bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Stratification in Hard Times
Authors: Gangl Markus 
Published: May 2015

AbstractThis essay reviews current research on the relationship between economic inequality and social stratification. Stratification, that is, the intergenerational reproduction of the distribution of incomes and socioeconomic advantage, is likely to be related to the level of economic inequality because parental incomes and wealth are important resources in families' investment in children's earnings capacity. The relationship is likely to be moderated, however, by the fact that monetary resources are not the sole family resource of importance, and by counterbalancing effects of progressive policy, notably as far as educational policy is concerned. Also, the relationship between inequality and stratification is likely to exhibit considerable time lags, and empirical analyses of contemporaneous correlations are unlikely to be informative in consequence. Owing to the substantial data requirements, few convincing empirical studies on the inequality–stratification relationship are available at present. More reliable evidence is available from studies of the relationship between inequality and educational attainment, arguably the key interim process in stratification. Here, empirical results suggest rising inequality to cause rising inequality of educational achievement, notably because well‐off families are able to increase children's attainment in the face of rising economic incentives, whereas lower income families are less able to do so. The essay concludes by suggesting key areas of future research, likely to be spurred by the increasing sophistication of analytical models and the increasing quality of available intergenerational data on earnings, incomes and socioeconomic standing.
Taking Personality to the Next Level: What Does It Mean to Know a Person?
Authors: Wilson Robert , Vazire Simine 
Published: May 2015

Abstract
What does it mean to know a person? In his famous article, McAdams (1995) addresses this question from the perspective of personality psychology and concludes that personality traits are “the psychology of the stranger.” To really know someone, you need to know more than just how they typically think, feel, and behave on average (a common definition of traits). You need to know how their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors change depending on their role and context, why those fluctuations occur (the underlying motives and causes of those patterns), and how they make sense of their own patterns over time (their life narrative). In this essay, we argue that although there has been little empirical work on within‐person fluctuations in personality, the time is ripe to examine these patterns. New technology has made it possible to quantify momentary thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and to track the contextual factors that underlie these fluctuations (i.e., “personality signatures”). By capturing individual differences at this dynamic level, we can gain a better understanding of how people differ from one another. This will also open the door to new research questions, such as investigating the amount of insight people have into their own and others' personality signatures.
Technology Diffusion
Authors: Jaffe Adam B. 
Published: May 2015

AbstractTechnology diffusion is the process by which new technologies are adopted for use across individual firms or households in a given market, and across different markets. The most salient facts about this process are that it always plays out over time, and the time before adoption is widespread varies greatly across technologies. The dominant explanations for gradual adoption are the time needed for information about the technology to diffuse, and heterogeneity among adopters, such that those for whom the benefits of the new technologies adopt first, while those for whom the benefits are less wait until the technology has improved and/or its cost has fallen. Research has focused on the nature of the information diffusion process, and the attributes of firms and households that affect their adoption decisions. Promising areas for new research include the application of insights ad methods from behavioral economics, the linking of formal models to empirical research, the diffusion of technology to less developed countries and its role in economic development, and public policy issues related to technology diffusion in important sectors such as health care and global climate change.
Text Analysis
Authors: Roberts Carl W. 
Published: May 2015

AbstractEven once words have been counted, or their themes and semantics quantitatively rendered as networks or grammars, it remains unclear what they reveal. Are the texts windows into historical facts that the analyst cannot experience in person, or are they windows into their authors' perspectives? A choice is needed here, because authors' perspectives may alter their renderings of “the facts” and, conversely, changes in an author's surroundings may prompt changes in her or his perspective. Next, is the researcher a novice who strives for fidelity to authors' perspectives, or is the researcher an expert whose perspective affords insights unknown to the authors? With contemporary growth in both world population and communication technologies, increasing contacts among peoples with disparate perspectives afford the social sciences an opportunity both to improve our understanding of these perspectives (or cultures) and to discontinue mining words for evidence consistent with theoretical perspectives of our own choosing. Modality analysis is a promising method for performing historical‐comparative analyses of political cultures based on the volumes of texts only recently available to us.
Genetic and Environmental Approaches to Political Science
Authors: Fazekas Zoltán , Hatemi Peter K. 
Published: May 2015

