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Studies of social networks have often taken the existence of a social tie as a proxy for the transmission of information. However, other studies of social networks in the labor market propose that the likelihood of information transmission might depend on strength of the tie; and that tie strength is a potentially important source of the tie's value. After all, even if job seekers have social ties to those who have valuable job information, the seekers will gain little information benefit when the ties do not actually transmit the information. This paper clarifies the conditions under which social ties might provide information benefits. We use a survey vignette experiment and ask MBA students about their likelihood of relaying job information via strong ties (to friends) or weak ties (to acquaintances), holding constant the structural locations spanned by the tie and job seekers' fit with the job. The results support the claim that strength of tie has a causal effect on the chances of information transmission: potential referrers are more likely to relay job information to their friends than to acquaintances. The larger implication of these findings is that whatever benefits there might be to using weak ties to reach distant non-redundant information during job search, these benefits need to be considered against the likely fact that people connected via weak ties are less likely to actually share information about job opportunities than are people to whom the job seeker is strongly tied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many urban theorists, notably W.J. Wilson, hypothesize that rates of male joblessness in low-income urban neighborhoods have increased since the 1960s. This paper examines this claim by tabulating male employment trends in census tracts in 49 metropolitan areas from 1950 to 1990, and models causes of these trends. The results show a marked decline in the employment of working-age men in low-income black tracts, both in absolute terms and relative to the employment rates of male residents of other types of tracts. This decline occurred among cities in all regions of the country. By 1990, more than 40% of working-age black men in low-income tracts were not employed, about two-thirds of whom were adults between the ages of 25 and 64. Models indicate that declining urban manufacturing employment contributed to the declining rates of work for black men in low-income neighborhoods, but they do not support explanations based on spatial mismatch, suburbanization, or black out-migration. The paper concludes that Wilson is right to focus on the employment problem of low-income black neighborhoods, and that black male joblessness in low-income neighborhoods in 1990 reached crisis levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. residential landscape is increasingly multi-racial and multi-ethnic, giving rise to the question of how to compare dichotomous segregation among multiple groups living in the same area. To address the problem in the existing dichotomous approach, which offers no common basis for comparing dichotomous segregation among multiple groups, this paper develops a weighted segregation ratio approach based on Theil’s segregation index and its additive decomposability. This approach can be used to bridge information obtained from dichotomous segregation between specific groups (such as black–white and black-Hispanic), and dichotomous segregation between group and non-group (such as white–non-white and black–non-black) in previous studies. We apply both dichotomous and weighted segregation ratio approaches to 1990 and 2000 U.S. census data. Results are interpreted for five selected metropolitan areas as well as for the weighted national average. This new approach yields distinctive findings that portray the complicated process of residential segregation, including the increasing significance of Hispanic segregation and Asian segregation in the decade from 1990 to 2000. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

While inequality between individuals is known to be an important determinant of redistributive preferences, research on inequality between groups has increased only recently. This paper argues that individuals infer income expectations from the economic standing of their social group, in particular groups based on characteristics determined at birth, such as sex, race, or parents class. High group incomes can lead individuals to oppose redistribution, even if they are currently poor. Analyses of US survey data from 1978 to 2014 support this argument. The uncovered effects on preferences exceed those of individual income by more than three times in magnitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Research on neighborhood effects on youth educational outcomes has been mainly an American tradition. This study reviews the European evidence on this subject and brings new evidence, focusing on Helsinki, the capital of Finland. Register-based data and multi-level statistical analysis are used to assess the existence and form of neighborhood effects on the educational careers of young people in Helsinki. The results indicate that there is no effect on the completion of secondary education generally, but there is an effect on the type of education that is completed. This effect is nonlinear: the affluent neighborhoods differ from the rest of the neighborhoods. The paper concludes by stating that research on neighborhood effects should better recognize the existence of “soft” effects. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, we describe the development and implementation of the multilevel sample design for the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey, a study of children, adults, families, and neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. This survey was designed to support multilevel analyses on a number of topics, including child development, residential mobility, and welfare reform. We describe the design of the baseline wave, highlighting the analytical and statistical issues that shaped the study. We also present the results of an in-depth statistical investigation of the survey’s ability to support multilevel analyses that was carried out as part of the study design. The results of this study provide important guideposts for future studies of neighborhoods and their effects on adults and children. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Researchers have established that individual religiosity influences sexual behavior and that religious support can increase consistency between personal religiosity and behavior. Researchers are less certain, however, of the effect that religious friendship networks have on sexual behavior. In addition, the effects of network characteristics such as density and one’s position in a social network have not been established. This paper uses a network subsample of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the effect of friends’ religiosity on the probability of first sex. We find that friends’ religiosity has an independent influence on adolescent sexual behavior that is similar in magnitude to personal religiosity. We also find evidence that friends’ religiosity has the strongest influence on the sexual behavior of adolescents who are embedded in dense social networks, in which teens’ friends are also friends with one another. These results support the hypothesis that group influences depend on the degree of embeddedness within the network and highlight the importance of studying religion as a property of groups as well as individuals. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Over the last several decades increases in the income inequality in the United States have been well-documented. Yet, this assessment of growing prosperity for some but downslide for others is based on a specific interpretation of the concept “inequality.” This paper develops an alternative measure of inequality based on the concept “relative deprivation.” Relative deprivation refers to the frustration that is associated with a person’s relative position in a reference group. The proposed measure draws from the social science literature on poverty and improves upon an earlier measure, RD. Using data from the 1998 General Social Survey, I analyze the relationship between the proposed and earlier measures of relative deprivation, and two outcome variables: (1) self-rated health, and (2) happiness. While the measures produce similar results in predicting self-rated health, the proposed measure is a better predictor of happiness than the earlier measure. I conclude that the empirical and theoretical advantages of the proposed index make it an improved measure of relative deprivation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper uses a newly available data set on African-American and Latina mothers living in an inner-city neighborhood of Chicago to study the role of depression as a potential barrier to economic self-sufficiency. Logit regressions that control for a rich set of background characteristics reveal that a short period of high depressive symptoms does not have major repercussions in the economic sphere. However, repeated episodes or a prolonged condition of high depressive symptoms is strongly associated with an elevated risk of subsequent welfare dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a mathematical model of the distribution over time of talking in discussion groups. Researchers of small group processes and social inequality have long recognized that interaction in small discussion groups is usually not equally distributed and that being a person who talks more than others is associated with having higher status outside the group and greater prestige and influence within the group. There is also a history of mathematical approaches to describing this phenomenon. As an addition to this literature, here a nonlinear dynamical system model is presented and used to develop computer simulations that are compared with data from a laboratory study of real four-person discussion groups. The model is based on theoretical assumptions about group processes including individual differences in volubility, status generalization, deference hierarchies and norms of taking turns and of fairness. While none of these alone make predictions that match the data, when they are all combined simulations are produced that closely match the data in both changes over time and differentiation among members. The dynamical system using the parameters as estimated for these data reaches a fixed point, which may help understand how groups structures become stable under some conditions but not others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]