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Even More Unequal Childhoods: 45 Years of Widening Income Gaps in Parental Investments in the United States

By on October 20, 2026 in Articles

Orestes P. Hastings

Sociological Science October 20, 2026
10.15195/v13.a45

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Parents convert economic resources into advantages for their children through spending on goods, services, and experiences. Using the 1980–2024 Consumer Expenditure Survey, this study offers the most comprehensive account to date of income-group trends in parental financial investments in childcare, education, and extracurriculars. Income gaps widened over these 45 years: per-child spending among the top decile quadrupled, while bottom-quartile spending was slightly lower in 2024 than in 1980. The top decile spent about three times as much per child as the bottom quartile in the early 1980s but more than 13 times as much by 2024. This widening appears across all three categories, in the household budget share devoted to children, and more in how much families spend than whether they spend at all. These findings document a sustained widening of income gaps in parental investments, pointing to these expenditures as an increasingly important dimension of unequal childhoods.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Orestes P. Hastings: Department of Sociology, Colorado State University.
E-mail: pat.hastings@colostate.edu

Acknowledgments: The author is grateful for feedback from Mariana Amorim, Sabino Kornrich, and Daniel Schneider.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Data, code, and supplemental results files are posted at https://github.com/ophastings/even-more-unequal-childhoods


  • Citation: Hastings, Orestes P. 2026. “Even More Unequal Childhoods: 45 Years of Widening Income Gaps in Parental Investments in the United States” Sociological Science 13: 1179-1203.
  • Received: June 28, 2026
  • Accepted: September 6, 2026
  • Editors: Stephen Vaisey, Sara Wakefield
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a45


0

No Stalled Revolution: The Closing Gender Gap in Early Careers in Europe and the United States

By on September 28, 2026 in Articles

Oliver Lipps, Daniel Oesch, Roujman Shahbazian

Sociological Science September 28, 2026
10.15195/v13.a44

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Women have surpassed men in higher education, yet their labor market progress relative to men is widely seen as stalled. We address this apparent contradiction by adopting a cohort perspective—since gender convergence is driven by cohort replacement rather than period effects—and focusing on early careers (ages 25–34), before parenthood widens the gender gap. Drawing on large-scale national data spanning several decades, we analyze single-year birth cohorts from 1960 to 1998 in France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States across multiple labor market outcomes. Our results show that gender gaps in employment, working hours, and occupational attainment have narrowed substantially in all countries studied. Most importantly, young women have made up considerable ground in total labor income: the gender gap has more than halved between the 1965 and 1995 birth cohorts. Although young women still lag behind young men, particularly mothers, our findings show steady convergence and challenge the narrative of stalled progress.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Oliver Lipps: FORS, Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences.
E-mail: oliver.lipps@fors.unil.ch.

Daniel Oesch: LIVES Centre, Géopolis, University of Lausanne.
E-mail: daniel.oesch@unil.ch.

Roujman Shahbazian: Uppsala University, Stockholm University.
E-mail: roujman.shahbazian@uu.se.

Acknowledgments: This article benefited from helpful comments by Fabrizio Bernardi, Guillaume Bornet, Matthias Enggist, Alicia Garcia-Sierra, Michael Grätz, Luis Ortiz, and Gina Westenberger, as well as from participants at the 2025 SLLS Conference in Fribourg, the 2026 Social Demography Seminar Series at UNED Madrid, and the 2026 RC28 Annual Conference in Sevilla.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: The statistical code, documentation, and instructions needed to reproduce all the empirical results reported in this article are publicly available at https://osf.io/ks4qj. As our analyses rely on restricted-access microdata, which we are not legally permitted to redistribute, the package contains the full code and step-by-step documentation of how each dataset can be obtained from the respective statistical agencies and data archives (see the Data availability section).


  • Citation: Lipps, Oliver, Daniel Oesch, and Roujman Shahbazian. 2026. “No Stalled Revolution: The Closing Gender Gap in Early Careers in Europe and the United States” Sociological Science 13:1159-1178.
  • Received: May 31, 2026
  • Accepted: September 1, 2026
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Bianca Manago
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a44


0

Developing Countries Face Falling Circulation Rates and Rising Migration Losses in Science

By on September 21, 2026 in Articles

Andrew C. Herman, Jens Peter Andersen, Mathias Wullum Nielsen

Sociological Science September 21, 2026
10.15195/v13.a43

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As universities and doctoral training expand in low- and middle-income (LMI) countries, transnational scientific mobility is rising. This trend is often framed as “brain circulation,” implying a mutual exchange of talent and knowledge to the benefit of all countries involved. We track 12 million scientists over 15 years, stratified by performance, to weigh this view against the prediction from structural dependency theory that expanding scientific capacity in lower-income countries may intensify rather than attenuate the loss of top-performing talent to wealthier countries. Our findings temper the brain circulation account. Circulatory migration rates have declined over time, even as the net losses from migration for LMI countries have risen. Not one of the countries that together produce 90 percent of LMI countries’ top-cited early-career scientists achieves a net migration gain relative to high-income countries. It has become more difficult for developing countries to offset migratory losses with the spillovers from circulation.

