European Sociological Review - current issue

Does Unemployment Help or Hinder Becoming Independent? The Role of Employment Status for Leaving the Parental Home

Jacob, M., Kleinert, C. — 2008-03-17

Two broad trends in industrialized countries motivate this article: on the one hand, the life phase between youth and adulthood has prolonged and diversified; on the other hand, entering the labour market has become more complex and insecure. The article combines two aspects of these trends by analysing the effect of unemployment on leaving home. Extending previous research, we use a resource-oriented theoretical framework that allows us to elaborate the impact of employment-related resources of different actors. Our main hypothesis is that availability of employment related resources matters for leaving home. Furthermore, we assume that several actors are involved in the decision to leave home: individual, welfare state, parents, and partner. Resources of each can be pooled, and resources of other actors can compensate for own shortages. In the analyses we use life history data of two birth cohorts in West Germany. We find that for young adults with partners own unemployment accelerates leaving home, while for singles leaving home is delayed. Parental resources and unemployment benefits also have only an effect if young adults have no partners. Thus, partnership status plays a crucial role in shaping the transitions of youth to residential independence.

Status Inconsistency Revisited: An Improved Statistical Model

Zhang, X. — 2008-03-17

Gerhard Lenski hypothesized that status inconsistency leads to mental stress, social isolation, and liberal political views. But intensive empirical research has failed to observe these consequences. The statistical methods used in the research controlled for the main effects of relative positions in hierarchies by including the additive terms. But they neglected another confounding source, the interaction effect caused by reasons other than status inconsistency, while there was empirical evidence for its existence. This paper proposes an improved statistical model that controls for this confounding source by including one more term, a multiplicative term, while using the absolute difference between relative positions in different hierarchies to measure the effect of status inconsistency. This model is applied to the GSS data, and the hypothesized consequences are observed. Statistical results show that status inconsistency between education and income undermined self-rated health, satisfaction with leisure life, trust in other individuals in society, social participation in various groups and organizations, confidence in political and economic institutions, and conservative political party identification.

A New Dimension of Social Stratification in Poland? Class Membership and Electoral Voting in 1991-2001

Domanski, H. — 2008-03-17

In contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, the debate on class politics takes on a different form to that in the West—its concern is whether class divisions increased as the post-communist societies made the transition to the market system. Using Polish survey data on respondents voting behaviour in elections of 1991, 1994, 1997, and 2001, I present evidence on the significance of social class for voting behaviour. Results of log-linear analysis show that class membership does indeed exert a significant impact on voting behaviour. Although it changed across the time, it appeared no less in 2001 than in 1991. Also the patterns of this association (which class votes which party?) remained unchanged. On the whole our evidence suggests that in Poland a new dimension of social stratification—that which is referred in sociological literature as ‘class politics’—has emerged. At the same time, claims for the class basis of voting in Poland should not be exaggerated, as the class-vote link in Poland is much lower than in most of the Western societies. To estimate the relative strength of this association I compared it across 17 countries using data from the European Social Survey 2002.

Self-Perceived Job Insecurity and Social Context: A Multi-Level Analysis of 17 European Countries

Erlinghagen, M. — 2008-03-17

Job insecurity causes far-reaching negative outcomes. The fear of job loss damages the health of employees and reduces the productivity of firms. Thus, job insecurity should result in increasing social costs. Analysing representative data from 17 European countries, this paper investigates self-perceived job insecurity. Our multi-level analysis reveals significant cross-country differences in individuals’ perception of job insecurity. This finding is not only driven by social-structural or institutional differences, but the perception of job insecurity is also influenced by nation-specific unobserved characteristics.

The Effect of Occupational Sex-Composition on Earnings: Job-Specialization, Sex-Role Attitudes and the Division of Domestic Labour in Spain

Polavieja, J. G. — 2008-03-17

Important theoretical controversies remain unresolved in the literature on occupational sex-segregation and the gender wage gap. These controversies can be summarized as a debate between cultural-socialization arguments and economic or rational-action theories of specialization. The article discusses these theories in detail and carries out a preliminary test of the relative explanatory performance of some of their most consequential predictions. This is done by drawing on the Spanish sample of the second round of the European Social Survey (ESS). Empirical results suggest that the effect of occupational sex-segregation on wages could be explicable by workers’ sex-role attitudes, their relative input in domestic production and the job-specific human-capital requirements of their jobs. Of these three factors, job-specialization seems clearly the most important one.

