Sociology – Page 3 – David Yamane

December 3, 2014 admin Sociology

What We Talk About When We Talk About Racism, Post-Ferguson Reflections on the Need for Basic Distinctions

Discussions of race, more often than not in my experience, generate more heat than light. I learned this early on in my own education when I was doing the research for my book, Student Movements for Multiculturalism: Challenging the Curricular Color Line in Higher Education.

Anger, frustration, hurt, misunderstanding, and other emotions were abundant on both sides of the debates over racism in the Ivory Tower. It is not surprising to me, then, that these same feelings are even more abundant in the wake of the refusal of a grand jury in Missouri to indict (now former) Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown while in the line of duty.

Racism is difficult to talk about under any circumstance. But talking about it over the dead body of Michael Brown or Tamir Rice seems impossible, even if it is all the more necessary.

As a sociologist, I teach about race and racism in my introductory class every semester. My goal is to show students that racism does exist, and also to give them a conceptual language within which to understand it more dispassionately. Light over heat.

Following the eminent 20^th century sociologist Robert K. Merton, the first point I make is the need to distinguish between two dimensions of racism: racial prejudice and racial discrimination.

Racial prejudice relates to rigid and unfavorable attitudes, beliefs, and feelings about members of a racial group. Discrimination refers to the unfair treatment of individuals based on some social characteristic such as race, sex, or ethnicity.

In an essay first published in 1949, Merton shows how making this basic distinction allows us to see the ways in which racism works in a more subtle way. Consider the four categories created by combining prejudice and discrimination:

When thinking about racism, we typically think about the person who holds racially prejudiced attitudes or beliefs and engages in racial discrimination on that basis. This can range from race supremacists who go out and kill people to real estate agents who don’t want “those kinds” of people in their neighborhoods. We can also appreciate the opposite individual, the non-prejudiced, non-discriminator – what Merton called the “all-weather liberal.”

These are the easy categories, though, because they recognize those times when prejudice and discrimination go together. If prejudice and discrimination went together all the time, however, it would be a distinction without a difference.

Distinguishing between prejudice and discrimination allows us to see situations in which the relationship between the two varies.

In the first place, we can see instances in which there is racial prejudice but no discrimination. Merton called these individuals “timid bigots,” because they were afraid to act on their prejudiced beliefs. I add the term “powerless” to this category, because whether or not one discriminates has a lot to do with whether they have the power to discriminate. To be able to treat people unequally requires that a person be in a position to do so, especially in ways that matter.

Considering the issue of power in relation to racial prejudice and discrimination helps us to put claims of “reverse racism” in context. To be sure racial minorities can harbor rigid and unfavorable attitudes, beliefs, and feelings about members of the racial majority, but because they have less power, they are often unable to act on those feelings in discriminatory ways. Which is not to say it never happens – that racial minorities never engage in old school racism – but it does suggest why it is less common than racial majorities doing the same. Reverse racism is difficult to accomplish in a racially unequal society.

This distinction also helps us to see instances in which there is racial discrimination but it is not based upon the racially prejudiced attitudes of individuals involved. This is typically known in sociology as “institutional racism” or “institutional discrimination” (as it also works against women, for example). Of late, people have picked up on an idea put forward by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva called “racism without racists.” This is racial discrimination that is not dependent upon racial prejudice.

Sociologists define institutional racism something like the following: Laws, customs, and practices that systematically reflect and produce racial discrimination (inequalities) in a society, whether or not the individuals maintaining these laws, customs, and practices are racially prejudiced (have racist intentions).

Some examples of this are: “last hired, first fired” employment practices, the way the Educational Testing Service constructs the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), and preferential admissions for legacies to elite colleges and universities.

Institutional racism also helps us to see and understand the way that historical old school racism can persist over time – even as individual’s racial attitudes become more liberal – when it is woven into the everyday practices of institutions and individuals.

For example, whether or not the Sheriff of Forsyth County, North Carolina and his staff are racially prejudiced, the fact that they are by law required to issue pistol permits – a very old school racist policy in its origins – makes them the enactors of this form of institutional racism (racism without racists). I am not a sociologist of crime and the criminal justice system, but I bet there are many more such examples.