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Andrew C. Herman: Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen.
E-mail: andrew.herman@soc.ku.dk.

Jens Peter Andersen: Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, Aarhus University.
E-mail: jpa@ps.au.dk.

Mathias Wullum Nielsen: Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen.
E-mail: mwn@soc.ku.dk.

Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank Andrés Castro, Charles J. Gomez, Kristian Bernt Karlson, and Vincent Larivière for their feedback on this work. Open access funding provided by Copenhagen University. This project was supported by Carlsbergfondet (Mathias W. Nielsen, CF19-0566), the Independent Research Fund Denmark (Mathias W. Nielsen, 3121-00015B; Jens Peter Andersen, 0133-00165B).


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: All codes used in conducting this analysis are available at the OSF project repository here: https://osf.io/tkh2a/. Aggregated data are available in the same repository so that plots and analyses can be reproduced. The disaggregated data from the Web of Science as well as the augmented version from the Center for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University are proprietary and as such cannot be shared.


  • Citation: Herman, Andrew C., Jens Peter Andersen, and Mathias Wullum Nielsen. 2026. “Developing Countries Face Falling Circulation Rates and Rising Migration Losses in Science” Sociological Science 13: 1132-1158.
  • Received: June 2, 2026
  • Accepted: July 31, 2026
  • Editors: Stephen Vaisey, Herman van de Werfhorst
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a43


0

Ethnopolitical Exclusion and Resource Conflict

By on September 14, 2026 in Articles

Wali Reheman

Sociological Science September 14, 2026
10.15195/v13.a42

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Why do natural resources fuel ethnic conflict in some ethnic homelands but not others? This article argues that the answer turns on the boundary between active discrimination and passive powerlessness. Among excluded groups, lootable resources raise conflict risk only where the state actively discriminates, not where groups are merely powerless; among included groups, the same resources predict lower risk. No rival account reproduces this positive/null/negative gradient. The boundary governs whether these groups fight, not what they fight over: petroleum pushes discriminated and powerless groups alike toward territorial conflict, wherever the oil sits. Two-way fixed-effects estimates on 859 ethnic groups in 150 countries (1960–2020) establish both patterns. The conflict-generating mechanism thus lies between a group and its state, so country-level resource-curse measures, averaged across the nation, can miss the within-country boundary that actually divides conflict from peace.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Wali Reheman: Department of Government, American University.
E-mail: rw8143a@american.edu.

Conflict of Interest: I declare no conflicts of interest and received no external funding for this research.


Reproducibility Package: All data, code, and documentation necessary to reproduce every empirical result in this article are openly available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/S28Y4

  • Citation: Reheman, Wali. 2026. “Ethnopolitical Exclusion and Resource Conflict” Sociological Science 13: 1107-1131.
  • Received: May 13, 2026
  • Accepted: July 29, 2026
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Peter Bearman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a42


0

Overwork Without Premium: The Persistent Class Gradient of Long Hours in China, 2006–2023

By on August 31, 2026 in Articles

Chen Ouyang

Sociological Science August 31, 2026
10.15195/v13.a41

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In the United States, overwork migrated up the class structure, and its hourly wage association turned from penalty to premium in aggregate estimates. The “996” controversy suggests China is replaying this elitization. I test both with 11 waves of the Chinese General Social Survey (2006–2023; 36,282 nonfarm workers), using wave-specific, subperiod, and full-period estimates. Neither is supported as a broad, durable pattern. Overwork stays concentrated among manual, service, and self-employed workers; a post-2015 rebound was not disproportionately professional—manual workers rose at least as much—and was not detectably sustained in 2023. Overwork does not pay: overworkers log two-thirds more hours than comparable workers yet earn no more annually, and the hourly penalty—deepest for blue-collar employees—narrowed partially after 2010 and remained negative in every wave. State-sector employment is associated with lower overwork throughout. Elitized overwork appears institution-dependent; the sample instead shows a non-elite overwork configuration.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Chen Ouyang: School of Marxism, Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
E-mail: m202475410@hust.edu.cn.

Acknowledgments: The author sincerely thanks Editor-in-Chief Ari Adut, the Deputy Editor, and the anonymous external reviewers for their careful reading and constructive suggestions. The author also thanks the Sociological Science editorial and production team for their meticulous work; the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) team at the National Survey Research Center, Renmin University of China, for making the data used in this study available; and Professor Hongshan Lü for his invaluable guidance throughout the research.

Funding: This research received no external funding.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: All analysis code, the cross-wave harmonization pipeline, archived numeric outputs, and documentation needed to reproduce every empirical result in this article are deposited at Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21709718. The CGSS microdata cannot be redistributed under the CNSDA data-use agreement; the package documents, wave by wave, how registered researchers can obtain each file free of charge from the Chinese National Survey Data Archive (cnsda.org).


