Health disparities & COVID-19 lecture

For Social Problems, an introductory level sociological course, I gave a lecture that combines an introduction to health disparities and some issues of disparate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s 23 minutes. Some slides and links below.

The first half describes the theory of fundamental causes (as I understand it), and has some basic health disparities examples. Here are some graphs:

Then I apply some of the ideas to what we know about COVID-19 impacts, and likely problem areas. Here is some of that:

The PowerPoint slides, with references in the notes, is up here: https://osf.io/d4ym3/.

Family violence and abuse lecture, with COVID pandemic discussion koi

I recorded a video lecture on the subject of family violence and abuse, including intimate partner violence, rape, and sexual abuse, with some discussion of the COVID pandemic implications.

The 24-minute video is on YouTube here:

Related pieces that came out after I recorded this:

• The Telegraph: ‘I have five minutes and I need help’: Life on the domestic abuse frontline during coronavirus
• New York Times: Why a Drop in Domestic Violence Reports Might Not Be a Good Sign
• New York Times: A New Covid-19 Crisis: Domestic Abuse Rises Worldwide
• UN Women: Violence against women and girls: the shadow pandemic
• NPR: Child Sexual Abuse Reports Are On The Rise Amid Lockdown Orders

• Washington Post: With kids stuck at home, ER doctors see more severe cases of child abuse
• New York Times: Child Abuse Cases Drop 51 Percent. The Authorities Are Very Worried

COVID lecture for Social Problems class

On March 2, I opened up my Social Problems class to questions on the emerging coronavirus epidemic. One of the things I did was show them a graph of worldwide cases on a log scale, and told them that it implied the world would have a million cases a month later. We hit that number to the day two days ago. Here are my notes from that day:

Today in my Social Problems class, with about 50 students, I opened the floor to questions about Coronavirus. As a scientifically-literate person who reads the news, I felt responsible answering some of their many questions. (If I'm wrong feel free to tell me and I'll tell them)

— Philip N Cohen (@familyunequal) March 3, 2020

A month later, with school indeed canceled (which I had given only a 10-20% on March 2, I recorded this 28-minute lecture for them as an update. Feel free to use any part of it any way you like*:

---

* Two notes, having watched it over myself and gotten some feedback:

1. At 4:40 I said of the graph shown: “The number of new cases confirmed by testing, every day, in the country, since February.” I should have said, “in the world” (as the figure is labeled).
2. It’s been pointed out that social distancing and other responses to the outbreak are not the only thing that differentiate trajectories of the different outbreaks around the country. Also relevant is the demography of the area, including age, as well as health status and healthcare infrastructure. Those factors will emerge as the pandemic matures.

Very important social scientist says — wait, Brad Wilcox did what now?

Last year Brad Wilcox gave a talk at Saint Vincent College, a monastic college just 8 minutes from the glass-lined tanks of old Latrobe. The talk was structured as a critique of Stephanie Coontz and her decadent view that marriage should be freely chosen.

I was skipping through it looking for his current definition of the “Gold Standard” family (“intact, married, biological family”), when I found this amazing piece of sophistry masquerading as incompetence (or maybe the other way around, hard to know). To lighten things up around here, I thought I’d share it.

This is the clip (It’s here on the full video), followed by the transcript:

Stephanie Coontz, who is a very prominent, progressive author, writer and scholar, has argued that ‘marriage has become more joyful, more loving, more satisfying.’ So what’s the evidence tell us about what actually happened? Well, looking just at those folks who were married, from the 70s to the 80s, and the 90s, and actually the 2000s [he’s looking up at his own graph here], there’s no evidence that marriage is becoming more joyful or more loving among those folks who managed both to get married, and in this case, to remain married. So we see a decline. It’s actually particularly precipitous for women, from the 70s to the 2000s. And when you factor in the fact that fewer and fewer folks were getting married, that’s particularly interesting. What’s this is telling us is that a smaller and smaller share of American adults both men and women were in a very happy marriage from the 70s to the 2000s. So, I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence to sort of back up her idea that sort this newer, post-70s model, this more contingent model, was more successful.

