Introduction To Research Methods In The Social Sciences (SOCI 016B) Syllabus

Introduction To Research Methods In The Social Sciences course description:An overview of research methods in the social science, with an emphasis on practicing a variety of techniques/methodologies, and thinking about designing good research questions and assessing answers

Pilot/Practice Digital Content Analysis

In this assignment, students pick a small sample of social media content and analyze it using a technique of their choice, then write up their results/experience

The willingness to state an opinion: inequality, don’t know responses and political participation

Most explanations of inequality in political participation focus on costs or other barriers for those with fewer economic, educational, and “cognitive” resources. I argue, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's work on “political competence,” that social position in the form of income also structures political participation through differences in the sense that one is a legitimate producer of political opinions. I test whether income differences in participation persist net of costs by examining nonparticipation in a setting in which barriers to participation are low: answering political survey questions. Lower-income people are more likely than others to withhold political opinions by saying “don't know” net of differences in education, “cognitive ability,” or engagement with the survey exercise. Further, political “don't know” rates predict voting rates, net of other predictors. Efforts to democratize participation in American politics must attend not only to the costs of involvement but also to class-based differences in individuals' relationship to political expression itself

Professional campaigners are socially removed from low-income communities and taught to ignore them at election time, perpetuating political inequalities

Voter turnout has fallen as income inequality has risen, in the US and other advanced democracies. Daniel Laurison considers this phenomenon an effect of how political campaigns are organised, and how campaign staff are recruited. Based on evidence from elections in the US, he explains why campaigns are reluctant to focus efforts on voters from disadvantaged communities

The class pay gap in Britain’s higher professional and managerial occupations

In this paper we demonstrate the way in which class origin shapes earnings in higher professional and managerial employment. Taking advantage of newly released class origin data in Britain’s Labour Force Survey, we examine both the relative openness of different high-status occupations and the earnings of the upwardly mobile within them. In terms of access, we find a distinction between “traditional” professions, such as law, medicine and finance, which are dominated by the children of higher managers and professionals, and more technical occupations such as engineering and IT that recruit more widely. However, even when those who are not from professional or managerial backgrounds are successful in entering high-status occupations, they earn sixteen percent less, on average, than those from privileged backgrounds. This class-origin pay gap translates to up to £7,350 ($11,000) lower annual earnings. This difference is partly explained by the upwardly mobile being employed in smaller firms and working outside London, but it remains substantial even net of a variety of important predictors of earnings. These findings underline the value of investigating differences in mobility rates between individual occupations as well as illustrating how, beyond entry, the mobile often face an earnings “class ceiling” within high-status occupations

Class Mobility And Reproduction For Black And White Adults In The United States: A Visualization

The relationship between where people start out in life (class origin) and where they are likely to end up (class destination) is central to any question about the fairness of contemporary society. Yet we often don’t have a good picture—literally or metaphorically—of the contours of that relationship. Further, work on class mobility in the United States often glosses over the large differences between white and Black Americans’ class positions and mobility trajectories. This visualization, based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, shows the association between occupational class origin and destination for Black and white employed Americans ages 25 to 69. Stark racial inequality, produced by the legacy and ongoing operation of white supremacy, is evident in each aspect of these figures

Liberal Education and Civic Engagement: A Project of the Ford Foundation's Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom Program

Surveys and assesses recent efforts by U.S. colleges and universities to cultivate in their students the intellectual skills and values conducive to lives of civic engagement

Mind the gap: financial London and the regional class pay gap

The hidden barriers, or ‘gender pay gap’, preventing women from earning equivalent incomes to men is well documented. Yet recent research has uncovered that, in Britain, there is also a comparable class-origin pay gap in higher professional and managerial occupations. So far this analysis has only been conducted at the national level and it is not known whether there are regional differences within the UK. This paper uses pooled data from the 2014 and 2015 Labour Force Survey (N = 7,534) to stage a more spatially sensitive analysis that examines regional variation in the class pay gap. We find that this ‘class ceiling’ is not evenly spatially distributed. Instead it is particularly marked in Central London, where those in high-status occupations who are from working-class backgrounds earn, on average, £10,660 less per year than those whose parents were in higher professional and managerial employment. Finally, we inspect the Capital further to reveal that the class pay gap is largest within Central London's banking and finance sector. Challenging policy conceptions of London as the ‘engine room’ of social mobility, these findings suggest that class disadvantage within high-status occupations is particularly acute in the Capital. The findings also underline the value of investigating regional differences in social mobility, and demonstrate how such analysis can unravel important and previously unrecognized spatial dimensions of class inequality