For ever – or at least for 70 years - make love was many times more common than have sex, at least in the Google Ngrams database of millions of books in American English. And, then — well, you can guess what happened then:
The results are the same with “making” and “having” (you can play with the search here).
Why? What happened? Could it be “the culture”? Zooming in on the period since 1950, preliminary evidence is mixed:
I’m open to hypotheses.
Filed under Me @ work
As followup to today’s stratification syllabus, here’s how our leading theorists (at least the ones in my class) have fared in American English book references since the 1860s.
Two things. First is the waves. Marx, Weber and Parsons have their peaks in the early 1970s; Durkheim and MacKinnon peaked in the 1990s; Bourdieu may not have peaked yet as of 2008 (why doesn’t Google update this thing?).
Second is something about generational ripples, with within-theorist peaks repeating at intervals, such as Weber, Durkheim and (to a lesser degree) Parsons in 1970s and 1990s. The 70s and 90s might just be peaks in sociology publishing.
Anyway, the generational wave theory bodes well for a MacKinnon rebound.
You can play with this here.
Filed under Me @ work
But what are people juggling?
[Updated with a look at phrase origins at the end.]
Judging by the prevalence of terms in the Google Ngrams database of books, since 1970 people have begun juggling their families, their work-and-family, their responsibilities, and even their children themselves.
Maybe all the metaphorical juggling has contributed to the rise of real-life juggling, although based on the distribution of juggling conventions this is a bigger deal in Europe than the U.S. In American English, “juggling balls” is thriving, but since the mid-1980s its growth can’t keep up with “juggling work.”
And, judging by who’s juggling in a Google image search for “juggling work,” the clip-artists of today, at least, think it’s women who are driving the trend about 2-to-1:
Origins update:
The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t have a clear dating of this kind of use for juggling before 1985, “They have to know how to do many things—from juggling the futures market to overhauling a tractor or curing viral scours.”
The first instance of “juggling work” I get in the Lexis database is from the New York Times, Sep. 23, 1980:
She conceded that juggling her work and family is not always easy. ”You feel split all the time,” said Mrs. Massie, taking a cigarette. ”Sometimes the family responsibility collides with the need to be alone, and with the selfishness that is necessary for any creative effort.”
The American Sociological Review has a reference to “juggling work assignments” in a 1956 book review on industrial practices, which isn’t quite the sense of juggling tasks within a single life. By 1983 Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies has this:
The impossible pressures of juggling work and family responsibilities have led some Soviet women to reject the ideology of emancipation altogether.
And by then we’re off and juggling.
Filed under Me @ work
8:30 AM, Thursday, May 3: Be at the first session of the Population Association of American conference to hear me present, “Divorce and the Recession, 2008-2010″ (and three other interesting papers on the how the recession has affected families).
The presentation version of my paper is now available as a Maryland Population Research Center Working Paper. Here are a few highlights and additions.
This analysis supersedes some of my earlier musings about divorce fluctuations, which have been quite inconsistent (here’s the whole series). I once reported a positive relationship between rising unemployment and rising divorce rates — but no increase in Google searches on divorce. But then my Google method turned up what looked like an increase in divorce-related searching – by which point I was skeptical that there was in fact dominant effect of the recession that is discernible in the short run. And now I don’t see an unemployment pattern to speak of.
The conference paper is the most I can do with what we now have — big-sample data from 2008-2010. As I noted before, there is a drop in divorce rates from 2008 to 2010, but that hides a rebound from 2009 to 2010; that pattern holds when individuals factors are controlled. In the context of a long-run decline in divorce rates, I don’t make much of that. At the state level, this my story:
After establishing an individual level model predicting women’s divorce, I test whether unemployment and foreclosures are associated with the odds of divorce, and for whom. Results show that foreclosure rates are positively associated with the odds of divorce, but only for those with more than a high school education. State unemployment rates show no effect on odds of divorce. I also test the effect of state laws delaying divorce, and find they have an increasingly negative effect of the three-year period, suggesting a backlog of new divorces during the recession.
The interpretation of those state law patterns — a late addition to the paper — is up for discussion. Anyway, here’s the figure showing the foreclosure pattern by education level, from a model that controls for individual characteristics and state fixed effects:
Maybe this means marriages in which people are more likely to own homes are more at risk of real estate shocks, but that’s pretty indirect. There might be a fancy way to work that out, with a prediction model for which of these divorced people probably owned a home before divorce (be my guest!).
Those state patterns are built on an individual model shown in this figure. Bars that point left show negative effects on divorce odds, bars that point right are for increased risks.