So, when I look at situations like Mike Brown or Tamir Rice or Eric Garner or even back to Trayvon Martin, I don’t ask myself whether racism was involved or not. I try to approach the situations with a more complex conceptual framework that allows me to see the difference between prejudice and discrimination as well as their complex relationships to one another.

From the start I have said that it is possible BOTH for racial discrimination to be a problem in law enforcement AND for Darren Wilson not to be a racist. This is based on my understanding of Merton’s distinctions.

These distinctions in themselves do not cure the problem of heightened emotions in discussions of racism in American society, but perhaps for some they will be more of a conversation starter than a conversation stopper when it comes to talking about race and racism.

November 19, 2014 admin Books, Guns, Sociology

Concealed Carry Fun with Google Ngram

My writing accountability partner recently turned me on to Google Ngram. The search engine lets you you electronically comb through millions of books in Google’s database for certain words or phrases. (You can read about the technical details on Google or Wikipedia.)

I searched for the phrase “concealed carry” as a case-insensitive phrase and the engine returned the following chart.

Because the phrase has to appear in 40 or more books per year to register on the chart, the fact that it shows up in 0% of the books before 1980 doesn’t mean the phrase never occurs. But it doesn’t commonly occur through the 1980s, and then starts picking up in the 1990s — surely a lagged effect of Florida passing its concealed carry law in 1997 given the time it takes most people to publish books. The term steadily rises through the 2000s (the Google database ends in 2008). I don’t put much stake in the decline from 2006 to 2008, since we don’t see a big downward trend in either of the other spellings during that time. Without seeing the period from 2008 forward it is hard to know if it is just a blip or if it marks a trend.

It is interesting to note that by 1994 the term “Concealed Carry” — CAPITALIZED to signify it as an entity — begins to appear and remains relatively stead through 2008.

No major insight here. Just some fun with Google Ngram that further documents the rise of concealed carry in American since 1987.

November 9, 2014 admin Catholicism, Religion, Sociology

Lecture on How People Become Catholic at College of the Holy Cross

I was fortunate recently to be asked by my old friend Tom Landy to deliver one of the Deitchman Family Lectures on Religion and Modernity at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.

My talk, “How Do People Become Catholic?” was based on my book, Becoming Catholic: Finding Rome in the American Religious Landscape.

I’m excited to note that the lecture was videotaped and is being made available by the Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J. Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at Holy Cross.

November 7, 2014 admin Guns, Religion, Sociology

Mencken and Froese on the Sources and Strength of America’s Gun Culture

As I noted in my last post, scholars associated with the 2014 Baylor Religion Survey held a session at the recent annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion unveiling their data. (Of course, this is more of a tease since the data will not be publicly available for a year or two.)

Although there were four presentations, the one by Paul Froese and Carson Mencken on gun culture garnered the most interest – including mine!

Photo of Professor F. Carson Mencken (left) courtesy of Baylor University Media Communications

Photo of Paul Froese courtesy of Baylor University Media Communications

Froese and Mencken noted, rightfully so, that accessing the symbolic and affective nature of the gun itself for gun owners is something that is done well in qualitative studies (by Kohn, Taylor, Floyd, Burbick, and Carlson, as noted in my previous post), but not in studies based on nationally-representative samples.

The authors of the Baylor Religion Survey hoped to bridge this gap by posing the following question:

Q72. If you own a gun, please indicate how strongly you agree or disagree with the following statement: Owning a gun makes me feel: (a) Safe. (b) Responsible. (c) Confident. (d) Patriotic. (e) In control of my fate. (f) More valuable to my family. (g) More valuable to my community. (h) Respected.

Response categories for each subpart were: strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree. The authors see the first four Likert items (“a” through “d”) as measuring a dimension of power and the second four (“e” through “h”) as measuring a dimension of morality. Taken together, responses to these questions constitute a Likert scale of intensity of attachment to guns. The authors reported a scale reliability statistic of alpha = 0.86, which is very good for social scientific scales.

Using multivariate statistical modeling, the authors attempted to identify the factors associated with higher levels of attachment to guns. Using a question on the survey about economic despair, Froese and Mencken find that higher levels of economic despair are related to higher levels of attachment to guns. This finding, however, holds only among white gun owners. They surmise that black gun owners may be more accustomed to economic deprivation given America’s history of racial inequality, and so they are less likely to exhibit the “substitution effect” of replacing economic empowerment with empowerment through guns.

