citation networks) a particular journal has. For the interested, see Dan Myers' comment on a long (and somewhat contentious) on Jeremy's initial thread.

2. Not that I get the kind of traffic that Jeremy gets, but to anyone who finds me through his sidebar, I'd really like to keep the commentary constructive on this topic. If you think my argument is off, tell me so! But please explain why and share an alternative.

3. Sorry for the clunky his/her anonymity. Since I publicly identify who I am and where I work and haven't asked these people if they want their views known, I am covering their identities.

4. I believe this claim can be empirically validated. However, given that two papers in the first ASR I canvass below are related to Criminology, I will reserve the right to correct myself at a later date.