Here’s a screengrab of the slide he’s looking at:

Wow, that sure makes it seem like the percent of adults in a very happy marriage is a lot lower than it used to be, although rebounding strongly this decade. It also just doesn’t look anything like the many graphs of marital happiness I have seen, and made, from the General Social Survey, which is the data he’s using here. So, how exactly is Brad Wilcox completely wrong this time?

Two amazingly incompetent and/or disingenuous ways. First, he included people who aren’t married in his denominator, so the decline in “happy marriage” he shows is due to the decline in marriage altogether, not to any change within marriage. That’s like saying the percentage of people who love reading handwritten parchment scrolls has plummeted since the Middle Ages.

Second, that huge drop in the 2000s he shows is entirely due to the fact that most people weren’t asked the question in survey years 2002, 2004, and 2006, and he included them as not in “very happy” marriages. Brad could just as accurately have said the 19,000 happily married people in the GSS are the only happily married people on earth.

Here is the actual trend, with what he showed (which is trivially easy to reconstruct), showing the individual years instead of the decade grouping he used:

I can’t think of something better to say than just showing this. (I didn’t bother with the gender breakdown, which isn’t the point.)

I hope this helps. Please stay at home if you can, and support those who can’t stay home as best you can.

---

Update: Stephanie Coontz writes on Facebook:

Thanks to Philip Cohen for showing how Brad Wilcox misuses data to criticize my claim that modern marriages are “more loving, more satisfying” than in the past. What I actually say is that when they work WELL, modern marriages are more intimate, fair & loving than marriages of the past. When they DON’T work well, they are more disappointing and seem less bearable because of our higher expectations. This makes our current crisis especially challenging, because we have to expect more of our partners, and can expect less from others, than usual.

COVID-19 graphs, with data and code

Updated March 25.

Although I’m not an expert on pandemic analysis, I am naturally following the COVID-19 data as best I can. And because I always understand data better when I make the figures myself, I’ve been making and looking at COVID-19 trend data, and sharing it as I go.

The figures below are the latest I made as of March 18 25 29, but you can click on the images to link to the current version. The figures, as well as data files and code, are in an Open Science Framework project, here: osf.io/wd2n6/, under CC0 license (free to use for any purpose). The project updates automatically as I go, but these figures won’t (because this is an old fashioned blog).

First, across countries:

For this one, to put the diverse US in perspective, in included US states in addition to selected countries. These are deaths.

State cases and deaths, per capita:

Finally, one with commentary: The first month, in numbers and Trump’s winning words:

 

Interview with Judith Stacey on the foundations of feminism in academia

I had the privilege of interviewing Judith Stacey for the Annex Sociology Podcast.

Joseph Cohen asked me if I had any ideas for guest hosting the podcast, and this had been on my mind for a while — the cohort of women who brought feminism into academia in the 1960s and 1970s. In the ongoing conversations about the relationship between activism and sociology among early career scholars, we can learn a lot from this earlier generation. I have a little list of dream interviews in this vein — or something like an oral history project — and the podcast gave me a chance to explore it.

For my generation of gender researchers (whether we recognize it or not), the connections that she and others made between patriarchy and family structure were foundational. Most people today don’t realize how important research on China was to that development (see also Kay Ann Johnson and Ruth Sidel). In the U.S., this fed into the battles over welfare, welfare reform, and intersectionality in the U.S. And in academia, the formation of the Council on Contemporary Families, of which Stacey was a co-founder (which I have worked with as well).

Stacey already had a background teaching history in high school, and a masters degree in Black history, when she decided to switch to a PhD program in sociology, and immediately took on the world-historical question of patriarchy, feminism, and socialism, and traveled to China in the late 1970s. I said to her (lightly edited):

I want to just pause a little bit on this, just to — you know, one of the things I want to bring us around to is the discipline today, or feminism and academia today — but I just want to pause a little and just think about you as a graduate student in a time when sociology was about one-third of the people getting PhDs in the seventies were women in sociology, it’s a lot more now, over 60 percent. And the idea of, “I’m going to travel all the way around the world to a country where I can’t speak the language, that’s going through a tremendous revolutionary period” — I mean, you use the word ‘chutzpah’ to describe this, but I think it’s a certain kind of courage.