None of these patterns are surprising given past research, but it’s very nice to have recent big-data estimates as new benchmarks.
Finally, I updated the Google analysis, because I couldn’t resist. The trend for a basic “divorce” search, which I used previously, was seriously diverted by the something called “the Kardashian event” in October 2011. How much did this mess up the data? This much:
Partly for that reason, this time I stuck with lawyer searches: “divorce lawyer,” “divorce attorney,” and “family law attorney,” which are all pretty well correlated over time. This is the trend (dates on the x-axis appear at the end of each year):
I could interpret this as consistent with the divorce/recession lull-rebound hypothesis, but time will tell. It doesn’t fit well from 2004 to 2008, since divorce rates were probably falling during most of that time. Still, that’s a pretty rapid rise at the end. If there isn’t an increase in divorce in 2011/2012, remind me to report that this method didn’t work.
Filed under Me @ work, Research reports
Listening to the debate about motherhood in the last few days reminded me of something that’s been nagging me for a while: what does it mean that mothers are becoming moms?
On the Republican side, in his NRA speech Friday, Mitt Romney said, “I happen to believe that all moms are working moms.” (The right-wing radio personality Laura Schlesinger always said, by way of introduction, “I am my kids’ mom,” as the most salient piece of her identity.) On the other side, both Hilary Rosen and President Obama used mom as the toughest-job-in-the-world’s title.
Why is it mom? Back in the 90s, poor single women weren’t “welfare moms.”
Here’s the trend in “working mother” versus “working mom” from Google Ngrams – the occurrence of these terms in the Google Books database:
The same pattern appears with just mother versus mom.
I don’t know why this is happening or what it means. Do you?
Filed under In the news
I’ve written before about the abstinence-only problem in sex education. The short answer is it doesn’t work to promote abstinence or prevent pregnancies among young people. The long answer goes all the way down to Hell and back.
The announcement that teen births hit a record low in 2010 offered a chance to revisit the curious pattern in which states that require abstinence-only education have higher rates of teen births than those that do not. The ThinkProgress post that got tens of thousands of “likes” just mentioned the top and bottom of the list. But using the list of state policies put together by Guttmacher, and the birth rates from CDC (I used the “final” data from 2009, instead of the new 2010 data, but it doesn’t seem to matter), here’s the complete breakdown:
Those that require that abstinence-only be “stressed” in any sex-ed classes average 9.9% of births to teenagers; those that require it be “covered” average 9.0%; and those with no requirement average 7.3%.
This pattern was verified by a much more rigorous analysis in the peer-reviewed journal PLosOne last year. The authors broke the laws down somewhat differently, into four levels (no provision, abstinence covered, abstinence promoted, abstinence stressed), and plotted them against state teen pregnancy rates, like this:
Their conclusion:
…increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates. This trend remains significant after accounting for socioeconomic status, teen educational attainment, ethnic composition of the teen population, and availability of Medicaid waivers for family planning services in each state. These data show clearly that abstinence-only education as a state policy is ineffective in preventing teenage pregnancy and may actually be contributing to the high teenage pregnancy rates in the U.S.
In any event, the rates in the U.S. are much higher than in most European countries, as I wrote on last year’s report.
Googling Antichrist
So, abstinence education may be the cause of teen births — or just a very ineffective response to them. But what role does the Antichrist play in all this? According to Google search patterns, a big one (this statement has not yet been peer-reviewed). States’ percentages of all births to women under age 20 (left) are correlated at .87 with their searches for “the antichrist”:
Whenever I can correlate a real-world pattern of social importance with search behavior, I like to seize the chance. So I took the top 100-most correlated-with-teen-births Google searches and broke them into 9 categories, ranked in order of their interest to me. All of these were correlated with the teen birth percentage at the level of .84 or higher. Your interpretations of these are as good as mine. (Background and previous Google search posts are here.)
Christian stuff
Health
Violence
Relationships
Food
Dogs
Cars
Entertainment
Misc
Filed under In the news, Me @ work
This post contains racially offensive language.
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a PhD student in economics at Harvard, has analyzed Google searches for racially offensive terms across metro areas, and tested for a “racial animus” effect on the vote for Obama in 2008.* The results are pretty strong:
The baseline proxy that I use is the percentage of an area’s total Google searches from 2004-2007 that included the word “nigger” or “niggers.” … A one standard deviation increase in an area’s racially charged search is associated with a 1.5 percentage point decrease in Barack Obama’s vote share, controlling for John Kerry’s vote share. The results imply that, relative to the area with the lowest racial animus, racial animus cost Obama between 3 to 5 percentage points of the national popular vote. … The statistical significance and large magnitude are robust to numerous controls including local unemployment rates; home state candidate preference; Census division fixed effects; changes in House voting over the same period; prior trends in Presidential voting; and a variety of demographics controls.