  • Citation: Ouyang, Chen. 2026. “Overwork Without Premium: The Persistent Class Gradient of Long Hours in China, 2006–2023” Sociological Science 13: 1079-1106.
  • Received: July 12, 2026
  • Accepted: August 8, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Wei-hsin Yu
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a41


0

Social Class Differences in Parenting? Revisiting Classed Childrearing through a Video-Ethnography of Mealtime

By on August 25, 2026 in Articles

Joanne W. Golann, Karen Phelan Kozlowski, Kara Mitchell Brennan

Sociological Science August 25, 2026
10.15195/v13.a40

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Sociological research has long established social class differences in childrearing strategies. However, recent studies suggest more heterogeneity by social class in parenting practices than previously recognized. In this article, we revisit families’ classed socialization processes by drawing from the New Jersey Families Study, a two-week, in-home video study of 21 families with young children, to examine how working-class and middle-class families interact with their children during mealtimes. Contrary to expectations, we found that social class did not neatly correspond to parenting styles, with half of families blending middle-class and working-class styles. This is one of the first sociological studies to closely observe the socialization of young children across different social classes. It is also one of few studies in sociology to use video-ethnographic data. Finally, this study challenges long-standing assumptions about class-based socialization, suggesting that in contemporary families, social class boundaries are much blurrier than previously believed when it comes to childrearing.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Joanne W. Golann: Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, Vanderbilt University.
E-mail: j.golann@vanderbilt.edu.

Karen Phelan Kozlowski: School of Social Science and Global Studies, University of Southern Mississippi.
E-mail: karen.kozlowski@usm.edu.

Kara Mitchell Brennan: Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, Vanderbilt University.
E-mail: kara.p.mitchell@vanderbilt.edu.

Acknowledgments: We thank Kanoe Bonilla, Emma Bufkin, Maria Maria Castillo, Sheila Chau, Ana Delgado, Catherine Duggan, Richard Hall, Susanna Harpold, Shihe Luan, Angelina Ma, Audrey Morris, Ben Rubin, Monica Shen, Erin Smith, and Grace Xu for research assistance on the New Jersey Families Study. We are grateful to Thomas Espenshade, Boriana Pratt, and Pamela Klebanov for data access and support. Corresponding author: j.golann@vanderbilt.edu.

Other Statements and Declarations: This research has been approved by the Princeton University Institutional Research Board. Informed consent to participate in the study was obtained for all families.

The authors have no financial or non-financial interests directly or indirectly related to the work to disclose.

The authors give consent to publish this manuscript.

Partial support for this work comes from the National Science Foundation–Sociology Grant #2214309, American Sociological Association Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline, Vanderbilt University Discovery Funds and Seeding Success grants, and the Peabody College Small Grants for Research.

The authors report no financial or non-financial interests directly or indirectly related to the work.



Reproducibility Package: Data are not publicly available due to informed consent agreements. For researchers interested in using the New Jersey Families Study data, please contact Joanne Golann for more information.


  • Citation: W. Golann, Joanne, Karen Phelan Kozlowski, Kara Mitchell Brennan. 2026. “Social Class Differences in Parenting? Revisiting Classed Childrearing through a Video-Ethnography of Mealtime” Sociological Science 13: 1046-1078.
  • Received: March 5, 2026
  • Accepted: July 16, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Elizabeth Bruch
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a40


1

Men’s Labor-Market Decline and the Rising Correlation between Spouses’ Earnings in the United States

By on August 20, 2026 in Articles

Yifan Shen

Sociological Science August 20, 2026
10.15195/v13.a39

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This study examines the role of deterioration in men’s labor-market conditions in explaining the rising correlation between spouses’ earnings in the United States. Prior research treats the growth of married women’s employment as the primary driver of this trend, leaving men’s declining economic position largely unexamined. Drawing on U.S. Census and American Community Survey data from 1960 to 2019 covering 722 commuting zones, I apply two-way fixed-effects models and a shift–share instrumental-variable design that exploits local variation in exposure to Chinese import competition across male- and female-intensive industries. Both approaches indicate that deterioration in men’s labor-market conditions raises the spousal earnings correlation within local labor markets, with the increase concentrated among couples with children. The pattern is class-stratified: where men’s conditions worsen, mothers’ work hours rise among those married to higher-earning men but little among those married to lower-earning men. This rising correlation thus reflects not only the growth of wives’ employment but also the unequally distributed capacity of families to adapt to men’s labor-market decline—an adaptation that itself amplifies inequality between households.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Yifan Shen: Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
E-mail: yifanshen@ust.hk


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: The replication package contains the Stata code that reproduces every table and figure from the IPUMS census/ACS microdata, all third-party input data, and documentation describing how to download the IPUMS microdata (samples and variables) required as input data. It is available at https://doi.org/10.3886/E251260V1


  • Citation: Shen, Yifan. 2026. “Men’s Labor-Market Decline and the Rising Correlation between Spouses’ Earnings in the United States” Sociological Science 13:1018-1045.
  • Received: May 13, 2026
  • Accepted: July 21, 2026
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Michael Rosenfeld
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a39


0

Access to Higher Education and Support for Meritocracy: Effort, Skill, and Education as Components of Merit

