Job turnover and divorce (preconference preprint)

As I was prepared to discuss Alison Pugh’s interesting and insightful 2015 book, The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity, on an author-meets-critics panel at the American Sociological Association meetings in Montreal next week (Monday at 4:30), I talked myself into doing a quick analysis inspired by the book. (And no, I won’t hijack the panel to talk about this; I will talk about her book.)

From the publisher’s description:

In The Tumbleweed Society, Allison Pugh offers a moving exploration of sacrifice, betrayal, defiance, and resignation, as people adapt to insecurity with their own negotiations of commitment on the job and in intimate life. When people no longer expect commitment from their employers, how do they think about their own obligations? How do we raise children, put down roots in our communities, and live up to our promises at a time when flexibility and job insecurity reign?

Since to a little kid with a hammer everything looks like a nail, I asked myself yesterday, what could I do with my divorce models that might shed light on this connection between job insecurity and family commitments? The result is a very short paper, which I have posted on SocArXiv here (with supporting data and code in the associated OSF project shared here). But here it is in blog form; someday maybe I’ll elaborate it into a full paper.

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Job Turnover and Divorce

Introduction

In The Tumbleweed Society, Pugh (2015) explores the relationship between commitments at work – between employers and employees – and those at home, between partners. She finds no simple relationship such that, for example, people who feel their employers owe them nothing also have low commitment to their spouses. Rather, there is a complex web of commitments, and views of what constitutes an honorable level of commitment in different arenas. This paper is inspired by that discussion, and explores one possible connection between work and couple stability, using a new combination of data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the American Community Survey (ACS).

In a previous paper I analyzed predictors of divorce using data from the ACS, to see whether economic indicators associated with the Great Recession predicted the odds of divorce (Cohen 2014). Because of data limitations, I used state-level indicators of unemployment and foreclosure rates to test for economic associations. Because the ACS is cross-sectional, and divorce is often associated with job instability, I could not use individual-level unemployment to predict individual-divorce, as others have done (see review in Cohen 2014). Further, the ACS does not include any information about former spouses who are no longer living with divorced individuals, so spousal unemployment was not available either.

Rather than examine the association between individual job change and divorce, this paper tests the association between turnover at the job level and divorce at the individual level. It asks, do people who work in jobs that people are likely to leave themselves more likely to divorce? The answer – which is yes – suggests possible avenues for further study of the relationship between commitments and stressors in the arenas of paid work and family stability. Job here turnover is a contextual variable. Working in a job people are likely to leave may simply mean people are exposed to involuntary job changes, which is a source of stress. However, it may also mean people work in an environment with low levels of commitment between employers and employees. This analysis can’t differentiate potential stressors versus commitment effects, or identify the nature (and direction) of commitments expressed or deployed at work or within the family. But it may provide motivation for future research.

Do job turnover and divorce run together?

Because individual (or spousal) job turnover and employment history are not available in the ACS, I use the March CPS, obtained from IPUMS (Flood et al. 2015), to calculate job turnover rates for simulated jobs, identified as detailed occupation-by-industry cells (Cohen and Huffman 2003). Although these are not jobs in the sense of specific workplaces, they provide much greater detail in work context than either occupation or industry alone, allowing differentiation, for example, between janitors in manufacturing establishments versus those in government offices, which are often substantially different contexts.

Turnover is identified by individuals whose current occupation and industry combination (as of March) does not match their primary occupation and industry for the previous calendar year, which is identified by a separate question (but using the same occupation and industry coding schemes). To reduce short-term transience, this calculation is limited to people who worked at least 20 weeks in the previous year, and more than 20 hours per week. Using the combined samples from the 2014-2016 CPS files, and restricting the sample to previous-year job cells with at least 25 respondents, I end up with 927 job cells. Note that, because the cells are national rather than workplace-specific, the size cutoff does not restrict the analysis to people working in large workplaces, but rather to common occupation-industry combinations. The job cells in the analysis include 68 percent of the eligible workers in the three years of CPS data.

For descriptive purposes, Table 1 shows the occupation and industry cells with the lowest and highest rates of job turnover from among those with sample sizes of 100 or more. Jobs with low turnover are disproportionately in the public sector and construction, and male-dominated (except schoolteachers); they are middle class and working class jobs. The high-turnover jobs, on the other hand, are in service industries (except light truck drivers) and are more female-dominated (Cohen 2013). By this simple definition, high-turnover jobs appear similar to precarious jobs as described by Kalleberg (2013) and others.

Although the analysis that follows is limited to the CPS years 2014-2016 and the 2015 ACS, for context Figure 1 shows the percentage of workers who changed jobs each year, as defined above, from 1990 through 2016. Note that job changing, which is only identified for employed people, fell during the previous two recessions – especially the Great Recession that began in 2008 – perhaps because people who lost jobs would in better times have cycled into a different job instead of being unemployed. In the last two years job changing has been at relatively high levels (although note that CPS instituted a new industry coding scheme in 2014, with unknown effects on this measure). In any event, this phenomenon has not shown dramatic changes in prevalence for the past several decades.

Figure 1. Percentage of workers (20+ weeks, >20 hours per week) whose jobs (occupation-by-industry cells) in March differed from their primary job in the previous calendar year.

Using the occupation industry codes from the CPS and ACS, which match for the years under study, I attach the job turnover rates from the 2014-2016 CPS data to individuals in the 2015 ACS (Ruggles et al. 2015). The analysis then uses the same modeling strategy as that used in Cohen (2014). Using the marital events variables in the ACS (Cohen 2015), I combine people, age 18-64, who are currently married (excluding those who got married in the previous year) and those who have been divorced in the previous year, and model the odds that individuals are in the divorced group. In this paper I essentially add the job turnover measure to the basic analysis in Cohen (2014, Table 3) (the covariates used here are the same except that I added one category to the education variable).

