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While there is a widespread belief that stable employment is important for social integration, stable employment careers have become less common in America's increasingly complex labor market. Job tenure has dropped, precarious work arrangements have gained prominence, long-term unemployment has spiked, and an increasing share of the jobless are not looking for work. Against this background, we investigate the linkages between labor market experiences and volunteer activities, as an indicator of people's involvement in civic life. We outline a theory on how transitions between labor market states—within, into, and out of the labor force—bring about changes in civic engagement and test our predictions using panel data from the Current Population Survey 2002–2015. Contrary to what much previous research suggests, we find that people who become unemployed are more likely to start volunteering and no more likely to stop. We additionally show that people who leave the labor force altogether (i.e. not having a job nor looking for one) are more likely to stop volunteering. Conversely, entering the labor force, either by securing or searching for a job, is associated with an increase in volunteer activities. We explore the role of motivation and time resources in accounting for these patterns, finding among other things that moving into or out of the most detached labor market state—outside the labor force without any intention to find work—is most consequential for civic engagement. We discuss the implications of our findings for civic democracy in light of ongoing labor market trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals with disabilities experience lower education levels, lower employment rates, fewer household resources, and poorer health than people without disabilities. Yet, despite comprising more than one-eighth of the US population, people with disabilities are seldom integrated into sociological studies of inequality. This study uses time use as a lens through which to understand one type of inequality between working-aged people with and without disabilities: participation in daily activities. It also tests whether social disparities (as suggested by the social model of disability) or health disparities (as suggested by the medical model of disability) explain a larger percentage of participation differences. I first consider if disability predicts daily time in market work, nonmarket work, tertiary (health-related) activities, and leisure—net of health and sociodemographic characteristics. Next, I utilize Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to assess the relative contribution of these characteristics in explaining time differences. Results from the American Time Use Survey indicate that adults with disabilities spend less time than adults without disabilities in market work and more time in tertiary activities and leisure. There is no difference in nonmarket time. Health accounts for the largest percentage of the explained component of tertiary time differences, but depending on the choice of predictors, sociodemographic characteristics account for as much—or more—of the explained component of differences in market and leisure time. Results indicate the importance of disentangling disability from health in sociological studies of inequality. They also support a hybrid disability model in suggesting that both health and sociodemographic characteristics determine how disability shapes daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vast literature demonstrates how personal networks mirror and reproduce broader patterns of social inequality. The availability of key resources through informal mechanisms is an important way that high-status Americans retain a host of social advantages. Largely absent from this account of social capital inequality, however, is an explicit temporal dimension. The current article addresses that gap by targeting the dynamic nature of personal networks. Specifically, we consider whether race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) are associated with how US adults' resource-providing ties persist or vanish between two time points. Using panel data from the Portraits of American Life Study, we find that non-Whites and lower-SES Americans tend to receive useful advice and practical help from fewer close ties than do White and higher-SES adults, while Black Americans are especially likely to receive financial assistance from their network members. Models fail to indicate that non-Whites lose these resourceful ties at a disproportionate rate over time. On the other hand, we find that income has a robust association with the ability to retain ties initially providing advice and help. We interpret the latter findings as a temporal manifestation of network-based inequality. The maintenance gap between higher- and lower-SES Americans, we argue, can reinforce other social capital disparities by shaping dependable access to important resources and by altering their ability to effectively mobilize resources. Network maintenance is a concept that could be useful to researchers studying how social capital matters for a variety of instrumental and expressive outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neighborhood effects scholarship suggests that neighborhoods may impart different effects across the early life-course because children's interactions with neighborhood actors and institutions evolve across the stages of child development. This paper expands our understanding of neighborhood effects on cognitive and non-cognitive development across childhood and early adolescence by capitalizing on thirteen waves of restricted and never-before-used longitudinal data from the NLSY Child and Young Adult (1986-2010) sample. The findings from within-child fixed-effects interaction models suggest that while younger children are immune to neighborhood effects on their cognitive development, older children consistently suffer a steep penalty for growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This neighborhood disadvantage penalty persists among older children despite alternative age constructs. Further, the results are robust to various adjustments for observed and unobserved sources of bias, model specifications, and also manifest as cumulative and lagged effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Latin Americanization thesis posits that the racial hierarchy in the United States is now composed of Whites, Honorary Whites, and Collective Blacks, with skin tone being the primary determinant of one's placement within this tripartite system of social status. Extant research mostly examines this approach at the macro level; relatively little is known about the thesis at the micro level. By examining goal-oriented task groups, our experiment tests whether Whites exhibit transitive levels of influence, a behavioral indicator of social status, in a manner