By on August 18, 2026 in Articles

Hye Won Kwon, Jani Erola

Sociological Science August 18, 2026
10.15195/v13.a38

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Prior research has emphasized perceptions of effort-based meritocracy (i.e., the descriptive belief that hard work leads to success), noting a rising trend in meritocratic beliefs across countries. The current study proposes focusing on three components of merit—effort, skill, and education — and on a less-examined form of meritocratic beliefs: support for meritocracy (i.e., the prescriptive belief that society should distribute rewards based on merit). Analyzing the 2009 International Social Survey Programme data, this study demonstrates the role of higher education in shaping heterogeneity in support for meritocracy. College-educated individuals seem to reject effort-based meritocracy while strongly supporting skill- and education-based meritocracy. In addition, the gap between the college-educated and the non-college-educated in supporting education-based meritocracy is larger in countries with broader access to higher education. These findings suggest that people may refer to different dimensions of meritocracy when supporting or disapproving “meritocracy,” calling for refined policy interventions to reduce social inequalities.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Hye Won Kwon: Department of Sociology, Ewha Womans University.
E-mail: hwkwonsoc@ewha.ac.kr.

Jani Erola: INVEST Research Flagship Center, University of Turku.
E-mail: jani.erola@utu.fi.

Acknowledgments: This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2024S1A5A8020262). We gratefully acknowledge the Research Council of Finland flagship funding (INVEST, decision number 320162) and Academy Professor’s funding (STRATEQ, decision number 371741). Direct Correspondence to Hye Won Kwon (E-mail: hwkwonsoc@ewha.ac.kr).


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: A reproducibility package that includes codes and macro-level data is available at https://github.com/INVEST-flagship/Kwon-Erola-2026. The ISSP 2009 survey data cannot be uploaded to publicly available locations, because the data can be accessed only after the user registration through the GESIS portal. The ISSP 2009 data are available via the GESIS portal: https://www.gesis.org/en/issp/data-and-documentation/
social-inequality/2009.


  • Citation: Kwon, Hye Won, Jani Erola. 2026. “Access to Higher Education and Support for Meritocracy: Effort, Skill, and Education as Components of Merit” Sociological Science 13: 997-1017.
  • Received: August 5, 2025
  • Accepted: July 5, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Nan Dirk de Graaf
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a38


0

Decoupling Inequality and Stratification in the American Wealth Distribution, 1989–2022

By on August 11, 2026 in Articles

Jake Burchard, Lisa A. Keister

Sociological Science August 11, 2026
10.15195/v13.a37

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Wealth inequality in the United States has grown substantially in recent decades, yet it remains unclear whether wealth has become more stratified along socially salient, group-based lines. Insofar as intragroup solidarities and intergroup antagonisms depend on the extent to which groups are arranged into minimally overlapping, hierarchically ordered strata within the wealth distribution, stratification is sociologically important independently of inequality. Using Survey of Consumer Finances data from 1989 to 2022 and a nonparametric, rank-based stratification metric, we examine trends in wealth stratification across multiple axes of social difference, including racialized group membership, age, education, employment-based class, and marital status. We find that stratification declined along several dimensions, with education being the main exception. Decomposition analyses show that these dimensions differ not only by the level of stratification they exhibit over time but also by where in the distribution stratification is primarily generated and by the relative contributions of housing and nonhousing wealth. These findings underscore the importance of wealth composition and distributional location in shaping stratification and encourage scholars to explore how wealth accumulation may harden or weaken group boundaries.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Jake Burchard: Department of Sociology, Duke University.
E-mail: jake.burchard@duke.edu.

Lisa A. Keister: Department of Sociology, Duke University; Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University.
E-mail: lkeister@duke.edu.

Acknowledgments: We thank the editors and two anonymous external reviewers for their comments and suggestions. We also thank Jianyu Hong for research assistance.

Funding: This research received support from the Population Dynamics Research Infrastructure Program award to the Duke Population Research Center (P2C HD065563) at Duke University by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Data and code to reproduce all results reported in the paper are available at: https://gitlab.oit.duke.edu/jkb83/decoupling-inequality-and-stratification-replication-package.


  • Citation: Burchard, Jake, and Lisa A. Keister. 2026. “Decoupling Inequality and Stratification in the American Wealth Distribution, 1989–2022” Sociological Science 13: 971-996.
  • Received: April 27, 2026
  • Accepted: June 23, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Ray Reagans
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a37


0

Quantities of Interest for Interactions and the Pitfalls of Assuming Linear Treatment Effects

By on August 6, 2026 in Articles

Josep Serrano-Serrat

Sociological Science August 6, 2026
10.15195/v13.a36

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Although quantitative social sciences often rely on estimating models in which treatment effects vary across groups, researchers rarely specify which causal quantity they aim to estimate or justify their empirical modeling choices. This article makes two contributions. First, it clarifies the distinct quantities of interest when studying interactions: comparisons at different treatment intensities (the difference in conditional average marginal effects) and comparisons at similar intensities (what I term the average interactive partial effect). When treatment effects are nonlinear and treatment distributions differ across groups, these quantities diverge. Second, the article assesses estimation strategies to estimate these quantities. It demonstrates that linear interaction models produce biased estimates of either quantity when treatment effects are nonlinear and explores two alternatives that explicitly accommodate such nonlinearities. This article is accompanied by an R package that implements these approaches. Through simulations, stylized examples, and an empirical application, the article shows that explicitly defining the quantity of interest and selecting appropriate models is essential for valid interaction analysis.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Josep Serrano-Serrat: Institute for Public Goods and Policies (IPP), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).
E-mail: j.serrano.serrat@csic.es.