This confirms in a nationally-representative sample of respondents what Jennifer Dawn Carlson found in her ethnographic study of gun carriers in Detroit, Michigan, to be published as Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline next spring by Oxford University Press.

Also for white gun owners, there is a strong positive effect on having a judgmental image of God on attachment to guns, though for both whites and blacks a higher level of importance attached to religion is associated with a lower level of attachment to guns. The relationship between church attendance and attachment to guns seems to be curvilinear, with individuals who are very low church attenders and very frequent church attenders having the least attachment to their guns.

By their own admission these findings are preliminary, but even this initial take on the data suggests much to look forward to from the analysis of the gun questions on the Baylor Religion Survey. I will continue to watch with envy and report with interest on the work of these scholars.

November 5, 2014 admin Guns, Religion, Sociology, Uncategorized

Faith and Firearms in the 2014 Baylor Religion Survey

Having begun my sojourn from the sociology of religion to the study of American gun culture a couple of years ago, I was excited to make a “homecoming” of sorts by attending the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in Indianapolis this past weekend.

I was there to present my first paper on guns in America, an analysis of the relationship between faith and firearms ownership based on the General Social Survey (about which, more later).

I was excited to find another group of scholars – from Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion – working on the issue as well. For the first time, the nationally representative Baylor Religion Survey (fielded previously in 2005, 2007, 2010) included questions about gun ownership and attitudes toward guns. (See end of post for methodological details.)

These questions go beyond what is typically found in national surveys like the General Social Survey, and in combination with extensive questions about religiosity, makes for a promising set of data.

Specifically, in the section on “Guns and Society,” five questions are posed (each with a number of sub-parts):

Q68. For each item, please tell us how much, if at all, each of the following contributes to gun violence in the country: (a) The availability of guns. (b) The absence of God from our public schools and places. (c) Irresponsible gun owners. (d) Media violence such as in movies and video games. (e) Inadequate treatment of mentally ill people. (f) Inadequate background checks on gun purchases. Response categories are: a great deal, not so much, not at all.

Comment: I always try to approach the issue of “gun violence” cautiously, because I am not yet convinced there is something distinct about “gun violence” that merits its designation as a single entity, as opposed to “violence that involves guns” or “violence and guns.” But violence that involves guns is a serious concern among a large part of the American population and so it is good to ask about what people think its causes are (and are not).

One oversight here, I think, is the most significant contributor to gun violence in American society: criminal activity, especially drugs dealing and use, and gang activity (including respect killings related to the “code of the street.” (I made a presentation on this issue recently, which I will blog about soon.)

If I were a respondent to this survey, I would not be able to express this view – unless I counted criminals as “irresponsible gun owners,” but I don’t think that is what the survey authors intended for that response. I know media violence is not a major cause, and more extensive background checks are not going to stop criminals from shooting people.

Q69. Have you, or anyone you are close with, ever been threatened with a gun or shot at? Response categories are: yes or no.

Comment: What is the extent of people’s direct experience of violence with guns, and how might this affect their outlooks? I believe this is what this question is trying to get at.

Obviously, it would be interesting to distinguish between the respondent herself vs. others, and also being threatened vs. being shot at. But there are limits on how many questions you can ask on a survey like this (there were 99 total questions on the survey already), so combining several questions into a single question like this is not uncommon.

It would also be interesting to know whether the respondent, or anyone the respondent is close with, had ever brandished or shot a gun in self-defense, or found themselves in a situation in which they wished they had a gun for self-defense.

Those on the pro-gun side of the great American gun debate often accuse those who focus on the harmful effects of guns of not giving due attention to the beneficial effects of guns. This type of question will certainly be seen as coming from a position that is less sympathetic toward guns in general.

Q70. Please tell us whether you oppose or favor the following: (a) A ban on semi-automatic weapons. (b) Expanded gun safety programs. (c) Putting armed security guards/police in more schools. (d) Better mental health screening of gun buyers. (e) A ban on high-capacity ammunition clips that hold more than 10 bullets. (f) More teachers and school officials having guns. (g) Banning the possession of hand guns except by law enforcement. (h) Laws that allow citizens to carry concealed guns. Response categories are: favor or oppose.

