140,659 research outputs found
Popularity
What makes you popular among your high-school peers? And what are the labor market returns to popularity? We investigate these questions using an objective measure of popularity derived from sociometric theory: the number of friendship nom- inations received from schoolmates. We provide novel evidence that early family en- vironment, school composition and school size play a signicant role in determining popularity. We show that the estimated wage return to one additional nomination is about 2 percent the popularity premium. This amounts to roughly 40 percent of the return to one more year of education.
A revised version of this paper is published in the Fall 2013 issue of the Journal of Human Resources
Discriminación y redes sociales: Popularidad entre los estudiantes de bachillerato en Argentina
El objetivo de este trabajo es adquirir un mejor entendimiento del fenómeno de la popularidad de compañeros de clase durante la adolescencia y detectar señales de discriminación. En Argentina, estudiantes de secundaria seleccionan y clasifican a 10 compañeros de clase con los que les gustaría formar equipo. Se descubrió que los estudiantes físicamente atractivos y de alto rendimiento académico son altamente cotizados por sus compañeros de clase, pero sólo en planteles mixtos, lo que hace pensar que eso responde principalmente al emparejamiento. Otros rasgos, tales como el color de la piel, la nacionalidad y el nivel socioeconómico de los padres, no inciden en la popularidad entre los compañeros de clase, aunque el origen étnico y la formación académica de los padres son estadísticamente significativos en algunos casos. Da la impresión de que el tratamiento desigual basado en la raza, riqueza económica y nacionalidad que hay presente en otros entornos sociales de Argentina no se observa entre los adolescentes que asisten a la escuela.
Rock, Rap, or Reggaeton?: Assessing Mexican Immigrants' Cultural Assimilation Using Facebook Data
The degree to which Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are assimilating
culturally has been widely debated. To examine this question, we focus on
musical taste, a key symbolic resource that signals the social positions of
individuals. We adapt an assimilation metric from earlier work to analyze
self-reported musical interests among immigrants in Facebook. We use the
relative levels of interest in musical genres, where a similarity to the host
population in musical preferences is treated as evidence of cultural
assimilation. Contrary to skeptics of Mexican assimilation, we find significant
cultural convergence even among first-generation immigrants, which
problematizes their use as assimilative "benchmarks" in the literature.
Further, 2nd generation Mexican Americans show high cultural convergence
vis-\`a-vis both Anglos and African-Americans, with the exception of those who
speak Spanish. Rather than conforming to a single assimilation path, our
findings reveal how Mexican immigrants defy simple unilinear theoretical
expectations and illuminate their uniquely heterogeneous character.Comment: WebConf 201
Colonialism\u27s Role in the Success of the Filipino Skin Whitening Industry
In the Philippines and other developing countries, the skin whitening industry is prolific and expanding among native populations. However, this desire for white skin has dire health repercussions, both physical and psychological. Many researchers in the field of Filipino-American psychology attribute this desire for whiter skin to the American colonial rule of the Philippines, which began in 1898 and lasted for nearly fifty years. Historians often characterize the American occupation as cruel and demeaning, leading to colonial mentality that has continued into the post-colonial era. As a result, in order to ameliorate this dilemma, one must explore how the internalized oppression and psychological state of the Filipino people caused by America’s previous colonial rule of the Philippines contributes to the success of the Filipino skin whitening industry. To research this question, historical journal articles that contextualize the American treatment of the Filipino people are utilized, in order to explore possible motives for occupying the Philippines. Articles in the field of Filipino-American psychology are also studied, thus exploring the psychological health of Filipinos and Filipino-Americans in relation to colonial rule. Articles in the field of history and sociology show the relationship between colonialism and skin whitening, both in the Philippines and in other countries. To explore other possible contributing factors, in the field of psychology and sociology are utilized. The success of the Filipino Skin Whitening Industry is greatly attributed to the damaged psychological state of the native people brought on by American colonial rule. This can be attributed to the mistreatment of the native population, and the subsequent development of internalized oppression, colonial mentality, and an ingrained preference for white skin. However, contemporary factors may also contribute to the industry’s success, such as the phenomenon of “cosmopolitan whiteness,” and Filipino-Americans’ tendency to conform to popular culture. Although colonialism plays a significant role in the success of the skin whitening industry, it is possible that many other factors come into play. As a result, it is imperative to explore colonial mentality more thoroughly, as well as its mental health implications. In addition, it would be valuable to explore the ways in which internalized oppression can be combated, thus decreasing the need for the skin whitening industry
Diffusion of Lexical Change in Social Media
Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature
of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a
dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique
user accounts). Using a latent vector autoregressive model to aggregate across
thousands of words, we identify high-level patterns in diffusion of linguistic
change over the United States. Our model is robust to unpredictable changes in
Twitter's sampling rate, and provides a probabilistic characterization of the
relationship of macro-scale linguistic influence to a set of demographic and
geographic predictors. The results of this analysis offer support for prior
arguments that focus on geographical proximity and population size. However,
