The Employment Status of Young Adult Black Males Residing in Poverty Households: Recent Milwaukee County Experience

Harold Rose, UWM professor of Geography and Urban Studies, examined the findings of the Employment and Training Institute analysis of employment held by 8,479 young African American males from Wisconsin families seeking or receiving public assistance (AFDC, food stamps, and/or medical assistance) in 1987-1989. Rose discusses the findings in light of a wide variety of perspectives by drawing on national literature addressing social and economic changes in the 1980s, welfare dependency, conditions in inner city Milwaukee, labor force participation rates, extended presence of young black males in parental households, employment sectors, subpopulations’ earnings history, attachment to the labor force, school enrollment and attainment, persistence in the workforce, job growth in the local economy, spatial mismatch between job openings and job seekers, black youth styles and employment prospects, the role of the residential environment on the group’s world view, concentrated poverty and the quality of neighborhood life, recent growth of concentrated poverty neighborhoods, intensification of ghetto poverty, dispersion of low income households, zones of black neighborhood expansion, and behavioral norms in core zones. Rose observes, “The parents of this cohort, who grew up in this community, or arrived from elsewhere during the turbulent 1960s, must by now be questioning the hand they drew. Given the promise associated with that decade, the screens of opportunity turned out to be much finer than was anticipated, especially for males growing up in poor households.

The Labor Market Experience of Young African American Men from Low-Income Families in Wisconsin (1992)

This research study provides empirical data on the employment experience of young African American men who entered the Wisconsin labor force in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Its goal was to examine the early labor force experience of 17,216 young men from poor families, matching state wage databases against individuals identified in the state income maintenance system (i.e., households applying for or receiving food stamps, AFDC or medical assistance, 1987-1989). The study analyzed 36,005 jobs held by the study population over five quarters. The vast majority of African American men in their early twenties who were employed were relegated to marginal, low-wage jobs for the duration of the 39 month period studied with most of the jobs in retail trades and the service industries. In 1990 only 10% of the jobs held by young men in the Milwaukee County study population paid a living wage, and only 5 percent paid a family-supporting wage. In Milwaukee because of the large number of African American youth living in families with lower incomes, it is estimated that the study population includes over 85 percent of all African American males ages 20 to 24 in 1990 and over 75 percent of African American male teens ages 16 to 19 in 1990. UWM professors Harold Rose and Ronald Edari offered critical perspectives on the data and its implications for African Americans in Milwaukee

Seeing the way: visual sociology and the distance runner's perspective

Employing visual and autoethnographic data from a two‐year research project on distance runners, this article seeks to examine the activity of seeing in relation to the activity of distance running. One of its methodological aims is to develop the linkage between visual and autoethnographic data in combining an observation‐based narrative and sociological analysis with photographs. This combination aims to convey to the reader not only some of the specific subcultural knowledge and particular ways of seeing, but also something of the runner's embodied feelings and experience of momentum en route. Via the combination of narrative and photographs we seek a more effective way of communicating just how distance runners see and experience their training terrain. The importance of subjecting mundane everyday practices to detailed sociological analysis has been highlighted by many sociologists, including those of an ethnomethodological perspective. Indeed, without the competence of social actors in accomplishing these mundane, routine understandings and practices, it is argued, there would in fact be no social order

Parent-of-origin-specific allelic associations among 106 genomic loci for age at menarche.

Age at menarche is a marker of timing of puberty in females. It varies widely between individuals, is a heritable trait and is associated with risks for obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and all-cause mortality. Studies of rare human disorders of puberty and animal models point to a complex hypothalamic-pituitary-hormonal regulation, but the mechanisms that determine pubertal timing and underlie its links to disease risk remain unclear. Here, using genome-wide and custom-genotyping arrays in up to 182,416 women of European descent from 57 studies, we found robust evidence (P < 5 × 10(-8)) for 123 signals at 106 genomic loci associated with age at menarche. Many loci were associated with other pubertal traits in both sexes, and there was substantial overlap with genes implicated in body mass index and various diseases, including rare disorders of puberty. Menarche signals were enriched in imprinted regions, with three loci (DLK1-WDR25, MKRN3-MAGEL2 and KCNK9) demonstrating parent-of-origin-specific associations concordant with known parental expression patterns. Pathway analyses implicated nuclear hormone receptors, particularly retinoic acid and γ-aminobutyric acid-B2 receptor signalling, among novel mechanisms that regulate pubertal timing in humans. Our findings suggest a genetic architecture involving at least hundreds of common variants in the coordinated timing of the pubertal transition