consistent with this three-tier system. Furthermore, with applications of graph-theoretic models from status characteristics and status cue theories, we assess the social psychological mechanisms buttressing the proposed racial hierarchy by comparing propositions from four theories put forth by scholars of race/ethnicity (we translate their propositions into graphs and mathematical calculations). In so doing, we pose the question: In our experimental setting, which matters more, skin tone or ethnic background, or do both have equal effects on behavior? Our results support the purported racial hierarchy of the Latin Americanization thesis. On average, Whites were influenced the most by White confederates; Whites were influenced less by their light-skinned Latino/a confederates, and even less by dark-skinned Latino/a confederates. Model fit statistics for the propositions translated into graphs and values demonstrate that ethnic distinctions and skin tone are independent stratifiers in the form of status characteristics. This finding supports the notion that skin tone and ethnic background have the equivalent capacity to invoke processes to create the tripartite system of racial/ethnic inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research suggests that participation in organized extracurricular activities by children and adolescents can have educational and occupational payoffs. This research also establishes that participation is strongly associated with social class. However, debate has ensued--primarily among qualitative researchers--over whether the association between class and activities stems exclusively from inequalities in objective resources and constraints or whether differing cultural orientations have a role. We address this debate using a nationally representative sample of children's time diaries, merged with extensive information on their families, to model participation in, and expenditures on, organized activities. While we cannot directly observe cultural orientations, we account for a substantially wider array of resources and constraints than previous studies. We find that, above and beyond these factors, maternal education has a consistently large effect on the outcomes we study. We discuss the plausibility of a cultural interpretation of this result, as well as alternative interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High rates of Hispanic fertility raise an important question: Do Hispanic newborn babies start life's race behind the starting line, poor and disadvantaged? To address this question, we link the newborn infants identified with the new fertility question in the 2006-2010 American Community Survey (ACS) to the poverty status of mothers. Our results document the disproportionately large share (40 percent) of Hispanic babies who are born into poverty. The prospect of poverty is especially high in new Hispanic destinations, especially those in rural areas. For Hispanic newborn babies, poverty cannot be reduced to supply-side explanations that emphasize maladaptive behavioral decisionmaking of parents, that is, nonmarital or teen childbearing, low educational attainment, acquisition of English language skills, or other dimensions of human capital. Hispanics in new destinations often start well behind the starting line--in poverty and with limited opportunities for upward mobility and an inadequate welfare safety net. The recent concentration of Hispanic poverty in new immigrant destinations portends continuing intergenerational inequality as today's newborn infants make their way to productive adult roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the types of neighborhoods that black and white homebuyers have secured loans in during the recent housing boom and subsequent bust. We expand upon and refine previous research on locational attainment using loan-level data from the 1992-2010 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) combined with tract- and metropolitan-level data from the 1990, 2000, and 2010 Census and the American Community Survey. Multilevel models show that black homebuyers are moving into considerably more racially segregated neighborhoods than their white counterparts and that their access to "whiter" neighborhoods did not expand during the housing boom, even after controlling for the racial composition of the metropolitan area and other key ecological factors. Conversely, new white homebuyers have been moving into neighborhoods with greater percent black residents, which may be a contributing factor in observed declines in segregation during the past few decades. Additionally, black homebuyers in metropolitan areas with greater suburban growth were on average accessing homes in more integrated neighborhoods. Finally, the models explained considerably more of the variation in the neighborhood racial composition of whites compared to blacks. These findings are suggestive of a dual housing market, one in which the experiences of blacks are still systematically different than those of whites, despite expanded access to homeownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study conducts a nationwide, locally comparative analysis of the extent to which natural hazards contribute to residential mobility in the United States and how this influence varies for racial and ethnic minorities. Analyses combine census data on households with data from thousands of recorded natural hazards during the late 1990s. Findings affirm that natural hazards are common throughout the country; that associated property damage correlates positively with increases in residential mobility for all groups; that these increases are particularly noticeable among racial and ethnic minorities because of preexisting inequalities in mobility; and that areas with more costly damage tend to pull as well as push migrants, especially Latinos and Asians. Implications for existing theory, methods, and policy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social class confers a bundle of capabilities, practices, and beliefs that are conventionally assumed to be hierarchical, rigid, and self-perpetuating. However, this framework often belies the fact that these qualities needn't be necessarily or exhaustively advantageous. In particular, social change may render obsolete class-linked characteristics that were advantageous in previous periods. Drawing on interviews with homeowners at risk of foreclosure and a yearlong ethnography of a housing counseling organization, I find that although the housing crisis of the “Great Recession” affected both working- and middle-class homeowners alike, the practices of working-class borrowers better positioned them to exploit a number of informational advantages in the rapidly changing mortgage modification setting. My findings are a departure from existing research that treats middle-class capabilities and practices as intrinsically advantageous. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]