Comment: I hope my readers who are part of one of America’s gun cultures will overlook the use of the term “clip” and “bullets” in subpart “e.” The scholars who put this survey together are experts in religion, not guns. But if you can get past that terminological issue, here you find an interesting mix of questions about laws or policies that address guns and safety. Some represent what are conventionally understood as “gun control” (subparts a, e, and g), some are ideas that come more from the pro-gun side (subparts c, f, and h – and I’m especially happy to see the question on concealed carry), and some could be interpreted in different ways depending on where the respondent is coming from (subparts b and d).

It’s good to have some survey questions available that go beyond one side’s definition of “common sense” gun laws. And perhaps having these different questions asked at the same time will allow us to see for the first time the diversity and complexity of people’s views about the various roles that guns can and should play in our society.

Q71. Do you happen to have in your home (or garage) any of the following: (Please mark all that apply.)

(a) Hand gun/revolver.
(b) Long gun
(c) Automatic/Semi-Automatic weapon

Comment: Here is a conventional gun ownership question, with a bit of a twist. The main question is the same as the General Social Survey, but the follow-up options differ. The GSS asks whether the person who owns a gun owns a handgun/revolver, a shotgun, or a rifle. Here shotgun and rifle are combined, and an additional response of “automatic/semi-automatic weapon” is added. The potential benefit of this approach is the ability to distinguish those who do NOT own automatic/semi-automatic weapons from those who do. Perhaps these are collectors of historic arms or true “Fudds” who would never hunt with anything other than a bolt action rifle or sporting gentleman who only use side-by-side shotguns.

With due respect to my colleagues, though, someone with some firearms experience should have looked these categories in advance because the qualitative and quantitative difference between ownership of “automatic” and “semi-automatic” weapons is ENORMOUS. Consequently, to the extent this question is used, I think the assumption will have to be that respondents who say “yes” to this question basically own semi-automatic weapons (since it is hard to imagine someone who owns a fully automatic weapon who does not own a semi-auto).

I would have been much more interested in knowing how many people own AR-15 style “modern sporting rifles” (a.k.a., “assault weapons”). Combining long gun and automatic/semi-automatic ownership categories doesn’t get at this, though, since it would also include a semi-auto shotgun, a Ruger 10-22 rifle, a Tommy Gun, and an M2 Browning, to name just a few.

Q72. If you own a gun, please indicate how strongly you agree or disagree with the following statement: Owning a gun makes me feel: (a) Safe. (b) Responsible. (c) Confident. (d) Patriotic. (e) In control of my fate. (f) More valuable to my family. (g) More valuable to my community. (h) Respected.

Comment: This promises to be some of the most interesting information that comes from the Baylor Religion Survey, because it goes beyond simply whether people own guns or not to get at some of the symbolic and affective meanings that people attach to gun ownership. We know something about this through qualitative studies like Abigail Kohn’s Shooters: Myths and Realities of America’s Gun Cultures, Jimmy Taylor’s American Gun Culture: Collectors, Shows, and the Story of the Gun, Joan Burbick’s Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy, Nancy Floyd’s She’s Got a Gun, and Jennifer Dawn Carlson’s forthcoming Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline. But it will be nice to have nationally-representative data on some of the things that are cultural causes and consequences of gun ownership. I think it will be particularly interesting to see what gender differences emerge in responses to these questions.

I am also working up a separate blog post specifically on Baylor sociologists F. Carson Mencken and Paul Froese’s presentation of some early analyses of this last question at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion meetings. Stay tuned for that.

In the end, the questions asked about guns on the Baylor Religion Survey are not perfect – which is to say, they are not what I would have asked. But some of them are quite ingenious – which is to say, they are smarter than what I would have asked. And they will contribute considerably to our understanding of American gun ownership and attitudes.

Unfortunately, the data will not be public for a year or two while the Baylor University researchers do their analyses. I for one will be anxiously awaiting their release, and looking forward to reports from Baylor in the meantime.

METHODOLOGICAL DETAILS: The 4^th wave of the Baylor Religion Survey was fielded by mail (in English and Spanish) in collaboration with the Gallup Organization between January and March 2014. In the end, there were 1,572 respondents. The 15% response rate at first blush seems low, but comparisons with the General Social Survey show strong similarities on demographic characteristics (age, gender) and religious characteristics (religious attendance). Weights are also provided to correct for known differences between the survey sample and the American population. 40% of questions concern demographics and religious affiliation, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors. 60% topical modules, including 5 questions (with many subparts) on “guns and society.”