Acknowledgments: An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia and the 2025 Annual Conference of the Swiss Political Science Association in Genève. I am grateful to Cesc Amat, Ignacio Jurado, Patrick W. Kraft, Sergi Martínez, and Marco Steenbergen for their valuable comments and suggestions, which substantially improved the article. I also thank Felix Elwert, as Editor of Sociological Methods & Research, Arnout van de Rijt, as Editor of Sociological Science, and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful feedback and constructive guidance throughout the revision process.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: All code necessary to replicate this study is available in an OSF repository at https://osf.io/8tx6g/.


  • Citation: Serrano-Serrat, Josep. 2026. “Quantities of Interest for Interactions and the Pitfalls of Assuming Linear Treatment Effects” Sociological Science 13:945-970.
  • Received: March 11, 2026
  • Accepted: June 23, 2026
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Kristian B. Karlson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a36


0

Bending the Heckman Curve: Competing Declines in Learning Capacity and Skill Relevance Over the Life Course

By on August 4, 2026 in Articles

João M. Souto-Maior, Mitchell L. Stevens

Sociological Science August 4, 2026
10.15195/v13.a35

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The Heckman curve has powerfully influenced social policy by providing mathematical support for the concentration of human-capital investments early in the life course. The canonical model behind this curve derives a single relationship for aggregate human capital and does not address how return trajectories vary across skill types. We extend the canonical mathematical framework to derive skill-specific return trajectories, incorporating two key parameters governing declines in (a) human capacity to learn and (b) skill relevance over the life course. Our microfoundation model implies that the shape of return trajectories depends on the relative magnitudes of these two declines, indicating a trade-off: although early investments may be more efficient due to declining human learning capacity, they risk misalignment with future labor market needs. Depending on the targeted skill, investments in adult workers might more effectively align with evolving skill content. We illustrate this result with numerical simulations using empirically plausible parameter ranges and selected skill profiles. Our work suggests that optimal investment timing may be skill-dependent, and identifies empirical questions that can better inform human-capital policy in a time of rapid technological change and lengthening lifespans.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


João M. Souto-Maior: Stanford Center on Longevity and Graduate School of Education, Stanford University.
E-mail: joao.msoutomaior@gmail.com.

Mitchell L. Stevens: Graduate School of Education and Stanford Center on Longevity, Stanford University.
E-mail: stevens4@stanford.edu.

Acknowledgments: This paper is part of the project “Education and Learning for Longer Lives,” sponsored by the Stanford Center on Longevity (SCL) in 2025–2026. We thank the SCL’s Futures Fellows and New Map of Life Postdoctoral Fellows for the contexts in which this work germinated. We are especially grateful to Bernardo Mackenna, Chris Heitzig, Leon Marbach, and Arik Lifschitz for written feedback, and to Matt Sigelman for valuable advice. Earlier versions of this work benefited from critical feedback (all in 2025) in Stanford’s Pathways Network Seminar and Inequality Workshop, the SCL Fellows Seminar, the Sociological Science Annual Conference, and the International Network of Analytical Sociology Conference. Any errors are our own.


Supplemental Materials

Data and code availability statement: This paper does not use external data. Full replication code for numerical simulations and figures available at: https://github.com/joaosoutomaior/competing-declines-code.


  • Citation: Souto-Maior, João M., and Mitchell L. Stevens. 2026. “Bending the Heckman Curve: Competing Declines in Learning Capacity and Skill Relevance Over the Life Course” Sociological Science 13: 915-944.
  • Received: April 9, 2026
  • Accepted: June 16, 2026
  • Editors: Stephen Vaisey, Herman van de Werfhorst
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a35


0

Categorical Engagement and the Contingent Nature of Typicality Effects

By on July 28, 2026 in Articles

Alex Tyulyupo, Balázs Kovács

Sociological Science July 28, 2026
10.15195/v13.a34

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Market categories can favor typical members over atypical ones, yet this “categorical imperative” operates inconsistently across contexts. We argue that typicality effects depend on how evaluators engage with categories during search. Using behavioral simulation in which participants search a large database of companies for competitors, we distinguish between searches that explicitly invoke industry classifications and those using alternative methods, and measure goal-category congruence through semantic alignment between evaluators’ objectives and the categories they employ. We find that typical companies become more likely to be selected in category-based searches; other searches produce no typicality effects. Among category-based searches, goal-category congruence moderates the effect: typicality strongly predicts selection when goals and categories misalign but becomes irrelevant when they align well. These findings identify a specific microprocess through which categorical effects become contingent, offering a process-level explanation for variation documented across audiences, producer characteristics, and evaluation contexts.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Alex Tyulyupo: Yale School of Management, Yale University.
E-mail: alex.tyulyupo@yale.edu.

Balázs Kovács: Yale School of Management, Yale University.
E-mail: balazs.kovacs@yale.edu.