One advantage of the ACS data structure is that the occupation and industry questions refer to the “current or most recent job,” so that people who are not employed at the time of the survey still have job characteristics recorded. Although that has the downside of introducing information from jobs in the distant past for some respondents, it has the benefit of including relevant job information for people who may have just quit (or lost) jobs as part of the constellation of events involved in their divorce (for example, someone who divorces, moves to a new area, and commences a job search). If job characteristics have an effect on the odds of divorce, this information clearly is important. The ACS sample size is 581,891, 1.7 percent of whom reported having divorced in the previous year.

Results from two multivariate regression analyses are presented in Table 2. The first model predicts the turnover rate in the ACS respondents’ job, using OLS regression. It shows that, ceteris paribus, turnover rates are higher in the jobs held by women, younger people (the inflection point is at age 42), people married more recently, those married few times, those with less than a BA degree, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and immigrants. Thus, job turnover shows patterns largely similar to labor market advantage generally.

Most importantly for this paper, divorce is more likely for those who most recent job had a higher turnover rate, as defined here. In a reduced model (not shown), with just age and sex, the logistic coefficient on job turnover was 1.39; the addition of the covariates in Table 2 reduced that effect by 39 percent, to .84, as shown in the second model. Beyond that, job turnover is predicted by some of the same characteristics as those associated with increased odds of divorce. Divorce odds are lower after age 25, with additional years of marriage, with a BA degree, and for Whites. However, divorce is less common for Hispanics and immigrants. (The higher divorce rates for women in the ACS are not well understood; this is a self-reported measure, not a count of administrative events.)

To illustrate the relationship between job turnover and the probability of divorce, Figure 2 shows the average predicted probability of divorce (from the second model in Table 2) for each of the jobs represented, with markers scaled according to sample size and a regression line similarly weighted. Below 20 percent job turnover, people are generally predicted to have divorce rates less than 2 percent per year, with predicted rates rising to 2.5 percent at high turnover rates (40 percent).

Figure 2. Average predicted probability of divorce within jobs (from logistic model in Table 2), by turnover rate. Markers are scaled according to sample size, and the linear regression line shown is weighted by sample size.

Conclusion

People who work in jobs with high turnover rates – that is, jobs which many people are no longer working in one year later – are also more likely to divorce. A reading of this inspired by Pugh’s (2015) analysis might be that people exposed to lower levels of commitment from employers, and employees, exhibit lower levels of commitment to their own marriages. Another, noncompeting explanation would be that the stress or hardship associated with high rates of job turnover contributes to difficulties within marriage. Alternatively, the turnover variable may simply be statistically capturing other aspects of job quality that affect the risk of divorce, or there are individual qualities by which people select into both jobs with high turnover and marriages likely to end in divorce. This is a preliminary analysis, intended to raise questions and offer some avenues for analyzing these questions in the future.

References

Cohen, Philip N. 2013. “The Persistence of Workplace Gender Segregation in the US.” Sociology Compass 7 (11): 889–99. http://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12083.

Cohen, Philip N. 2014. “Recession and Divorce in the United States, 2008–2011.” Population Research and Policy Review 33 (5): 615–28. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-014-9323-z.

Cohen, Philip N. 2015. “How We Really Can Study Divorce Using Just Five Questions and a Giant Sample.” Family Inequality. July 22. https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/how-we-really-can-study-divorce/.

Cohen, P. N., and M. R. L. Huffman. 2003. “Individuals, Jobs, and Labor Markets: The Devaluation of Women’s Work.” American Sociological Review 68 (3): 443–63. http://doi.org/10.2307/1519732.

Kalleberg, Arne L. 2013. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States 1970s to 2000s. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

Pugh, Allison J. 2015. The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Steven Ruggles, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015. http://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V6.0.

Sarah Flood, Miriam King, Steven Ruggles, and J. Robert Warren. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: Version 4.0. [dataset]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015. http://doi.org/10.18128/D030.V4.0.

Philip Cohen at 50, having been 14 in 1981

This is a sociological reflection about life history. It’s about me because I’m the person I know best, and I have permission to reveal details of my life.

I was born in August 1967, making me 50 years old this month. But life experience is better thought of in cohort terms. Where was I and what was I doing, with whom, at different ages and stages of development? Today I’m thinking of these intersections of biography and history in terms of technology, music, and health.

Tech

We had a TV in my household growing up, it just didn’t have a remote control or cable service, or color. We had two phones, they just shared one line and were connected by wires. (After I moved out my parents got an answering machine.) When my mother, a neurobiologist, was working on her dissertation (completed when I was 10) in the study my parents shared, she used a programmable calculator and graph paper to plot the results of her experiments with pencil. My father, a topologist, drew his figures with colored pencils (I can’t describe the sound of his pencils drawing across the hollow wooden door he used for a desktop, but I can still hear it, along with the buzz of his fluorescent lamp). A couple of my friends had personal computers by the time I started high school, in 1981 (one TRS-80 and one Apple II), but I brought a portable electric typewriter to college in 1988. I first got a cell phone in graduate school, after I was married.

