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College drinking scholars have built a deep literature around the ways in which gender shapes drinking culture and its outcomes. Few have explicitly explored the way that gender combines with other structural attributes, like social class, and works through social media interaction to predict drinking intensity. We investigate the way gender, identity, and different types of social media involvement can help explain drinking intensity among college students at an institution with a strong party culture. A series of nested regressions show that men's drinking intensity is more strongly associated with dimensions of male identity related to family social class and father's political leaning. Furthermore, we find a complex relationship between drinking intensity and different dimensions of social media use. For both college women and men, there is a positive association between the intensity of use of general social media platforms and drinking intensity, but this association is not significant when accounting for their involvement in college party culture. However, after accounting for party culture involvement, our results suggest that use of apps related to hookup culture participation may represent an additional dimension that is associated with drinking intensity, a finding that seems especially prominent for some men. We conclude by discussing implications, limitations, and directions for future research [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of fear of crime has been dominated by survey researchers and quantitative analysis. However, very little is known about the kinds of social situations that generate fear, the ways in which people manage fear during social interaction, and the manner in which feared individuals respond to another's show of vulnerability. The author attends to these issues with data collected during observational research in an urban Latino community. Based on one particular setting, he discovered that the fearful and the feared often worked together to produce confrontational episodes. Driven by past harassment and ethnic prejudice, and influenced by media accounts of local violence, many pedestrians displayed obvious fear to the men who congregated in a commercial district. The author found that fearful behavior often resulted in harassment because it implicitly labeled men as dangerous. Men who sensed another's fear often reacted by behaving in a threatening manner., FEAR OF CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION routinely touches a large proportion of Americans. That fear may usually lie dormant within individuals as a reasonable understanding that the world can be a dangerous [...]

A recent investigative report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution exposed what appears to be widespread sexual abuse committed by medical professionals. The report suggests that the intellectual advantages and social prominence of well-heeled medical professionals provide them with special resources to commit an undetected series of offenses and to avoid or reduce punishment when they are ultimately apprehended. Thus, the story implies that medical sexual abuse and its control is shaped by power and influence. Similarly, social constructionists argue that class and power shape debates, in part, through the manner in which the media frames social problems. The current study seeks to explore these issues by employing a qualitative approach to analyzing news reporting on medical professionals who drug and sexually violate their patients. Drawing from 22 sedation-facilitated sexual violence (SFSV) stories, we compare the media accounts of SFSV to 22 media treatments of stranger street attacks (i.e., blitz rapes). Guided by constructionist frameworks, for example, we investigated whether or not the language used to describe medical offenders suggested that they were more or less condemnation worthy than “stranger” offenders who attacked their victims in public spaces. Compared to blitz rapists, medical offenders were more likely to be referred to using admiration worthy terms (e.g., intelligent, exemplary), and their victims were more likely to be described as helpless and lacking in agency. Blitz rapists are more often described as coercive and brutal, and their victims are more likely to be framed as heroic, especially when they resist the offender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Community’ is one of the most popular solutions to crime and delinquency problems in America today. But what is meant by ‘community’ and what is its function? One function of a community is to form coalitions through which definitional processes of local problems and the construction of putative ‘people-types’ (Loseke 1993) are accomplished. In this paper, I examine rhetoric at a series of community hearings on a local underage drinking problem in a rural, Midwestern county. Based on testimonies given at the hearing, three underage drinking people-types are discussed: the Sad Alien, the Uninformed Child, and the Artful Dodger. These people-types are used by social problems workers as resources to defend and legitimate their roles in existing strategies to reduce underage drinking and to authenticate and reproduce lines of programmatic action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociological study of popular music is an important area of inquiry because it is partly through the consumption of popular art forms that people become conscious of social conflict and through popular culture that political issues are debated. Investigation into the social machinery that produces ideas and moralities in the pop music industry, therefore, is needed. This paper uses textual analysis techniques to explore the process of moral claimsmaking in popular music reviews. The pop critic is viewed through the lens of social constructionism as a social actor motivated by his or her structural position to give moral accounts about what is good or bad in popular music. Three general themes emerged. The music critic viewed quite harshly those musicians who: 1) inappropriately whined or complained about life's hardships; 2) were superficial in their musical presentation by relying too much on studio productionism or by giving inauthentic portrayals of race or gender; 3) "sold-out" by producing music for the primary purpose of making money. Conversely, those artists who were strong, real, and seemingly eschewed the immoral pursuit of riches were reviewed positively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although research typically has failed to establish a relationship between religious affiliation and correctional attitudes, recent assessments have revealed that fundamentalist Christians tend to be more punitive than are nonfundamentalists. These studies have advanced our understanding considerably, but their conceptualization of religion and correctional attitudes has been limited. Using a statewide survey, the present study demonstrates that compassionate as well as fundamentalist aspects of religious beliefs are related to public correctional preferences. Further, our results reveal that religion influences support for rehabilitation as well as punitiveness. These findings suggest the need for scholars to think more broadly about the role of religion in criminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]