AbstractOver the past decade, a growing interest in the possibility that biological factors, including genes, might contribute to individual differences in political and social behaviors has emerged. Behavioral genetic techniques have provided a variety of approaches to quantify the effects of genetic and nongenetic inheritance. However, until quite recently, these methods were largely unknown to political scientists. In this essay, we review the general approaches to modeling genetic and social influences on differences in complex human social traits. In so doing, we focus on the “genetics of politics,” including attitudes, ideologies, voting, and partisanship. The emergence of this research reflects a paradigm shift in the study of social traits necessitating the inclusion of biological influences, and recognizing the interdependence of genetic, social, and environmental factors in the development of political behaviors over the life course.
The Role of Cultural, Social, and Psychological Factors in Disease and Illness
Authors: Scott Robert A. 
Published: May 2015

AbstractUnderstanding the effects of social, psychological, and cultural processes on the body raises age‐old questions that remain perplexing puzzles still today. Research by biomedical, social, and behavioral scientists on the role played by these factors in causing disease and people's subjective experience of it promises to advance understanding of issues about the connections between mind and body. This essay summarizes findings from relevant areas of research, identifies the most promising lines of inquiry to date, poses questions that remain to be investigated going forward, and concludes with speculation about possible applications of existing and prospective new knowledge in health‐related and other arenas of social practice.Among the various avenues of research relevant to this topic, three in particular stand out. They are (i) studies of the connections between stress and sickness, (ii) studies of persons' subjective experiences of physical symptoms, and (iii) studies of expectancy effects. Studies of stress document the physical effects of long‐term exposure to adverse social, psychological, and environmental conditions, the role these play in causing disease, their effects on people's experiences of sickness, and on their ability to recover. Studies of symptom perception focus on people's subjective experiences of being ill, investigating ways in which aspects of culture, social environment, traits of personality, and psychological states affect our awareness of bodily symptoms, and how we interpret and experience them subjectively. Studies of expectancy effects, commonly referred to asthe placeboorthe healing response, aim to learn if beliefs alone can have physiologically measurable effects on bodily symptoms and on our perceptions of them, on how we feel and on how we respond to the treatments we are given.Taken together, these areas of research support the conclusion that understanding sickness requires simultaneous knowledge of two factors: the biological conditions diagnosed on the basis of physical signs (disease) and an individual's subjective experiences of the physical symptoms that a disease manifests (illness).
The Role of Data in Research and Policy
Authors: Anderson Barbara A. 
Published: May 2015

AbstractData are essential for scientific research and policy planning. However, there needs to be attention to data quality and to the estimates and models based on those data. In addition, data need to be freely available for researchers to test new ideas and validate the work of others through replication, while respondents who provide data need to be protected. Three issues concerning data are addressed: (i) availability and accuracy of data for new research and reanalysis while protecting human subjects, (ii) problems with the estimation of indicators based on flawed or nongeneralizable data, and (iii) the use of data to develop models for projecting the future, the assumptions on which those models are based, and the assessment of the accuracy of past projections. In each of these areas, increased attention is necessary on how data are used, interpreted, and made available to the scholarly and policy community.
The Social Science of Sustainability
Authors: Urpelainen Johannes 
Published: May 2015

AbstractThe sustainability of socioeconomic systems is widely recognized as a key global challenge, and a social science of sustainable societies is now emerging. Social scientists have made commendable progress in quantifying the cost‐effectiveness of different environmental policy instruments, explaining their diffusion across nations, and documenting the phenomenon of historical and ongoing sustainability transitions. However, social scientists should pay much more attention to the political economy of environmental policy formulation, the challenge of building coalitions that support more ambitious policies to promote sustainability, and the development of analytical models and testable hypotheses about sustainability transitions. Owing to the inherently problem‐oriented nature of sustainability, the social science of sustainability must be strongly interdisciplinary, both among social sciences and with respect to the natural sciences. For the social science of sustainability to survive and thrive over time, academic researchers must both maintain the highest analytical standards and focus on research questions and answers that contribute to the solution of problems that practitioners face.
The Sociology of Religious Experience
Authors: Porpora Douglas 
Published: May 2015

AbstractThis essay examines the sociology of religious experience within the broader context of how other disciplines also study the same phenomenon. It explains the principle of methodological atheism sociologists have typically employed in the study of religion, which goes back to Peter Berger'sThe Sacred Canopy. The principle expressly excludes the possibility that subjects of religious experience may actually be experiencing something real that contributes to their experience. As a consequence, other disciplines and even some sociologists have recently departed from methodological atheism in favor of an approach that might be called methodological agnosticism. This essay examines that shift and the research agenda thereby opened up.
To Flop Is Human: Inventing Better Scientific Approaches to Anticipating Failure
Authors: Boruch Robert , Ruby Alan 
Published: May 2015