October 3, 2014 admin Sociology

Poverty and Racial Attitudes

One of the most significant books I read as an undergraduate was Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations, by sociologists Howard Schuman, Charlotte Steeh, and Lawrence Bobo (1985). (A revised edition was published in 1998 by Harvard University Press.)

In fact, my first ever academic conference presentation (at the Western Anthropology/Sociology Undergraduate Research Conference at Santa Clara University) was inspired by this book. It was based on a paper I wrote for Dr. Yossi Shavit’s social statistics class: “From Bensonhurst to Berkeley: Trends in American Racial Attitudes, 1972 to 1988.” In that paper, I used General Social Survey (GSS) data to analyze whether American racial attitudes had improved or, I feared, declined or stagnated over time.

With the help of Shavit and my teaching assistant Eleanor Bell, I created a Guttman scale for racial attitudes based on 7 questions from the GSS.

As the snippet from my paper above shows, Guttman scales are hierarchical so that a person who agrees with a certain item should also agree with lower-ranked items. For example, a person who favors busing to achieve desegregation (the hardest item in the racial attitudes scale) should also favor easier items such as interracial marriage and having a family member’s black friend home for dinner.

I was reminded of this work today when I was surfing around the internet trying to find ways people have used the General Social Survey to study racial attitudes recently. Many of the same survey questions I utilized continue to appear, but I was taken aback when I stumbled across the following graphic on racial attitudes from Nate Silver’s FiveThiryEight website that examined responses to a question I had not analyzed:

Wow. That is all I can say.

July 18, 2014 admin Guns, Sociology, Uncategorized

Scrutinizing Claims About Guns in Homes as a “Risk Factor” for Homicide in the Home

Getting into the sociology of guns has been both fascinating and frustrating. The fascination comes from deeply immersing myself in something entirely new to me. The frustration comes in attempting to understand the reality of guns in a scholarly – that is, objective and nuanced – manner. In the sociology of guns, the line demarcating science and advocacy is very blurry indeed.

I was thinking about this recently when Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America issued a “report” claiming that there had been 74 “school shootings” since the massacre at Sandy Hook. A map of the shootings went viral and President Obama picked up on this figure, giving it considerable political weight. But when gun advocates started to scrutinize the “data,” they found something quite interesting: Moms Demand defined “school shooting” as any shooting that took place on school property. This included events that took place after hours, events that did not involve students, suicides, etc. But clearly when people hear the phrase “school shootings” something else comes to mind. Soon, Pulitzer Prize-winning Tampa Bay Times Politifact declared the claim “mostly false.”

This incident reminded me of some of the other statistics frequently invoked in the debate over guns. Take a simple empirical statement, for example: “people who keep guns in homes are almost 3 times more likely to be murdered.” This seems fairly straightforward and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence invokes it on their website as evidence that “legislatures should adopt common sense gun laws that increase the safe and secure storage of firearms in the home.”

But the empirical reality underlying this claim is not as simple as the Brady Campaign suggests. The claim is based on a study by an influential/notorious (depending on where you stand) researcher, Arthur Kellerman and his colleagues: “Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993. (I have written more about this on my Gun Culture 2.0 blog here and here.)

Kellerman and his colleagues studied Memphis and Shelby County (TN), Seattle and King County (WA), and Cleveland Cuyahoga County (OH). They identified 420 cases (subsequently reduced to 388 cases in the final analysis, of individuals who were firearm homicide victims in private homes between 1987 and 1992. Using a case-control design, they identified a sample of control subjects who were matched to case subjects (those who were killed) by sex, race, age group, and neighborhood of residence.

To determine what differences there were between those who were killed and the control subjects, control subjects and proxies for case subjects were interviewed and asked an identical set of questions to identify risk factors such as gun ownership, drug and alcohol use, previous violence in the home and so on. Proxies for case subjects were identified from police records, newspaper accounts, obituaries, and funeral homes.

Using this information, researchers can estimate how much more likely individuals exposed to a particular risk are to experience the outcome of interest (being killed) than those not exposed to the risk. These estimates are typically expressed in the form of crude/raw odds ratios (from univariate analyses) or adjusted odds ratios (from multivariate analyses). Simply put, “a person exposed to X, is Y times more likely to experience Z,” where X is the risk factor, Z is the outcome of interest, and Y is the odds ratio.