The first portable electronic device I had (besides a flashlight) was a Sony Walkman, in about 1983, when I was 16. At the time nothing mattered to me more than music. Music consumed a large part of my imagination and formed the scaffolding of most socializing. The logistics of finding out about, finding, buying, copying, and listening to music played an outsized role in my daily life. From about 1980 to 1984, most of the money I made at my bagel store job went to stereo equipment, concerts, records, blank tapes for making copies, and eventually drums (as well video games). I subscribed to magazines (Rolling Stone, Modern Drummer), hitchhiked across town to visit the record store, pooled money with friends to buy blank tapes, spent hours copying records and labeling tapes with my friends, and made road trips to concerts across upstate New York (clockwise from Ithaca: Geneva, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Saratoga, Binghamton, New York City, Elmira).

As I’m writing this, I thought, “I haven’t listened to Long Distance Voyager in ages,” tapped it into Apple Music on my phone, and started streaming it on my Sonos player in a matter of seconds, which doesn’t impress you at all – but the sensory memories it invokes are shockingly vivid (like an acid flashback, honestly) – and having the power to evoke that so easily is awesome, in the old sense of that word.

Some of us worked at the Cornell student radio station (I eventually spent a while in the news department), whose album-oriented rock playlist heavily influenced the categories and relative status of the music we listened to. The radio station also determined what music stayed in the rotation – what eventually became known by the then-nonexistent term classic rock – and what would be allowed to slip away; it was history written in real time.

It’s like 1967, in 1981

You could think of the birth cohort of 1967 as the people who entered the world at the time of “race riots,” the Vietnam and Six Day wars, the Summer of Love, the 25^th Amendment (you’re welcome!), Monterey Pop, Sgt. Peppper’s, and Loving v. Virginia. Or you could flip through Wikipedia’s list of celebrities born in 1967 to see how impressive (and good looking) we became, people like Benicio del Toro, Kurt Cobain, Paul Giamatti, Nicole Kidman, Pamela Anderson, Will Ferrell, Vin Diesel, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Matt LeBlanc, Michael Johnson, Liev Schreiber, Julia Roberts, Jimmy Kimmel, Mark Ruffalo, and Jamie Foxx.

But maybe it makes more sense to think of us as the people who were 14 when John Lennon made his great commercial comeback, with an album no one took seriously – only after being murdered. The experiences at age 14, in 1981, define me more than what was happening at the moment of my birth. Those 1981 hits from album-oriented rock mean more to me than the Doors’ debut in 1967. My sense of the world changing in that year was acute – because it was 1981, or because I was 14? In music, old artists like the Moody Blues and the Rolling Stones released albums that seemed like complete departures, and more solo albums – by people like Stevie Nicks and Phil Collins – felt like stakes through the heart of history itself (I liked them, actually, but they were also impostors).

One moment that felt at the time like a historical turning point was the weekend of September 19, 1981. My family went to Washington for the Solidarity Day rally, at which a quarter million people demonstrated against President Reagan and for organized labor, a protest fueled by the new president’s firing of the PATCO air traffic controllers the previous month (and inspired by the Solidarity union in Poland, too). Besides hating Reagan, we also feared a nuclear war that would end humanity – I mean really feared it, real nightmare fear.

A piece of radio news copy I wrote and read at WVBR, probably 1983. The slashes are where I’m going to take a breath. “Local AQX” is the name of the tape cartridge with the sound bite (“actuality”) from Alfred Kahn, and “OQ:worse” means that’s the last word coming out of the clip.

On the same day as Solidarity, while we were in D.C., was Simon and Garfunkel’s Concert in Central Park. They were all of 40 (literally my mother’s age), tired old people with a glorious past (I’m sure I ignored the rave reviews). As I look back on these events – Reagan, the Cold War, sell-out music – in the context of what I thought of as my emerging adulthood, they seemed to herald a dark future, in which loss of freedom and individuality, the rise of the machines, and runaway capitalism was reflected in the decline of rock music. (I am now embarrassed to admit that I even hated disco for a while, maybe even while I listened 20 times, dumbstruck, to an Earth, Wind, and Fire album I checked out of the library.)

I don’t want to overdramatize the drama of 1981; I was basically fine. I came out with a penchant for Camus, a taste for art rock, and leftism, which were hardly catastrophic traits. Still, those events, and their timing, probably left a mark of cynicism, sometimes nihilism, which I carry today.

About 1984, with Daniel Besman (who later died) in Ithaca. Photo by Linda Galgani.

Data aside

Maybe one reason 1981 felt like a musical watershed to me is because it really was, because pop music just got worse in the 1980s compared to the 1970s. To test (I mean prove, really) that hypothesis, I fielded a little survey (more like a game) that asked people to rate the same artists in both decades. I chose 58 artists by flipping through album charts from 1975-1984 and finding those that charted in both decades; then I added some suggestions from early respondents. To keep the task from being too onerous, as it required scoring bands twice from 1 (terrible) to 5 (great), once for each period, and some people found it difficult, I set the survey to serve each person just 10 artists at random (a couple of people did it more than once). The participants were 3/4 men, 3/4 over 40, and 3/4 White and US-born; found on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. The average artist was rated 11 times in each period (range 5 to 19). (Feel free to play along or share this link; I’ll update it if more come in.)

The results look very bad for the 1980s. The average change was a drop of .59, and only three acts showed noticeable improvement: Pat Benatar, Michael Jackson, and Prince (and maybe Talking Heads and the lowly Bryan Adams). Here is the full set (click to enlarge):

Technology and survival

I don’t think I would have, at age 14, given much weight to the idea that my life would repeatedly be saved by medical technology, but now that seems like business as usual, to me anyway. I guess as long as there’s been technology there have been people who owe their lives to it (and of course we’re more likely to hear from them than from those who didn’t make it). But the details are cohort-specific. These days we’re a diverse club of privileged people, our conditions, or their remnants, often hidden like pebbles wedged under the balls of our aging feet, gnawing reminders of our bodily precarity.

