The gap between need and effective treatment for mental health problems continues to be a challenge for researchers and policymakers. Much of the attention has been on differences in treatment rates, with insufficient attention to variation in pathways that people take into treatment. Individuals may choose to seek help but may also be substantially influenced by others or coerced into care. The chances of each type of pathway are influenced by social characteristics and may shape perceptions of effectiveness of care.
When hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets of Hong Kong this summer, central figures reportedly took no selfies, avoided Facebook and Twitter, installed prepaid SIM cards, stuck to secure messaging apps, and used cash instead of rechargeable subway cards or other cashless payments. It is not clear whether this will help them avoid “conspiracy to commit public nuisance” charges, which led to prison sentences for leaders of the 2014 Umbrella movement (including sociologist Kin-man Chan).
ASA speaks with sociologist Michèle Lamont at the 2016 ASA Annual Meeting on August, 2016, in Seattle, WA. Lamont talks about what it means to “do sociology,” how she uses sociology in her work, highlights of her work in the field, the relevance of sociological work to society, and her advice to students interested in entering the field.
ASA speaks with sociology graduate student Simone Kolysh at the 2016 ASA Annual Meeting on August, 2016, in Seattle, WA. Kolysh talks about what it means to “do sociology,” how she uses sociology in her work, highlights of her work in the field, the relevance of sociological work to society, and her advice to students interested in entering the field.
Women’s opportunities have been profoundly altered over the past century by reductions in the social and structural constraints that limit women’s educational attainment. Do social constraints manifest as a suppressing influence on genetic indicators of potential, and if so, did equalizing opportunity mean equalizing the role of genetics? We address this with three cohort studies: the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS; birth years 1939 to 1940), the Health and Retirement Study, and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health; birth years 1975 to 1982).
Corporations gather massive amounts of personal data to predict how individuals will behave so that they can profitably price goods and allocate resources. This article investigates the moral foundations of such increasingly prevalent market practices. I leverage the case of credit scores in car insurance pricing—an early and controversial use of algorithmic prediction in the U.S. consumer economy—to unpack the premise that predictive data are fair to use and to understand the conditions under which people are likely to challenge that moral logic.
Scholars in sociology and social psychology typically represent creativity as an imaginative and deliberate mental activity. Such a perspective has led to a view of creativity as disconnected from the body and the senses as well as from nonanalytic cognition. In this article, we demonstrate that creativity is more grounded in bodily and sensory experience and more reliant on a combination of cognitive processes than has been typically recognized.
Because of economically induced changes in record label contracts, recording artists are now required to cowrite their songs. Despite this obligation, many recording artists are unskilled as writers. For their professional songwriter teammates, using face-work to save the recording artist from the embarrassment of being an unskilled songwriter can be at odds with status maintenance in the larger social community if the collaboration results in a bad song.
The sociological literature on creativity would suggest that collaboration between newcomers and more experienced members of an art world results in the fruitful combination of novelty and usefulness, though not without some conflict.