Acknowledgments: We thank Ceclin Begbie and Robert Bartholomew for their management of the behavioral lab. We thank Maciej Workiewicz, Elisa Operti, and Stoyan Sgourev for their input. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Yale School of Management. We benefited from feedback received at the 2025 Nagymaros Conference and the Yale School of Management OBID seminar.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: De-identified, model-ready data and code for reproducing all statistical tables and figures are available at (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6Z8RS). Raw Crunchbase records, company and venture descriptions, and participant-identifying information are not shared because of data-use and confidentiality restrictions.


  • Citation: Tyulyupo, Alex, and Kovács, Balázs. 2026. “Categorical Engagement and the Contingent Nature of Typicality Effects” Sociological Science 13:884-914.
  • Received: May 6, 2026
  • Accepted: June 23, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Clayton Childress
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a34


0

Information Diets Are More Diverse in Attention Than in Engagement

By on July 21, 2026 in Articles

Christopher Barrie, Aybuke Atalay, Alia ElKattan

Sociological Science July 21, 2026
10.15195/v13.a33

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What political content do we pay attention to online? Diverse political information is essential for democratic competence, yet online media raises concerns about fragmented information diets. Research on selective exposure highlights how social media can foster ideological echo chambers, while other studies emphasize incidental exposure to diverse viewpoints. A critical measurement challenge is that public platform traces often observe engagement (e.g., likes or shares) more readily than lower-visibility forms of attention—i.e., what users notice or choose to read without necessarily interacting publicly. In this study, we address this gap with a social media clone platform that separately records attention and engagement. We ran the study in both the United Kingdom (once) and the United States (thrice). Across both contexts, we found that the ideology-engagement association is significantly larger than the ideology-attention association. This underscores the importance of measuring attention, rather than solely engagement, to accurately assess the diversity of online information diets.

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Christopher Barrie: Department of Sociology, New York University.
E-mail: cb5691@nyu.edu

Aybuke Atalay: Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Edinburgh.
E-mail: aybuke.atalay@ed.ac.uk

Alia ElKattan: Department of Politics, New York University.
E-mail: alia.elkattan@nyu.edu

Acknowledgments: We thank audiences at the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper. This research was supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (SRG2223 230865). OpenAI GPT-4o and GPT-5 and Anthropic Claude (Sonnet 4.5) were used for code, code review, and manuscript redrafting. The authors declare no competing interests. Corresponding author: Christopher Barrie (cb5691@nyu.edu).


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Data, code, documentation, and replication materials necessary to re-produce the empirical and simulation results reported in this article are available at https://github.com/cjbarrie/smclone.


  • Citation: Barrie, Christopher, Aybuke Atalay, and Alia ElKattan. 2026. “Information Diets Are More Diverse in Attention Than in Engagement” Sociological Science 13: 864-883.
  • Received: April 9, 2026
  • Accepted: June 8, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Kieran Healy
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a33


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A Roadmap for Inequality Research: Transparency, Intersectionality, and Multiple Measures of Race

By on July 9, 2026 in Articles

Emma Williams-Baron, Aliya Saperstein

Sociological Science July 9, 2026
10.15195/v13.a32

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Most quantitative studies of U.S. inequality rely on single measures of race and do not transparently describe them. However, inconsistencies between measures can yield conclusions that differ both substantively and statistically. We ask: when faced with multiple ways to categorize respondents, how should researchers choose? We conduct intersectional analyses of five inequality outcomes, using the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which offers several measures of self-identification and external classification. Strikingly, we find the survey’s screener race variable, ubiquitous in prior research, is never empirically preferred based on model fit across outcomes spanning the labor market (wages, salary, and unemployment), health (depression), and education (school discipline). Instead, the top-performing measure varies by gender, outcome, and fit statistic. The range of potential researcher decisions and the absence of a clear gold-standard highlights the need for greater transparency and more thoughtful decision-making when researchers operationalize race—whether racial categorization is central to the analysis or included primarily as a control variable. To that end, we offer a roadmap of key considerations inequality researchers can consult when designing their approach.

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Emma Williams-Baron: Department of Sociology, Stanford University. E-mail: emmajwb@stanford.edu.
Aliya Saperstein: Department of Sociology, Stanford University. E-mail: asaper@stanford.edu.

Acknowledgments: We are grateful to our colleagues in the gender and inequality workshops at Stanford University for their helpful comments and suggestions, and to Steve McClaskie for responding to inquiries about the NLSY. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2024 American Sociological Association annual meeting and at a 2023 conference on racial inequality in education research hosted by NWEA in Portland, OR. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-1656518. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Data and code for reproducing the results presented in this article are publicly
available in an Open Science Framework repository here: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/K3RZT. Data may also be accessed through the NLSY Investigator site at: https://www.nlsinfo.org/investigator.