AbstractPostmortems and autopsies, at the individual and hospital unit levels, are disciplined approaches to learning from medical failures. “Safety factors” that engineers use in designing structures and systems are based on past failures or trials and experiments to find points of failure.The applied social sciences, including education sciences, labor economics, and criminology, have less clarity about failure. While a bridge collapse is usually plain and spectacular, failures of education innovations or attempts at crime control are often quieter, not spectacular, and often occur for no transparent reasons.The applied social sciences lack disciplined, well‐developed, and explicit approaches to anticipating the failure to meet expectations in testing the effectiveness of programs, analyzing the failures, and building a cumulative knowledge base on the phenomenon. Our fields can, for instance, identify “what works” pretty well from randomized controlled trials.However, little serious attention has been dedicated to understanding “why” and “how” a particular intervention failed to meet expectations in well‐executed randomized controlled trials. This essay discusses a variety of research initiatives that are designed to better understand failure, especially in controlled trials.
A Social Psychological Approach to Racializing Wealth Inequality
Authors: Brown Joey 
Published: May 2015

AbstractSince the Civil Rights' movements of the 1960s, some Blacks have advanced socioeconomically, resulting in a flourishing Black middle‐class. The Black middle‐class has experienced upward mobility as measured by traditional indicators of education and income. Cultural narratives promoting colorblindness and stressing the rise of a postracial, meritocratic America uphold Black advancement as a symbol of success. However, a focus on racial wealth inequality complicates the narrative of Black success and tells a different story regarding the life chances of Black Americans, even those who are middle‐class. This essay explicates foundational research on the increasing visibility of the Black middle‐class and racial wealth inequality. Secondly, it discusses advances in research on race and wealth inequality as well as recent social psychological theory on social class that may be useful in thinking about mechanisms and consequences of racial wealth inequality. Finally, the essay raises some key issues and questions for social psychologists interested in racial wealth inequality. By no means exhaustive, the goal is to begin a conversation on how social psychologists can contribute to understanding racial wealth inequality. In particular, social psychological work may help us understand continuing racial wealth inequality by considering the role of financial socialization, addressing tensions between objective and subjective social class identification, and thinking about the role of self and identity in wealth creation, accumulation, and dissemination.
Transformation of the Employment Relationship
Authors: Kalleberg Arne L. , Marsden Peter V. 
Published: May 2015

Abstract
Employment relations are implicit or explicit contractual arrangements that specify the reciprocal expectations and obligations linking employers and employees. They encompass a wide range of phenomena, including work organization, governance, evaluation, and rewards. During the past quarter century, the standard employment relationship that was normative in much of the world during the twentieth century declined in favor of various nonstandard employment relations involving more tenuous employer–employee linkages. The transformation of employment relations has been associated with a wide range of phenomena including growth in economic and social inequality, shifting career patterns, and changes in the organization of work.
Trends in Street Crime and the Crime Drop
Authors: Rosenfeld Richard 
Published: May 2015

Abstract
After rising for nearly three decades, rates of street crime have declined in the United States since the early 1990s. Researchers have attributed the crime swings to changes in the economy, age structure, imprisonment, and drug markets. Recent studies also highlight the role of immigration, abortion policy, and policing. A major challenge for future research on crime trends is to explain why street crime did not increase during the Great Recession of 2008–2009. National research agencies should devote attention to the question of why and how crime rates change over time.
Two‐Systems View of Children's Theory‐of‐Mind Understanding
Authors: Low Jason 
Published: May 2015