Kellerman’s study, picked up by the Brady Campaign and many other gun control advocates, reported adjusted odds ratios for homicide from multivariate logistic regression as follows:

Illicit drug use in household 5.7
Home rented 4.4
Previous fight in home 4.4
Lived alone 3.7
Gun(s) kept in home 2.7
Previous arrest in household 2.5

Hence, the Brady Campaign’s claim that “people who keep guns in homes are almost 3 times more likely to be murdered.” From this, Kellerman and colleagues concluded, “In the light of these observations and our present findings, people should be strongly discouraged from keeping guns in their homes.”

But, as is the case with all research – but even more so with research that is taken up by political advocates – the devil is in the details. What is the mechanism by which keeping a gun in the home makes a person more likely to be killed in the home?

Thinking of the Moms Demand “school shooting” report, I asked my Facebook friends what they thought the most common scenario would be for these firearms homicides. The imagined scenarios varied widely, but included domestic violence, home invasions, and drug/gang related situations. A number of people also wanted to throw accidents and/or suicide into the mix, which is interesting but were excluded by definition. I think it is a fair conclusion to draw from this admitted unscientific poll that when people hear that “people who keep guns in homes are almost 3 times more likely to be murdered,” they imagine the gun in the home actually being involved somehow (whether it is used for the killing or somehow escalates the situation). (Here the accident and suicide responses are suggestive of what people are imagining.)

Looking at Kellerman’s study more closely, we actually find that of the original 420 homicides committed in the homes of victims, only 209 (49.8%) of them were by any firearm at all. 26.4% were by cutting instrument, 11.7% by blunt instrument, 6.4% by strangulation or suffocation, and 5.7% by other means.

Of those 49.8% of homicides by firearm, how many of them involved a firearm that was kept in the home? Kellerman does not say. Sociologist Gary Kleck, however, has used Kellermann’s data and some additional assumptions to try to determine what percentage of homicide victims were killed in their own home using a gun “kept in the home where the shooting occurred.” He concludes that as few as 9.7% and as many as 14.2% of gun homicides were committed in the victims’ home with a gun kept there (“Can Owning a Gun Really Triple the Owner’s Chances of Being Murdered?” published in Homicide Studies in 2001). So, 209 gun homicides x 0.142 (proportion own gun, own home) = 30 cases. This leads to two conclusions:

1. Of the total number of homicides committed in the homes of victims, only 7.1 percent (30 of 420) were committed using a gun kept in that home. 92.9 percent were committed using a gun brought into the home or another mechanism of death.

2. Of the total number of homicides committed in the study area, only 1.6 percent (30 of 1,860) were gun homicides committed in the victim’s home using a gun kept there. 98.4 percent we either outside the home, were not gun homicides, or did not use the victim’s gun. People in the case sample are 62 times more likely to be killed under these other circumstance than to be killed in their own home with a gun kept there.

In his effort to prove that guns are dangerous, Kellermann clearly overdraws his conclusions. He might have been better off focusing on the relative infrequency of justifiable homicides to argue that there is not a huge protective benefit from owning a firearm, rather than characterizing it as a risk factor for homicide in the home. But that claim is much weaker and doesn’t make for good anti-gun advocacy group talking points.

July 11, 2014 admin Faculty, Guns, Higher Education, Sociology, Students, Teaching

A Letter to My Future Students

I am participating in a faculty Writing Associates Seminar, in which we are learning to integrate writing more intelligently and productively into our courses. For an upcoming retreat, our seminar leader asked us to write a letter to our future students about what we hope they will get out of our class. I wrote the letter below for a course I am developing — related to my new research project on American gun culture — on “Guns in American Society.” Enjoy!

Photo credit: Lauren Carroll/Winston-Salem Journal

11 July 2014

Dear Students –

I am excited for this opportunity to spend some time together learning about the place of guns in American society. I have very high, perhaps even unrealistic, expectations for what I hope you will take away from this course.

First of all, I hope you will cultivate a scholarly approach to understanding guns. That means you will be able to take an issue that is contentious and complex, and approach it in as objective and nuanced a manner as possible.

This is easier said than done. As sociologists, we are a part of, not apart from, the social worlds we study. This is both a strength and a weakness. It is a strength because we bring a great deal of personal experience and understanding to our studies. It is a weakness because our personal experiences and understandings can be partial, biased, uninformed.

