Year-end report, 2013

The blog did not stay on pace of doubling traffic every year, with an increase in visits of 34%. This isn’t too bad, slower than the growth of Twitter (44%) but faster than Facebook’s (25%).

I’m not an expert on web traffic, but one observation that may be useful for sociologists is that Twitter is gaining on Facebook as a source of blog traffic. Over the life of the blog (about 4 years) Facebook has provided about 3-times as many referrals as Twitter, but in 2013 Facebook only came up with 1.5-times more. Sociologists love Facebook (I can tell when a post is popular with them because it shows up as FB shares), but they are increasingly using Twitter, too.

At year-end there are about 2,350 followers on Twitter, 820 on Facebook, and 550 email subscribers.

Here is the search-term word cloud for the year, excluding the many searches related to Smurf character names, the definition of “watershed,” the blog name, and some other random stuff.

Here are the top posts published this year, by number of visits:

10. Paul Amato on reviewing Regnerus. In which Prof. Amato describes his role as a reviewer on the infamous paper, and offers his reflections. With my reflections.

9. Why I don’t defend the sex-versus-gender distinction. Many sociologists disagree, but I don’t think it’s worth it any more.

8. Marriage is declining globally: Can you say that? Yes, you can say that, and here’s why.

7. Data visualizations: Is U.S. society becoming more diverse? How we measure diversity — and what it means — focusing on religion, household structure, and age at marriage.

6. Disney’s dimorphism, ‘Help! My eyeball is bigger than my wrist!’ edition. Updating the series on Disney’s obsession with sex dimorphism in romantic situations with the latest, Frozen.

5. Suzanne Bianchi. Her untimely passing was a great loss for family sociology and demography.

4. The Douglas Allen study of Canadian children of gay/lesbian parents is worthless. An economics article falsely claimed to have shown that children of gay and lesbian couples were less likely to graduate high school. The evidence was not there.

3. That economists’ paper about gender inequality, marriage and divorce. A deeply flawed economics paper — on a subject sociologists have studied a lot — uncritically reported all over the economics press. Sociologists hate that (and share it on Facebook).

2. ‘More managerial than intellectual’: How right-wing Christian money brought us the Regnerus study. The detailed account from public release of documents behind the infamous study.

1. Why taller-wife couples are so rare. How we handle the average size difference between men and women is a matter of social construction: In the realm of love and marriage, we exaggerate it.