  • Citation: Williams-Baron, Emma, Aliya Saperstein. 2026. “A Roadmap for Inequality Research: Transparency, Intersectionality, and Multiple Measures of Race” Sociological Science 13: 825-863.
  • Received: September 20, 2025
  • Accepted: May 18, 2026
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Kristian B. Karlson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a32


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Leveraging Genomic Data to Document Within-Race Attractiveness Penalties Among Black Americans

By on July 7, 2026 in Articles

Beza Taddess, Luyin Zhang, Sam Trejo

Sociological Science July 7, 2026
10.15195/v13.a31

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In recent years, scholars of racial inequality have increasingly sought to move beyond simply quantifying discrete racial disparities and instead measure social stratification as a function of continuous racialized characteristics that vary both within and between racial groups. In this article, we draw on a sample of genotyped respondents from the Add Health study and construct genetic similarity proportions, individual-level measures that correlate with racialized physical features that vary across the expansive family tree of humanity (skin tone, facial structure, hair texture, etc.). We then investigate the relationship between these proportions and interviewer-rated physical attractiveness among self-identified Black Americans (N=2,087). Our findings highlight the existence of substantial attractiveness penalties related to having higher levels of Sub-Saharan African (as opposed to European) genetic similarity.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Beza Taddess: Department of Sociology, Princeton University. E-mail: bt7304@princeton.edu
Luyin Zhang: Office of Population Research, Princeton University. E-mail: luyin.zhang@princeton.edu
Sam Trejo: Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research, Princeton University. E-mail: samtrejo@princeton.edu

Acknowledgments: We are grateful to Dalton Conley, Filiz Garip, Iain Mathieson, Ellis Monk, and Marissa Thompson for helpful comments. This research uses data from Add Health, funded by grant P01 HD31921 (Harris) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Add Health is currently directed by Robert A. Hummer and funded by the National Institute on Aging cooperative agreements U01 AG071448 (Hummer) and U01AG071450 (Hummer and Aiello) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Add Health was designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. No direct support was received from grant P01 HD31921 for this analysis. Information on obtaining Add Health data is available on the project website. Send correspondence to Sam Trejo, samtrejo@princeton.edu.

Significance Statement: This study provides new evidence on how racialized physical features shape social experiences within a single self-identified racial group. By using genetic similarity proportions—genetic ancestry measures that correlate with physical traits such as skin tone and facial structure—the authors show that Black Americans with higher levels of Sub-Saharan African genetic similarity are systematically rated as less physically attractive. These results reveal a form of racialized disadvantage that operates within racial categories and is not captured by typical survey measures and help explain why traditional surveys report relatively small Black–White attractiveness gaps (whereas real-world behavior shows much larger differences). More broadly, the study offers genetic similarity proportions as a new tool for exploring processes of racialization in contemporary society.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: All results needed to evaluate the conclusions in the article are present in the article and/or the Supplementary Materials. All syntax files needed to replicate our main text analyses are available at the following link: https://github.com/luyin-z/attractiveness_penalties. We utilized the restricted Add Health survey and genotype data, which can be accessed by researchers via application at https://data.cpc.unc.edu/projects/2/view.


  • Citation: Taddess, Beza, Luyin Zhang, and Sam Trejo. 2026. “Leveraging Genomic Data to Document Within-Race Attractiveness Penalties Among Black Americans” Sociological Science 13: 802-824.
  • Received: March 24, 2026
  • Accepted: May 13, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Ellis Monk
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a31


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The Double Bind of Precarious Work: Creating Need and Undermining Support

By on July 1, 2026 in Articles

Tyler Woods, Kristen Harknett, Daniel Schneider

Sociological Science July 2, 2026
10.15195/v13.a30

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For most adults in the United States, participation in the labor force is a normative expectation and a pre-requisite for social acceptance and inclusion. Yet, the conditions of low-wage work can breed social isolation by interfering with supportive social ties at and outside of work. Drawing on survey data from The Shift Project, we examine the complex interplay between precarious working conditions and supportive social ties and illuminate a vicious cycle faced by low-wage workers. Precarious work schedule conditions are associated with reduced perceptions of support from social ties and act as a mechanism through which precarious working conditions take a toll on worker well-being. Further, those with precarious work schedules are less likely to benefit from the buffering effect of social support that attenuates the negative consequences of unstable and unpredictable schedules on well-being. Our findings demonstrate negative externalities of precarious working conditions for social support and reveal the double bind of precarious work: schedule instability undermines workers’ social support while simultaneously heightening the need for it.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Tyler Woods: Harvard Kennedy School. E-mail: tyler.woods@bain.com.
Kristen Harknett: University of California, Berkeley, Department of Sociology. E-mail: kharknett@berkeley.edu.
Daniel Schneider: Harvard Kennedy School. E-mail: dschneider@hks.harvard.edu.

Acknowledgments: We gratefully acknowledge support from the National Institute on Aging (Grant Nos. R01AG066898 and R56AG081273), the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Grant No. U19OH012293), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grant Nos. INV-002665 and INV-016942), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (Award No. 74528), and the W.T. Grant Foundation (Grant No. 188043). The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of these foundations. The authors received excellent research support from Kevin Bruey, Connor Williams, and Alessandra Soto.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Information on accessing the administrative register data and all code used in the analysis is available at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/
OEGXOW.