Family lore says I was born with a bad case of jaundice, probably something like Rh incompatibility, and needed a blood transfusion. I don’t know what would have happened without it, but I’m probably better off now for that intervention.

Sometime in my late teens I reported to a doctor that I had periodic episodes of racing heartbeat. After a brief exam I was sent home with no tests, but advised to keep an eye on it; maybe mitral valve prolapse, he said. I usually controlled it by holding my breath and exhaling slowly. We found out later, in 2001 – after several hours in the emergency room at about 200 very irregular beats per minute – that it was actually a potentially much more serious condition called Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. The condition is easily diagnosed nowadays, as software can identify the tell-tale “delta wave” on the ECG, and the condition is listed right there in the test report.

Two lucky things combined: (a) I wasn’t diagnosed properly in the 1980s (which might have led to open-heart surgery or a lifetime of unpleasant medication), and; (b) I didn’t drop dead before it was finally diagnosed in 2001. They fixed it with a low-risk radiofrequency ablation, just running a few wires up through my arteries to my heart, where they lit up to burn off the errant nerve ending, all done while I was almost awake, watching the action on an x-ray image and – I believed, anyway – feeling the warmth spread through my chest as the doctor typed commands into his keyboard.

Diverticulitis is also pretty easily diagnosed nowadays, once they fire up the CT scanner, and usually successfully treated by antibiotics, though sometimes you have to remove some of your colon. Just one of those things people don’t die from as much anymore (though it’s also more common than it used to be, maybe just because we don’t die from other things as much). I didn’t feel like much like surviving when it was happening, but I suppose I might have made it even without the antibiotics. Who knows?

More interesting was the case of follicular lymphoma I discovered at age 40 (I wrote about it here). There is a reasonable chance I’d still be alive today if we had never biopsied the swollen lymph node in my thigh, but that’s hard to say, too. Median survival from diagnosis is supposed to be 10 years, but I had a good case (a rare stage I), and with all the great new treatments coming online the confidence in that estimate is fuzzy. Anyway, since the cancer was never identified anywhere else in my body, the treatment was just removing the lymph node and a little radiation (18 visits to the radiation place, a couple of tattoos for aiming the beams, all in the summer with no work days off). We have no way (with current technology) to tell if I still “have” it or whether it will come “back,” so I can’t yet say technology saved my life from this one (though if I’m lucky enough to die from something else — and only then — feel free to call me a cancer “survivor”).

It turns out that all this life saving also bequeaths a profound uncertainty, which leaves one with an uneasy feeling and a craving for antianxiety medication. I guess you have to learn to love the uncertainty, or die trying. That’s why I cherish this piece of a note from my oncologist, written as he sent me out of the office with instructions never to return: “Your chance for cure is reasonable. ‘Pretest probability’ is low.”

From my oncologist’s farewell note.

Time travel

It’s hard to imagine what I would have thought if someone told my 14-year-old self this story: One day you will, during a Skype call from a hotel room in Hangzhou, where you are vacationing with your wife and two daughters from China, decide to sue President Donald Trump for blocking you on Twitter. On the other hand, I don’t know if it’s possible to know today what it was really like to be me at age 14.

In the classic time travel knot, a visitor from the future changes the future by going back and changing the past. The cool thing about mucking around with your narrative like I’m doing in this essay (as Walidah Imarisha has said) is that it by altering our perception of the past, we do change the future. So time travel is real. Just like it’s funny to think of my 14-year-old self having thoughts about the past, I’m sure my 14-year-old self would have laughed at the idea that my 50-year-old self would think about the future. But I do!

Let’s use award incentives to promote open scholarship (at ASA this year!)

At the American Sociological Association of America meetings in Montreal next month, I will begin a one-year term as chair of the Family Section. I’m honored to have been elected to this position, and will do my best to make a positive contribution in that role. Besides doing the job in the normal ways — organizing our sessions at the conference next year, coordinating committees, and so on — I will bring a proposal to the section’s council to open our graduate student paper award. Here’s what I mean.

Steps toward solutions

Sociology has an inertia problem with regard to open scholarship. Lots of us understand that it would be better if our work was shared faster and more freely. That would be better for the generation and dissemination of new knowledge, it would promote collaboration, reduce costs to the public, and increase our capacity for engagement with each other and the public. Unfortunately, the individual steps toward that goal are unclear or daunting. Many of us need promotion and tenure, which requires prestige, which is still driven by publication in the paywalled journals that work against our open goals: they slow down dissemination, restrict access to our work, and bilk our institutions with exorbitant subscription fees.

To help overcome this inertia, a group of us have created SocArXiv, a non-profit, open access, open source archive of social science research that allows free, immediate publication of papers at any stage of the publication process. When and if the papers are published in a peer-reviewed journal, the preprint version can link to the journal version, providing a free copy of the paywalled paper. (Here’s an example of a new paper published in American Sociological Review, with a free copy on SocArXiv, which includes a link to the ASR version). In the meantime, the paper is available to our peers and the public. It provides a time-stamped record of the development of our original ideas, and is discoverable through Google Scholar and other search tools. People can still get their jobs and promotions, but the quality, efficiency, and reach of our research is improved. And part of what we are rewarding is open scholarship itself.

Using awards

SocArXiv, of which I’m director, is trying to get the word out and encourage the use of our system, and open scholarship in general. One of our new ideas is opening paper awards. This may help people get in the habit of openness — and start to see its benefits — and also work against the negative impression that many people have of open access as a cesspool of low quality work. We hope this intervention will be especially effective coming early in the career of up-and-coming scholars.