This is a creative way to measure racism — not perfect, but nothing is. And he did a fair amount of experimenting and tinkering with the measures to make sure it wasn’t fluky. Very nice.
Racism at the population level
Another thing that jumped out at me in the paper, however, was the finding among the control variables that racist searches are more common in markets with higher proportions of Black residents. This raises a potentially difficult issue with the whole Google-search method, since we don’t know who is doing the searching. Does his finding suggest that Blacks are doing racist searches? I don’t think so. I previously looked at state-level correlations between race/ethnic composition and search terms, and it looks to me like the most correlated search terms are indeed being performed by those groups. For example, Americans Indians live in states where people Google “Indian Health Service” and Blacks live in states where people Google stuff about historically Black colleges and universities (and Whites apparently Google AC/DC songs).
But at lower levels of correlation, I would expect the presence of one group to affect the search behavior of others. An obvious example is how Southern states mostly vote Republican in national elections — more Blacks equals more conservative voting, even though the great majority of Black voters vote Democratic. The higher rates of conservatism among Whites in those places outweighs the presence of Democratic-voting Blacks. (The effect on Whites was discovered before Blacks could vote in the South, but remains true.)
We also know from way back that inequality between Blacks and Whites is greater where Blacks are more highly represented in the population, and there’s good evidence at least some of this is due to increased racism by Whites. I’ve found this for earnings for both men and women, for middle and working class workers; and, with Matt Huffman, for occupational segregation and access to managerial positions. Only some of that research has actually measured racial attitudes, however. Google gives us a chance to look from a different angle — at the private behavior, not expressed attitudes, of populations.
Removing West Virginia, which is an extreme outlier on the jokes variable (more than 3 standard deviations from the mean), the correlation between searches for “nigger jokes” and Black population percentage is .48. Here’s the scatter plot (the non-Southern states have the pink centers).
And here’s the regression numbers for the relationship:
That positive relationship, tapering off, fits the long-standing pattern, as seen for example in this 1998 paper, which tested the percent-Black on common attitude measures in the General Social Survey (the figure estimates are net of a variety of controls):
All adding to the accumulating evidence for search behavior as a valuable research tool.
* Thanks to a tip from Rachel Lovell.
** Some searches seem even better for this purpose, such as “funny nigger jokes,” but fortunately there isn’t enough searching for that to get state-level frequencies, according to Google.
New Gingrich has used racist code words for a long time, before the current food stamp and no-work-ethic mantras. Now he’s onto something new with a “Saul Alinsky radical” drumbeat. Here he is from last night in South Carolina:
The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky [chants of "USA! USA!"] … We are going to argue American exceptionalism, the American Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, the American federalist papers; the founding fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. He draws his from Saul Alinsky, radical left-wingers and people who don’t like the classical America.
Here he is in a December debate on Fox:
Who is Saul Alinsky? And what kind of first name is “Saul,” anyway? Jewish. And who Googles “alinsky”? I don’t know for sure, but I do know that whoever they are, they live in the same states as people who Google “obama citizenship” at a correlation of .73:
Some other searches that have the highest correlation with “Alinsky” across states (all .68 or better):
My guess is that hardly anyone in Gingrich’s intended audience knows who Saul Alinsky is. But I think he’s giving them enough information to know what kind of person he is. In December he put it this way:
…if you look at his background, he’s really a lot more Saul Alinsky and radicalism than he is anything to do with the traditional American models.
FYI, this morning someone removed the description of Alinsky as Jewish from the opening line of his Wikipedia entry, which was added in December.
Filed under In the news, Politics
NPR’s Morning Edition did a story today about my Google Correlate explorations on NPR – focusing on politics and food searches – by Shankar Vedantam, I thought it might be helpful to pull together the correlations posts I’ve done. Someone — probably not me — should get serious about using this kind of data to connect search behavior with demographic trends, politics, culture, and other aggregate patterns of social behavior.
Ideally, we need Google to give up the real data, warts and all, for real research. For example, this disturbing bit of text has appeared on their FAQ page:
In December 2011, we added support for time series correlations on a number of new countries. As part of this change, we reduced our sample size for US states and US time series to match that of the other countries. While this does not have much of an effect on popular queries, it may cause a noticeable increase in variance for queries with lower volumes.