  • Citation: Woods, Tyler, Kristen Harknett, and Daniel Schneider. 2026. “The Double Bind of Precarious Work: Creating Need and Undermining Support” Sociological Science 13: 772-801.
  • Received: January 5, 2026
  • Accepted: April 28, 2026
  • Editors: Stephen Vaisey, Michael Rosenfeld
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a30


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Teacher Sorting and Inequalities in Student Achievement: Unequal Exposures and Differential Returns to Teacher Qualifications

By on June 30, 2026 in Articles

Said Hassan

Sociological Science June 30, 2026
10.15195/v13.a29

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Teachers play a formative role in shaping children’s school experiences and ultimately, their educational outcomes. In this study, I use full population Danish administrative data to explore the consequences of unequal access to qualified teachers in three steps. First, I document strong patterns of teacher–student sorting in Denmark, one of the world’s most equal societies and generous welfare states. In short, teachers from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and with higher prior academic achievements tend to select into schools serving high-achieving children from privileged backgrounds. Second, I investigate the effect of exposure to teachers with different qualifications on students’ test score performance. To facilitate causal estimates, I exploit plausibly exogenous shocks to teacher changes induced by parental leave spells, which, I show, are unrelated to an extensive set of observed classroom characteristics, including student well-being and measures of classroom climate. Third, I explore differentials in the impact of teacher qualifications by students’ socioeconomic background. I find no consistent evidence of differential teacher effects, implying that teacher-induced learning inequalities are mainly driven by unequal exposure to highly qualified teachers, rather than unequal returns to qualifications. This suggests that policies equalizing access to qualified teachers may reduce learning disparities.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Said Hassan: Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
E-mail: said.aj.hassan@gmail.com.

Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Richard Breen, David Kirk, Per Engzell, Dirk Witteveen, Anders Hjorth-Trolle, Miriam Gensowski, Janne Jonsson, John Ermisch, Ahmed Tohamy, Anders Holm, and Lars Højsgaard Andersen for their very helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions. This research was supported by the ROCKWOOL Foundation (grant number 1231).


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Information on accessing the administrative register data and all code used in the analysis is available at: https://github.com/s-aj-hassan/Teacher-Sorting-Achievement.


  • Citation: Hassan, Said. 2026. “Teacher Sorting and Inequalities in Student Achievement: Unequal Exposures and Differential Returns to Teacher Qualifications” Sociological Science 13: 747-771.
  • Received: March 30, 2026
  • Accepted: April 17, 2026
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Herman van de Werfhorst
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a29


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The Exception to Women’s Advantage: How Rurality, Red Counties, and the Local Economy Shape Gender Gaps in Educational Attainment

By on June 25, 2026 in Articles

April Sutton, Bernardo Mackenna, Bolun Zhang, Amanda Bosky

Sociological Science June 25, 2026
10.15195/v13.a28

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Rural communities have lagged urban areas in the economic and sociocultural shifts thought to underlie women’s advantage in bachelor’s degree (BA) attainment, such as the expansion of high-status professional jobs and increasing gender egalitarianism. Using nationally representative data (ELS:2002), we bridge the gap between the macroscale factors theorized to drive women’s educational gains and the local environments shaping youth outcomes by analyzing gender patterns in BA attainment across rural and urban high school students. Women who attended high school in metropolitan areas hold a clear BA advantage, but not women who attended nonmetropolitan high schools, where girls earn higher grades than boys yet attain bachelor’s degrees at similar rates. We find that, net of other characteristics, women’s BA advantage is most suppressed in rural counties with strong Republican majorities and limited professional employment opportunities. Overall, our study suggests that women’s BA advantage is geographically uneven and varies across local sociopolitical and economic conditions.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


April Sutton: UC San Diego-Dept. of Sociology.
E-mail: asutton@ucsd.edu.

Bernardo Mackenna: UC San Diego-Dept. of Sociology.
E-mail: bmackenn@stanford.edu.

Bolun Zhang: UC San Diego-Dept. of Sociology.
E-mail: bolunzhang@zju.edu.cn.

Amanda Bosky: UC San Diego-Dept. of Sociology.
E-mail: abosky@utexas.edu.

Acknowledgments: This research was supported by a National Academy of Education/Spencer postdoctoral fellowship and a UC San Diego Hellman Fellowship awarded to April Sutton. We are grateful for the helpful feedback of anonymous reviewers. The article also benefited from presentations at the NAEd Annual Meeting and Fall Retreat and the Population Association of America.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: A replication package, including code, documentation, and links/DOIs to data sources, is available at Zenodo (doi:10.5281/zenodo.17336597). The primary analyses use restricted-access data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), U.S. Department of Education. These data are available only to approved investigators through the IES/NCES application process (https://ies.ed.gov/about/restricted-use-data). We provide the URLs/DOIs and table identifiers needed to retrieve the publicly available data (e.g., U.S. Census summary files) we used to augment the ELS:2002.


  • Citation: Sutton, April, Bernardo Mackenna, Bolun Zhang, and Amanda Bosky. 2026. “The Exception to Women’s Advantage: How Rurality, Red Counties, and the Local Economy Shape Gender Gaps in Educational Attainment” Sociological Science 13:712-746.
  • Received: May 15, 2025
  • Accepted: October 13, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Kristian B. Karlson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a28


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