Using its grant money and support from academic libraries, SocArXiv is offering sections of the ASA — like the Family Section — $400 to transport their paper award winner to the conference next year, if they using the archive as the submission platform for their awards. I’m bringing this proposal to the Family Section (and one just like it to the Population Section, of which I’m Secretary Treasurer).

We hope the open paper award will become a common best practice in our association — still providing the prestige and reward functions of the award, but also promoting best practices with regard to open scholarship, increasing our visibility, building the scholarly communication infrastructure of the future, and generating buzz for our conference and our research.

There are possible objections to this idea. Here are a few, with my responses:

• Sharing unpublished work will lead to someone stealing their ideas. You protect yourself by posting it publicly.
• We shouldn’t promote the dissemination of research that hasn’t been peer reviewed yet. We do this all the time at conferences, and SocArXiv allows posting updated versions that replace the original when it is revised.
• This would impose a burden on people submitting papers. Being considered for an award is a privilege, not a right; it’s OK to require a short, free submission process.
• Sharing a paper publicly will compromise its publishability later. All ASA journals, and all journals worthy of our support, allow posting preprints prior to publication. Here’s a list of 25 top journals and their policies.

Details

In the case of the Family Section, it looks like no change in the bylaws is needed, because they don’t specify the submission process for the graduate student paper award. They state:

Best Graduate Student Paper Award. The committee will be chaired by the Section Chair. Two additional members of the Section will be appointed by the Section Chair. The committee will select a best paper from among nominations submitted. Papers, dealing with a family-related topic, may be either published or unpublished and must have been writted by a graduate student (or group of graudate students) while still enrolled in a graduate program. The award, in the form of a Plaque and citation, shall be presented at a Section Reception (or, in the event no reception is held, at a Business Meeting of the Section).

Instead, I think we can just revise the call for award nominations, like this:

The Family Section Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award

​Deadline: 3/13/2018

Graduate students are invited to submit an article-length paper on the family. The paper should represent a finished product rather than a proposal for future work. The submission can be based on a course paper, a recently published journal article, a manuscript under review at a journal, or a conference presentation. Co-authored papers are acceptable if all authors are students, although the prize will be shared. The paper must have been written when the author was enrolled in a graduate program. The paper may not exceed 30 pages or 11,000 words. Submissions are made by posting the paper on SocArXiv and sending a link to the paper to the committee chair, Philip N. Cohen, at pnc@umd.edu. To submit your paper, go to SocArXiv.org, and click “Add a preprint.” If you don’t yet have an account, you will fill out a short form — it’s free, non-profit, and won’t spam you! For assistance, contact socarxiv@gmail.com or consult the FAQ page. Please indicate whether you would like your paper to be included in a public list of submissions (this will not affect your chances of winning). The winner will receive a plaque and travel reimbursement up to $400 to attend the 2018 Family Section reception at the ASA meetings.

The Family Section Council will consider this proposal next month in Montreal. Please let us know what you think!

See you in court, Mr. President (about that Twitter account blocking)

On June 7, I described how President Trump’s Twitter account blocked me, and the argument for why that violates the First Amendment. I can now report that the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University has filed a lawsuit on my behalf demanding that the President unblock us. The other plaintiffs are Trump-blocked Twitter users as well: Rebecca Buckwalter, Holly Figueroa, Eugene Gu, Brandon Neely, Joseph Papp, and Nicholas Pappas (the Knight Institute is also a plaintiff). The announcement is here.

This was the tweet I sent 15 minutes before discovering I was blocked by @realDonaldTrump:

Our argument is that the President created in his Twitter stream a “designated public forum,” and he can’t legally exclude people from that based on their political views.

Here’s my part of the story, as told to the Knight communications team:

I’m okay with the fact that the candidate I wanted lost the election. Our family was upset by the outcome, but I approached this like a civics lesson for the children: We told them that this is a democracy, and the next best thing to winning an election is using the democratic process to speak up. It is all of our responsibility to use the tools we have to engage in our democracy.

Social media are among the most effect tools I have to speak out. I have a blog and as a professor I publish academic writings, but Twitter gives me the broadest audience most immediately. For example, I’m delighted when I write a blog post that is read by a few thousand people. But because of my audience on Twitter, I can reach as many as 100,000 people with one of my tweets replying to the president. It’s true that there are some people who use the reply threads on Twitter just to trade insults, which may not be the most productive sort of conversation. But they also allow you to see a range of opinions of people who agree or disagree. Since I’m not a political commentator by profession, and I’m a parent, Twitter is the only way I can connect with that many people with just a few minutes of time every day (it helps that he and I seem to wake up at the same time in the morning so I can reply right away).

Being blocked by Trump diminished my ability to respond and engage in the political process. There has been measurable impact on my ability to be heard. Yes, I can still say what I want to say, but not to those I want to speak to, when I want to say it or in the way that means the most to me. It’s disempowering to be prohibited from speaking. And I’m troubled that the president can create a space on Twitter — where there are millions of people — that he can manipulate to give the impression that more people agree with him than actually do.

The complaint specifies:

Defendants’ blocking of Professor Cohen from the @realDonaldTrump account
prevents or impedes him from viewing the President’s tweets; from replying to these tweets; from viewing the comment threads associated with these tweets; and from participating in the comment threads.

If I complained about random citizens blocking me on Twitter, you could call me a whiner or a snowflake. But the President is not a random citizen, he is a public official — even, yes, my president — and complaining about him blocking me from his official public forum is not a personal beef, it’s a Constitutional obligation. That’s why we have a Constitution, and the court system to enforce it.

Here is the Knight Institute’s original letter demanding that he unblock his critics, sent prior to filing the suit. Attorney Alex Abdo has responded to some objections to their approach in this post. Here are the stories of the plaintiffs.