Abstract
Theory‐of‐mind research reveals a puzzling pattern of young children showing implicit “mindreading” success in indirect false‐belief tasks well before they can pass explicit tasks where they are asked to make direct predictions about the mistaken agent's belief or behavior. Relevant theorizing has either boosted indirect responses (e.g., eye movements) as showcasing infants' and young children's innate psychological reasoning system or scoffed at indirect responses as reflecting only a shallow causal understanding of behavior. This essay describes new theorizing suggesting that we have not one but two mindreading systems—an implicit efficient system (shared by infants, children, and adults) that supports spontaneous responses such as eye gazing and an explicit flexible system (constructed from age 4 onward) that supports direct verbal responses. This view has inspired cutting‐edge research documenting signature limits on the kinds of input that the efficient mindreading system processes. New research shows that the efficient system is set to help young children and adults minimally track facts relating to agents and objects, but not relations between agents and propositions. The flexible system—supporting understanding of belief as such—guides children's direct verbal inferences in a wide range of perspective‐taking situations that include ascribing how people interpret a particular object. Future research into the question of how human beings mindread in fast‐moving situations will need insight into whether there are systematic patterns of limits on implicit understanding that converge across age groups, multiple paradigms, and diverse populations.
Household Wealth Effects and theUSMacroeconomy
Authors: Dynan Karen , Cooper Daniel 
Published: May 2015

AbstractThe effect of wealth on consumption is an issue of long‐standing interest to economists. Analysts believe that fluctuations in household wealth have driven major swings in economic activity. This essay considers the so‐called “wealth effects”—the impact of changes in wealth on household consumption and the overall macroeconomy. There is an extensive existing literature on wealth effects, but there are also many unanswered issues and questions. This essay reviews the important issues regarding the role wealth plays in the macroeconomy and argues that there is a need for much more wealth effect research as well as better data sources for conducting such analysis.
Why do States Pursue Nuclear Weapons (or Not)
Authors: Wan Wilfred , Solingen Etel 
Published: May 2015

AbstractThis essay traces the evolution of the literature on the rationale behind states' pursuit of nuclear weapons, from classical neorealist explanations focusing on relative power to neoliberal institutionalist ones underlining the deterrent power of institutions and constructivist work on the impact of norms, status, and identities. We call attention to their contributions as well as their conceptual and empirical deficiencies and introduce an approach that links both nuclear ambition and nuclear restraint to models of domestic political survival. The inclusion of this previously overlooked independent variable harnesses the utility of extant approaches, allowing more effective weighing of the impact of other causal variables, while accounting for variation over time, across and within states. We take stock of more recent work employing quantitative and qualitative approaches and identify an agenda for advancing causal theories explaining why some states pursue nuclear weapons whereas others do not.
Why Do States Sign Alliances?
Authors: Leeds Brett Ashley 
Published: May 2015

AbstractDespite the fact that policy‐makers and scholars of international politics have often expressed skepticism about the efficacy of international agreements, formal military alliances have been an important feature of international politics for centuries. This essay first introduces the dominant explanation for why states sign alliance treaties: state leaders use formal alliances to convey credible information about their future intentions to partners and adversaries. It then considers empirical evidence in support of this perspective, particularly with regard to deterrence and compliance. Following this summary, I raise five puzzles that contemporary researchers are working to resolve, but which leave room for further analysis and development. First, I discuss the challenges faced by large n empirical studies of alliance formation. Next, I ask why strong states ally with weak states and consider some of the most compelling recent explanations. Third, I consider the complicated relationships between alliances and war. Fourth, I examine how alliances affect cooperation among member states. Finally, I encourage scholars to continue a recent focus on how alliances are designed. While we have seen significant progress in understanding military alliances over the last 20 years, primarily because of the development of game‐theoretic models that capture strategic interaction and the collection of new data that allow for nuanced tests of the hypothesized relationships, there is good reason to believe that we will continue to see significant innovation over the next decade.
Women Running for Office
Authors: Lawless Jennifer L. 
Published: May 2015

Abstract
When women run for office, they tend to fare at least as well as their male counterparts. From vote totals, to fund‐raising receipts, to media coverage, to voters' evaluations, male and female candidates have become increasingly indistinguishable from one another. This is not to suggest, however, that gender is irrelevant in US politics. It might not prevent women from winning their elections, but it substantially stunts their emergence as candidates in the first place. Women are less likely than similarly situated men to consider running for office and actually to emerge as candidates. This gender gap in political ambition can be traced to differences in the manner in which women and men perceive themselves as potential candidates, as well as how electoral gatekeepers view them. The extant scholarship, therefore, suggests that if we want to understand gender dynamics in contemporary US politics, then we must focus our efforts on the precandidacy stage of the process. More specifically, pinpointing the origins of the gender gap in political ambition and developing an understanding of how political ambition evolves are crucial next steps for the women and politics subfield.