Ethnic Competition and Opposition to Ethnic Intermarriage in the Netherlands: a Multi-Level Approach

Tolsma, J., Lubbers, M., Coenders, M. — 2008-03-17

This study investigates the relationship between characteristics of the living environment and antagonistic attitudes towards ethnic out-groups, with a focus on the explanation of opposition to ethnic intermarriage. Previous studies on the relationship between the living environment and prejudice-related attitudes used at most a limited set of contextual characteristics. We investigate to what extent relative group sizes, economic competition, cultural competition, safety threats, and social cohesion within Dutch municipalities and neighbourhoods affect antagonistic attitudes once social origin characteristics and other relevant individual-level characteristics are controlled for. To test hypotheses derived from Ethnic Competition Theory and Contact Theory, we used data from the Netherlands Kinship and Panel Survey supplemented with unique aggregate demographic statistics. The results show that proximity of ethnic out-group members in the municipality reduces opposition to ethnic heterogamy. However, an increase in the ethnic out-group proportion is positively related to opposition to ethnic intermarriage. Moreover, at the neighbourhood level, proximity of ethnic outgroups increases opposition among the lower educated, whereas it decreases opposition among the higher educated. These findings indicate that the threat mechanism, the contact mechanism, and selective migration operate at the same time. Economic competition is the only type of competition that evokes opposition to ethnic intermarriage.

Conditions for the Explanatory Power of Life Styles

Rossel, J. — 2008-03-17

Life style research has become an independent branch of social structural analysis that systematically complements the role of classical research on social inequality in explaining social action. However, there are important gaps in life style research. First, theoretical bases for explaining the statistical connection between life styles and social action are lacking. Secondly, it remains unclear why life styles sometimes are good predictors of social action and sometimes are not. In a first step this article puts forward an action-theoretic framework as a basis for life style research that implies a conceptual shift from life styles to cultural preferences. In a second step it develops three hypotheses that set out the conditions for a high or low explanatory power of cultural preferences. They are empirically tested by way of a data analysis that supports the applicability of the theoretical ideas developed in the paper.

Early Ethnic Educational Inequality: The Influence of Duration of Preschool Attendance and Social Composition

Biedinger, N., Becker, B., Rohling, I. — 2008-03-17

Ethnic inequality in education is a well-established topic among the scientific community. We assume that ethnic inequality is constituted early in life—before a child has even started school. Differences between natives and immigrants with regard to preschool attendance (if, when, and which preschool is attended) may account for some of the ethnic educational inequality upon entering school. We use the school entrance examination data of the City of Osnabrück (Germany) for the years 2000–2005 to analyse the school readiness of 6- to 7-year-old children as an indicator of early school success. It is apparent that the amount of preschool experience improves school readiness, even when controlling for family background. While this is true for all children, immigrant children nonetheless exhibit lower scores on school readiness when all these individual explaining factors are controlled for. Multilevel analysis shows that the ethnic effect differs among preschools. A preschool's influence depends on its social composition: preschools with a beneficial social composition are better able to promote children's development than those with a poorer learning context. Immigrant children benefit particularly from longer attendance at preschools with a positive context.

The Interface Between Social Research and Policy Making

Hernes, G. — 2008-03-17

Problems of communication often arise when social research is to be used as premises for policy making. In this paper it is argued that the two activities are entirely different, yet that there is a logical parallelism between theory construction and policy making which can be identified in four steps. Where scientists make observations, politicians raise issues. Where scientists propose explanations, politicians propose remedies. Where scientists draw empirical consequences and make predictions from their models, politicians work out possible political implications of their proposals. Where scientists rule out explanations when the predictions from them do not correspond to facts, politicians rule out options or reforms that are not feasible or workable. Where scientists try to explain the actual world, politicians attempt to create possible worlds. Both professions not only demand acuity and test imagination but also summon the capacity to spot import and resolve controversies.

Craig A. Parsons and Timothy M. Smeeding (Eds): Immigration and the Transformation of Europe.

Dronkers, J. — 2008-03-17

Jorg Flecker (Ed.): Changing Working Life and the Appeal of the Extreme Right.

Ivarsflaten, E. — 2008-03-17