I’m happy to talk more about this, in coordination with the legal team. Wish us luck!

A step toward civilization (and have more children), Shanghai edition

Over the course of two weeks in China, I saw several versions of signs like this:

“A small step forward, a big step for civilization” (向前一小步, 文明一大步).

This one is posted in the old-town section of Nanxun (now a tourist attraction), naturally, above a urinal.* Invoking civilization may be overblown for the problem of men standing too far away (which didn’t seem to be especially extreme, compared to U.S. urinals), but China has a long tradition of using dramatic slogans to call citizens to higher common purpose. Here was one that struck me, in downtown Shanghai:

Every family striving to become a civilized family; everyone involved in its creation (家家争做文明家庭; 人人叁与创建活动).

This is from the Shanghai public health authorities. (No, I don’t know Chinese, but I love trying to use a dictionary, and I ask people.) The fascinating thing about that is the composition of the civilized family pictured: father, mother, two grandparents, and two children. 

Fertility rates in China are well below replacement level, as they are in other East Asian countries, meaning the average woman will have fewer than two children in her lifetime and the population will eventually shrink (barring immigration). China’s total fertility rate nationally is probably at about 1.5. In Shanghai, a metro area with some 20 million people, the norm was already one child per family before the one-child policy was implemented in 1980, and fertility has continued to fall; it most recently clocked in at a shockingly low .88 per woman as of 2008.

Reasons for ultra-low fertility are varied and contested, but likely culprits include expensive housing and education costs for children. It was reported to me informally that about half of children can go to college-track high schools instead of vocational schools, and that is determined by a standardized test administered at the end of middle school. That puts tremendous pressure on parents with middle-class aspirations. Which helps explain the extensive system of expensive supplemental private education, as promoted by this ad I saw in an upscale mall:

School advertisement, Shanghai

The website for this company promises, “Super IQ, Wealth of Creativity, Instant Memory Capacity.” How many kids are you going to send to this private program?

One of the five perfect, super-involved parents at the parent-child class is a man, which may or may not seem like a lot. Of the many people taking their kids to school on scooters, I didn’t see a lot with more than one child, and the only picture I got was of one piloted by the apparent dad (note also something you don’t see here much: schoolboy in pink shirt):

Man taking children to school, Shanghai

This recalls another probable cause of low-low fertility, the gender-stuck family and employment practices that keep women responsible for children and other care work (scooter dads notwithstanding). In conjunction with women outperforming men in college graduation rates these days (as in the U.S.), this indirectly reduces fertility by leading to delayed marriage, and directly reduces fertility by causing parents to decide against a second child.

Grandparent, parent, child, in Hangzhou

The weak system of care hurts on both ends, with people having fewer children because raising them is expensive, and people needing children to take care of old people because public support is lacking. This may be one reason why grandparents can have a positive effect on parents’ motivation to have children, as reported by Yingchun Ji and colleagues (including Feinian Chen, who hosted my visit). The fact that it is common for grandparents to provide extensive care for their grandchildren, as Feinian Chen has described (paywall), presumably helps strengthen their pronatal case.

Lots of pictures of grandparents taking care of a single grandchild to choose from. Here’s one, from the (awesome) Shanghai Museum:

Grandparent and child, Shanghai

The one-child policy ended in 2016, and couples no longer have to get permission to have a first or second child (but they do for a third or more). This change alone, although a better-late-than-never thing, may not do much to increase birth rates. That is the conclusion from studies of families for whom the policy was relaxed earlier. Sadly, although birth rates were already falling dramatically in the 1970s and the one-child policy was not responsible for the trend, the policy still (in addition to large scale human rights abuses) created many millions of one-child families that will struggle to meet intergenerational care obligations in the absence of adequate public support. (Here’s a good brief summary from Wang Feng, Baochang Gu, and Yong Cai.)

This is a challenge for civilization.

The pictures here, and a few hundred more, are on my Flickr site under creative commons license.

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* Americans who love the funny translations of signs in China may be in for some disappointment, as the Standardization Administration has announced plans to implement thousands of stock translations in the service sector nationwide.

Teaching Black family history in sociology, student resistance edition

There is an amazing story from a family sociology class at the University of Tennessee. I don’t know the whole chronology of the reports, but I read pieces from As It Happens, BET, the local news. The gist of it is that there was an ambiguous quiz question about Black slave families, and when a Black student named Kayla Renee Parker complained, it led to her making a rebuttal presentation to the class, and then the White instructor, Judy Morelock, going on an abusive, racist social media rant and getting fired.

Before the details, my conclusions:

• Good test questions are important, and as a teacher it’s OK to admit you’re wrong or there is ambiguity.
• Two things are true: Black families were devastated by slavery and as a generalization most Black children under slavery lived with both parents.
• There is a line, but not a straight line, between Black families under slavery and those under today’s system of racial domination.
• Students who do research, honestly engage the material, and bring passionate or political arguments to class should have their courage and commitment encouraged, not punished.
• Some White people who say they are against racism, and maybe even are against racism, are also racist and hate students.
• Social media is public, so expect consequences.

The story, and then my approach, follows.

The quiz

Here is the question at issue:

Historical research on African-American families during slavery shows that:

A) Family ties weren’t important in African cultures where the slaves ancestors originated; consequently, family bonds were never strong among slaves.

B) Two-parent families were extremely rare during the slave period.

C) Black family bonds were destroyed by the abuses of slave owners, who regularly sold off family members to other slave owners.

D) Most slave families were headed by two parents.