demographic similarity -- especially with regard to race -- plays an even more
central role, as cities with similar racial demographics are far more likely to
share linguistic influence. Rather than moving towards a single unified
"netspeak" dialect, language evolution in computer-mediated communication
reproduces existing fault lines in spoken American English.Comment: preprint of PLOS-ONE paper from November 2014; PLoS ONE 9(11) e11311
Using Search Queries to Understand Health Information Needs in Africa
The lack of comprehensive, high-quality health data in developing nations
creates a roadblock for combating the impacts of disease. One key challenge is
understanding the health information needs of people in these nations. Without
understanding people's everyday needs, concerns, and misconceptions, health
organizations and policymakers lack the ability to effectively target education
and programming efforts. In this paper, we propose a bottom-up approach that
uses search data from individuals to uncover and gain insight into health
information needs in Africa. We analyze Bing searches related to HIV/AIDS,
malaria, and tuberculosis from all 54 African nations. For each disease, we
automatically derive a set of common search themes or topics, revealing a
wide-spread interest in various types of information, including disease
symptoms, drugs, concerns about breastfeeding, as well as stigma, beliefs in
natural cures, and other topics that may be hard to uncover through traditional
surveys. We expose the different patterns that emerge in health information
needs by demographic groups (age and sex) and country. We also uncover
discrepancies in the quality of content returned by search engines to users by
topic. Combined, our results suggest that search data can help illuminate
health information needs in Africa and inform discussions on health policy and
targeted education efforts both on- and offline.Comment: Extended version of an ICWSM 2019 pape
Impact of local information in growing networks
We present a new model of the evolutionary dynamics and the growth of on-line
social networks. The model emulates people's strategies for acquiring
information in social networks, emphasising the local subjective view of an
individual and what kind of information the individual can acquire when
arriving in a new social context. The model proceeds through two phases: (a) a
discovery phase, in which the individual becomes aware of the surrounding world
and (b) an elaboration phase, in which the individual elaborates locally the
information trough a cognitive-inspired algorithm. Model generated networks
reproduce main features of both theoretical and real-world networks, such as
high clustering coefficient, low characteristic path length, strong division in
communities, and variability of degree distributions.Comment: In Proceedings Wivace 2013, arXiv:1309.712
The Evaluation of Immigration Policies
This chapter summarizes the literature on the evaluation of immigration policies. It brings together two strands of the literature dealing with the evaluation of labor market programs and with the economic integration of immigrants. Next to immigrant selection and settlement policies, there are four types of interventions that aim at improving the economic and social outcomes of immigrants: a) introduction programs, b) language training, c) labor market programs, and d) anti-discrimination policies. The chapter discusses problems associated with the evaluation of such programs, presents methodological approaches to circumvent these problems, and surveys empirical results and findings. It concludes with lessons from previous research and identifies avenues for future research.migration, program evaluation, immigrant selection, settlement policy, introduction programs, discrimination, active labor market policy, language training, integration
Nativist cosmopolitans: institutional reflexivity and the decline of “double-consciousness” in American nationalist thought
Debate in the field of historical sociology on the subject of American citizenship and nationality tends to support one of two theories. The exceptionalist argument holds that American nationalist discourse has historically been based on the universal ideals of liberty enshrined in the Constitution, and has been inclusive in character. Critics contend that this was not the case – arguing that the narrative of American national identity has typically been grounded on exclusive ethno-cultural criteria like race, religion or language. This essay attempts to demonstrate that the truth encompasses, yet transcends, both positions. This is not because there were conflicting parties in the nineteenth century nationality debate – indeed, there was a great deal of elite consensus as to the meaning of American nationhood prior to the twentieth century which simultaneously affirmed both the universalist and particularist dimension of Americanism. How to explain this apparent contradiction, which Ralph Waldo Emerson termed "double-consciousness?" This paper suggests that the nineteenth century popularity of dualistic statements of American nationhood, and the eclipse of such conceptions in the twentieth, is a complex sociological phenomenon that can only fully be explained by taking into account the development of institutional reflexivity in the United States
An Empirical Analysis of 'Acting White'
There is a debate among social scientists regarding the existence of a peer externality commonly referred to as 'acting white.' Using a newly available data set (the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health), which allows one to construct an objective measure of a student's popularity, we demonstrate that there are large racial differences in the relationship between popularity and academic achievement; our (albeit narrow) definition of 'acting white.' The effect is intensified among high achievers and in schools with more interracial contact, but non-existent among students in predominantly black schools or private schools. The patterns in the data appear most consistent with a two-audience signaling model in which investments in education are thought to be indicative of an individual's opportunity costs of peer group loyalty. Other models we consider, such as self-sabotage among black youth or the presence of an oppositional culture, all contradict the data in important ways.
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