Therefore, we need to inform our personal experiences and understandings with broader sociological theories and more rigorous sociological studies of the phenomenon of interest. In other words, we need to develop our sociological imaginations. As C. Wright Mills put it decades ago, “it is by means of the sociological imagination that [people] now hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society.”

This passage from Mills also points to a second objective of this course. I hope you will come away from the course with a better understanding of yourself with respect to guns. This includes your personal relationship to and personal beliefs about them.

Finally, although we will cover the good, the bad, and the ugly of guns in American society, there is much more to understand than we will be able to cover in the short time we have together this semester. Therefore, I hope to encourage you to develop an attitude and the tools necessary to continue to develop your sociological imagination with respect to guns for the rest of your life.

I am looking forward to getting started on this sociological enterprise with you.

Until then, best wishes,

David Yamane

April 21, 2014 admin Culture, Higher Education, Music, Sociology, Students, Teaching

Contemporary Application of Bourdieu’s Distinction in Musical Taste

In his famous book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu reports findings from a French survey of cultural tastes fielded in 1967-68. Of particular note is a figure showing the distribution of preferences for three musical works by class fractions. Bourdieu reports that Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” represents “legitimate taste” and is favored by “those fractions of the dominant class that are richest in economic capital.” Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” stands in for “middle-brow taste” favored by the middle classes. And Strauss’s “Blue Danube” represents “popular taste” — which Bourdieu characterizes as “so-called ‘light’ music or classical music devalued by popularization,” and also “songs totally devoid of artistic ambition or pretension” such as works by Petula Clark. This taste “is most frequent among the working classes and varies in inverse ratio to educational capital” (p. 17).

I do a mini-version of Bourdieu’s survey in my sociological theory class, playing these three songs for my students and asking them to indicate which they like. There are often very seemingly idiosyncratic patterns in the responses to these songs. Strauss is generally pretty popular overall, though, which is exactly the opposite of what Bourdieu would expect from my generally well-educated and fairly affluent student. Discussion of this often highlights the fact that the music in Bourdieu’s study is too old to allow for meaningful interpretation of the relationship between American social class, educational capital, and taste. So, I field another survey for my students.

I am assisted in my choice of songs by a student who sent me a link to the following chart, from an on-line story called “Does Your Taste in Music Reflect Your Intelligence?”

The results bring together the most popular songs at 1,352 American colleges and universities and the average SAT scores at those same institutions. Of course, this is not a sociological study, though the person who did the work, Virgil Griffith, is a PhD student at Caltech studying the “information-integration theory of consciousness” (not exactly a rocket scientist, but close to alot of rocket scientists at Caltech).

Bourdieu talks about “educational capital” rather than intelligence, but we do know that one of the things that the SAT measures is the economic and cultural capital of the students taking the exam, so the SAT is not a terrible proxy for what Bourdieu is talking about.

In my reduced version of Bourdieu’s study, I chose three songs that appear high, middle, and low in the SAT spectrum: Radiohead’s “Karma Police” (high), OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson” (middle), and Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love” (low). I asked students to indicate which of the three songs was their favorite. The results were as follows:

HIGH (Radiohead): 21%
MEDIUM (OutKast): 38%
LOW (Beyonce): 41%

I welcome any comments on the results of this exercise!

April 21, 2014 admin Catholicism, Religion, Sociology, Writing

Three Blog Posts on Initiation in the Contemporary Catholic Church

Oxford University Press was good enough to allow me to write three blog posts this Easter weekend with my thoughts on initiation in the contemporary Catholic Church. Here are links to the three posts:

Initiation into America’s Original Megachurch (18 April 2014)
Reinventing Rites of Passage in Contemporary America (19 April 2014)
Easter Rites of Initiation Bring Good News for American Catholics (20 April 2014)

The posts build on my recently published study of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, and hopefully build some interest in it.

You can order it from Barnes & Noble at a 20% discount, and also get it as a Nook book or for the Amazon Kindle (Amazon.com was recently sold out of the book, but hopefully it will come back in stock there, too.)

Photo of adult being baptized

– See more at: http://blog.oup.com/2014/04/easter-reflections-initiation-america-megachurch/#sthash.Le5Dj9ey.dpuf