Parker chose C, but Morelock said the correct answer is D. In a back and forth that Parker put on her Facebook page, she pointed out that the textbook talked about “disruption of families through sale of family members,” and Morelock countered that “bonds were maintained among family members who were geographically separated” referring to people passing information between plantations. These are long-running and unsettled issues in the historical scholarship. If you revise answer C to read “bonds were often destroyed” then it is obviously true. If you take a legalistic approach you could say, “family bonds were destroyed” means all bonds, so C is incorrect. This is not a good argument for a teacher to have. Correct the ambiguity, figure out how to handle the points, take it as a teaching opportunity, and move on.

In fact, there appears to have been one good outcome, which was Parker making a very good presentation to the class (video in the As It Happens story). If that was the end of it, we never would have heard. Maybe it’s good that it wasn’t the end of it, though, because when Morelock’s Facebook posts came out we might agree it’s just as well that the incident led to her being fired. The posts are in the BET story, and include Morelock calling Parker (thought not naming her), “ignorant simple-minded,” and threatening to ruin her reputation after the end of the semester, specifically saying, “I will post her name, her picture, and her bio on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin. Count on it.” Wow. (She also says Parker was spreading “venomous rumors” about her, which I don’t see reported.)

Many teachers complain about their students on Facebook. If you have reasonable complaints, don’t compromise their identities, don’t reveal or advocate unprofessional or vindictive behavior, and don’t be really racist, I think this is ethically defensible. It’s like a teaching workshop, or talking about your job in the staff lounge. But it’s risky and if you screw up you can get fired (which might or might not be a good thing).

The key thing is always, “If there was a hidden camera here or someone hacked my account, would I be able to defend my behavior?” If the answer is yes, you might still be taking a risk to talk about students, but at least you can live with yourself.

Anyway, as far as what I see in the classroom video and Facebook post of her email exchange, I have nothing but kudos for Parker although I might argue with her a little, too. If she did bad things elsewhere, she shouldn’t have.

Classroom exchange

In Parker’s presentation, she quotes Frederick Douglass saying it was “common custom” where he was born “to part children from their mothers from a very early age.” This is good evidence in favor of Answer C. Obviously experiences varied dramatically across the slave system and over time. Throwing down over a generalization like “most” is not really worth it.

She added, “We continue to see those impacts today and that’s why I believe that family bonds were destroyed.” She says Morelock told her she can’t teach by anecdotes, and she countered that we have to pay attention to the stories of real people affected. This is a really good argument to have, in theory.

Parker recommends The New Jim Crow, and Slavery by Another Name, and she says of the present “it’s by a different name, it’s still slavery in itself. … Slavery is still continuing to destroy the Black family” because of the “prison industrial complex.” She cites an article by Rose Brewer, “Black Families Imperiled by Growth of Nation’s Prisons Industrial Complex.”

Finally Parker says Morelock recommended some books, one of which was a 1998 edition of Minority Families in the United States, by Ronald Taylor, which she said was good but should be more current.

It’s really an excellent presentation. If you care about educating students, this would make you happy (again, not knowing what else may have happened off camera). At the end Parker takes questions, and Morelock pipes up, saying in part (my transcript):

I don’t have a lot of recent books, because the publishers just don’t send us books the way they used to. And I’ve been using [Andrew] Cherlin [Public and Private Families] for many, many years, the book you have in this course. He says the same thing, and that book is in its seventh edition. If there had been additional sociological research since he wrote that book I would think that it would appear in it, but it doesn’t. So I have to go by what my discipline shows, and I understand no matter how much I revere and respect a historical figure like Frederick Douglass, who was absolutely one of the bravest, most articulate persons of his generation, and highly respected, I still have to go with what has been done systematically, the kind of systematic methods that did not exist at that time, when sociology was still in its infancy. So, in the 70s, you know, the research that was done, with historical documents, on Black families demonstrated that people forged bonds, this is written by sociologist Ronald Taylor, he also happens to be African American, I don’t think he would try to minimize the effects of slavery, which I never ever ever would myself, and he talks about studies here [she quotes Taylor on the strong bonds in Black families, and how they maintained them even when they were separated] … Nonetheless, as I said, no one has to accept the sociological point of view. All students in my class, as is always the case, are free to make up their own minds, in fact I encourage it, and I always encourage you to do as Kayla did, do more research, find out more information about a topic, and come to your own conclusions.

Aside from the giant red flag of calling Frederick Douglass “articulate,” this is a reasonable argument. Although it’s sad that Morelock doesn’t keep up with the literature, and her reliance on authority rather than reason and analysis is bad, the truth is her facts are pretty current. Even though she’s racist, it’s not her take on the history that makes her racist. The prison industrial complex is important but it’s not the same thing as slavery breaking up families, it’s a different but related thing. (Incidentally, Cherlin has a good newer book about working class families that addresses some of this; my review is here.)

It’s not surprising we’ve been arguing about this for a century or so. It’s complicated. Here is the trend, back to 1880, in the proportion of Black children ages 0-14 living with married parents. There are issues with the data and measurement, but this basic pattern holds: the share of Black children living with two married parents increased after the end of slavery, and fell a lot more later:

Of course, some students would also get mad if you said, “slavery destroyed all Black families,” which isn’t true either. I don’t agree with the first part of the BET headline, “Professor Denies Slavery Destroyed Black Families And Threatens Student Who Called Her Out,” but because the second part is true I have no interest in defending her.