In fact, some of the searches I’ve reported on in the past no longer produce the same results, apparently because of this change. Since they have apparently reduced the sample size, I favor the results I reported, but this is not the kind of thing we’d do if we ran the zoo. If anyone knows Google, you should try to work this out with them, get some grant money, and really wow us.
Anyway.
Here’s where the blog has been:
Wow, that’s a lot of posts. (It reminds of when Maine’s recycling law led Stephen King to start stockpiling beer cans instead of throwing them out, and the size of the pile illustrated the depth of his alcoholism.) Maybe I should cool it for a while.
The story is here, with an audio link.
NPR addendum:
Here are the foods that appear in the top-100 correlations with searches for “npr” across states:
Filed under Me @ work
Merry Christmas!
And the 100 search terms that most closely follow the same pattern across states, according to Google Correlate (all correlations higher than .80, listed in order from high to low).
TRADITIONAL VEGETARIAN
shotgun pistol grip recipe vegetarian
1911a1 lentil stew
glock 21 vegetarian pot pie
mossberg shotgun vegetarian stew
shotgun light phthalate free
sword for sale tofu marinade
12 gauge ammo walnut pesto
aarp insurance low voc
kel-tec plr-16 attenborough
survival food vegetarian times
guns sale chemex coffee
1911 a1 organic
saiga vegetarian stuffing
cdnn guns ode magazine
mini 14 folding stock vegan christmas
fmg9 bean stew
shotgun pistol metal water bottle
scale rc planes roasted beets
the french foreign legion vegetarian soup
ammo online lentil dal
glock review recipes vegetarian
buy m4 zen koan
shotgun tactical recipe kale
prescription pill identification walking meditation
shotgun ammo diet for a small planet
saiga shotgun marinated tofu
dxtbmp pema chodron
ghost ring sights vegetarian thanksgiving
fn fal for sale recipes kale
writers software moroccan stew
smith wesson 357 potato leek
500 pistol the daily show
pistol grip crock pot vegetarian
forend chodron
88 ford bronco organic cotton
auto sear david attenborough
1911 custom potato leek soup
cleaning kit leek soup recipe
aero commander red lentils
survival foods vegetarian slow cooker
shotgun forend shamanic studies
female warrior tart crust
class iii weapons vw golf tdi
s&w 357 vegetarian epicure
air combat games vipassana meditation
wilson combat colbert press
shotgun drum cooking lentils
combat commander beet salad
1911 parts zen alarm clock
45 1911 sport wagon
speedfeed stock traditional medicinals
flare launcher raw beets
bug out cooking red lentils
6pr leek soup
best 45 craniosacral
amt 45 elderhostel
eq2 aa ted talks
combat rifles vegetarian dinner
cheap land under the nile
custom 1911 vegan chocolate cake
tromix roasted beets recipe
atf forms potato leek soup recipe
gun supplies cooking barley
shotgun accessories baked tofu
sig 556 accessories foundation for shamanic studies
ak 47 accessories colbert bush
glock disassembly joy of cooking
norinco ak chemex coffee maker
prop planes zen alarm
glock 45 acp organic chocolate
winchester gun safe arugula pesto
best 45 acp pistol beet salad recipe
fab defense meditation timer
wilson firearms polenta
belize real estate for sale spiritual practice
colt ar 15 kale chips recipe
ruger p90 red lentil dal
full auto chard soup
akita puppies eating beets
lasermax buckwheat gluten
kel tec shotgun vegetarian christmas dinner
best 45 acp organic bed
knoxx specops off gassing
1911 slide the weeping camel
37mm launcher botanical drawing
norinco ak 47 walnut bread
kel tec ksg weeping camel
m4 for sale youth hostels
45 handgun cat diet
survival gear creme fraiche
desert eagle 50 recipes quinoa
online gun sales youtube tina fey
magnum revolver paul hawken
tactical shotgun couscous recipe
smith & wesson curried cauliflower
police shotgun eurythmy
war dialer bill moyers show
saiga 12 gauge tonglen
45 carbine youtube jon stewart
Filed under Me @ work
 | Nat on The Connection Between Unemplo… |
 | Scott Rose on Be a man, a Morehouse Man… |
| Scott Rose on Be a man, a Morehouse Man… |
 | Robert Hironimus-Wen… on Be a man, a Morehouse Man… |
 | CR on Be a man, a Morehouse Man… |