My version

Anyone who teaches this material should wrestle with this. Here’s what I have in the first edition of my book, in the history chapter (there is much more current material in the subsequent chapter on race and ethnicity). I would be happy to hear your response to this:

Families Enslaved

African families had gone through their own transitions, of course, of a particularly devastating nature. From the arrival of the first slaves in Jamestown in 1619 until the mid-1800s, Africans were forcibly removed from their homelands in western and central Africa and subjected to the unspeakable horrors of the Middle Passage aboard slave ships, slave auctions, and ultimately the hardships of plantation labor in the American South (as well as in the Caribbean and South America). Because they were thrown together from diverse backgrounds, and because their own languages and customs were suppressed by slavery, we do not know how much of slave family life was a reflection of African traditions and how much was an adaptation to their conditions and treatment in America (Taylor 2000).

But there is no doubt that family life was one of the victims of the slave system. The histories that have come down to us feature heart-wrenching stories of family separation, including diaries that tell of children literally ripped from their mothers’ arms by slave traders, mothers taking poison to prevent themselves from being sold, and parents enduring barbaric whippings as punishment for trying to keep their families together (Lerner 1973). In fact, most slaves only had a given name with no family name, which made the formation and recognition of family lineages difficult or impossible (Frazier 1930). Slave marriage and parenthood were not legally recognized by the states, and separation was a constant threat. Any joy in having children was tempered by the recognition that those children were the property of the slave owner and could be sold or transferred away forever.

Nevertheless, most slaves lived in families for some or all of their lives. Most married (if not legally) and had children in young adulthood, and most children lived with both parents. This was especially the case on larger plantations rather than small farms, because slaves could carve out some protection for community life if they were in larger groups, and husbands and wives were more likely to remain together (Coles 2006). Even if they had families, however, African Americans for the most part were excluded from the emerging modern family practices described in the next section until after slavery ended.

Relevant references:

Coles, Roberta L. Race and Family: A Structural Approach. 2006. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Frazier, E. Franklin. 1930. “The Negro Slave Family.” The Journal of Negro History 15(2):198–259.

Lerner, Gerda. 1973. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. New York: Vintage Books.

Taylor, Ronald L. 2000. “Diversity within African American Families.” In Handbook of Family Diversity, edited by David H. Demo, Katherine R. Allen, and Mark A. Fine, pp. 232–251. New York: Oxford University Press.

And in our teaching materials, we address it this way, with a multiple choice question:

Most African American slave children lived with: A. grandparents. B. unrelated adults.  C. one parent. D. both parents [D is correct].

And an essay question:

Describe the impact of slavery on the family structure of African Americans throughout U.S. history.

Answer guide: Students should address the lost customs and languages of diverse Africans brought as slaves. Social scientists are often unsure which of the resulting cultural features of African American family life are held over from African traditions and which are adaptations to slavery. Family lineage was difficult or impossible to trace. Separation of parents and children was common. After the Civil War, African American families were legally recognized, and some were reunited. Emerging African American families were more egalitarian in gender roles and had strong extended family and kinship networks.

This story has good lessons about a number of things that scare people who teach family sociology (and lots of other people, too): being wrong, being called racist, and getting fired for saying something on Facebook. Good chance to reflect on teaching, which is hard, but also great.

Trump blocked me on Twitter and that violates the Constitution

On Twitter, users have the option of blocking other users, which prevents them from viewing the blocker’s tweets, getting notified when they tweet, and participating in the comment thread below the blocker’s tweets. Apparently, Donald Trump’s Twitter account has started blocking people who criticize him. As of yesterday, I’m one of those people.

Yesterday, the Knight First Amendment Institute, a new outfit with a hefty endowment at Columbia University, sent a letter to the President outlining why this practice violates the First Amendment and demanding that he unblock users. You can read the letter here, but the gist of it is that the President’s account operates as a “designated public forum” for the federal govnernment and that suppressing speech on the basis of people’s political beliefs in that context is illegal. (See coverage here and here, and an argument against this logic here.)

Here is Trump spokesperson Sean Spicer explaining that Trump’s tweets are “official statements by the President of the United States”:

Spicer: Trump’s tweets are “official statements by the President of the United States.”

Noted. pic.twitter.com/5IWHoszfVt

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) June 6, 2017

My case illustrates how Trump created a public forum, used for official purposes, and then excluded me from participating in that forum on the basis of my political opinions.

When Trump was elected I made a case for “drawing a new line through the political landscape: for versus against Trumpism,” and oriented my political activity as a citizen accordingly. It turns out that the most efficient way I could get this message out was in the Trump threads on Twitter, by making simple memes stating opposition to Trump or mocking him. It’s not a sophisticated operation, but it didn’t take up very much of my time, and for the effort I think it had good results. (Maybe because my Twitter identity is “verified” or I have a relatively large number of followers, my tweets seemed to appear near the top of the thread if I posted them promptly.)

And I discovered that the Trump Twitter threads are a place to meet and argue with real people, strangers from other bubbles, about the most pressing issues of the day. Sure, most of the dialogue is pointless shouting and insults, which I am naturally way above, but not all of it, and for every person shouting there are many people reading along, who may be influenced by what they see. (For example, think of the young people living in Trump families described so well by Amy Harmon.)

My memes and statements were viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, according to Twitter’s analytics, often appearing right below a Trump tweet. Clearly, this is not what the President wants, but just as clearly it is one small part of how democracy works these days. Here are a few examples of images I made and posted, or comments, with links for people who aren’t blocked so you can see them, screen images to avoid that (if you follow the links you can see the discussion in the threads).

From June 4:

From June 3:

From June 6:

From June 2:

From May 31:

From May 28:

From May 18:

From May 16:

From May 13:

From May 7:

You get the idea. Maybe putting up these memes feels like carrying a sign at a protest, but in this case it’s a political forum organized by the President and limited to those he selects based on their political statements. I don’t know how this legal argument will fare in the courts, if it gets there, but in this case as in so many others, his actions are bad for democracy.