On the question of feminism and sociology, I asked, about her work in the 1980s:

So do you feel like, from that period and the momentum that you and your cohort brought into academia from the energy outside, when we look at the discipline of sociology now — is what we have now that we have established a feminist pole within the discipline, has the core of the discipline been changed, or has it just opened up to allow sort of a feminist section?

Her answers on this, and everything else, are super interesting and inspiring.

Here is some of Stacey’s writing, which I’ve been reading (and teaching) for about 30 years, that we reference in the interview:

• Stacey, Judith, and Professor of Contemporary Studies Judith Stacey. 1983. Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China. University of California Press.
• Stacey, Judith, and Barrie Thorne. 1985. “The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology.” Social Problems 32 (4): 301–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/800754.
• Stacey, Judith. 1993. “Good Riddance to ‘The Family’: A Response to David Popenoe.” Journal of Marriage and Family 55 (3): 545–47.
• Stacey, Judith. 1996. In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age. Beacon Press.
• Stacey, Judith. 1998. Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late-Twentieth-Century America. University of California Press.
• Stacey, Judith. 2011. Unhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China. NYU Press.

Teaching family sociology

Yesterday I gave a talk at a teaching and learning workshop at the Eastern Sociological Society meetings in Philadelphia, sponsored by the AKD sociology honor society and Norton, my publisher. “Diversity, Inequality, Social Change: A Framework for Family Sociology” is my attempt to describe my approach to the course, and the book I wrote for it.

The talk includes some of the graphics I use in the book and lectures, so I posted the slides here. They’re all free to use.

Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads, and that’s OK

UPDATED to include Sci-Hub data from six months: September 2015–February 2016, and correcting a coding error that inflated download counts.

---

Well, they might not have lost the downloads, but they didn’t get them.

Sci-Hub is a pirate operation that uses stolen university login credentials to harvest, store, and distribute for free virtually every academic article published anywhere. It is a simple, if criminal, solution to a very big problem: the lack of access to published research for people who can’t pay for it. When someone goes to the Sci-Hub site and requests an article, by simply pasting in the DOI or URL, the system either serves them the paper, or goes and steals it for them and then keeps a copy for the next user. For us university people who are used to dealing with the maze of logins and forwarding and proxies that come between us and the information we seek, it’s unbelievably fast and almost never fails.

Their most recent claim is an archive of 76 million papers and 400,000 users per day.

Today is 5 September and Sci-Hub is 8 years old. In eight years, the website grew from zero to 76,000,000 research articles available for free reading, and from 2,000 users per day to 400,000.

— Sci Hub (@Sci_Hub) September 5, 2019

Currently available at sci-hub.se or –.tw, it sometimes moves, but this site always lists where you can find it now. Naturally, both civil and criminal authorities are trying to shut it down, preferably by catching its mastermind, Alexandra Elbakyan, the elusive student programmer from Kazakhstan.

That picture is from the excellent (free streaming) documentary Paywall: The Business of Scholarship. Chris Bourg, the Director of Libraries at MIT (and a sociologist), also interviewed in the movie, said of Sci-Hub:

Those of us who work in scholarly communications, writ large, really have to look at Sci-Hub as sort of a poke in the side that says, “Do better.” We need to look to Sci-Hub to say, “What is it that we could be doing differently about the infrastructure that we developed to distribute journal articles, to distribute scholarship?” … I think we need to look at what’s happening with Sci-Hub, how it evolved, who’s using it, who’s accessing it, and let it be a lesson to us for what we should be doing differently.

Sociology’s stolen papers

Science magazine writer John Bohannon reached Elbakyan in 2016, and she turned over to him a 6-month cache of Sci-Hub server logs for a piece titled, “Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone.” He analyzed 28 million downloads, and Science made the data available for analysis, here. Eight million of those hits were from India and China, and the busiest location was Tehran.

The data archive includes only the time and date, the DOI number of each paper downloaded, and the location of the user. I’m not expert in DOI analysis, but Bohannon included a guide that shows the prefix 10.1177 is associated with Sage Publications, which publishes the American Sociological Association’s journals. Looking at the entire six-month series, September 2015 — February 2016, I found 171,000 Sage items, downloaded 377,000 times. Of those (if I got the DOIs right), 805 titles downloaded 1628 times came from the ASA research journals (my Stata code is here).

---

ASA / Sage downloads from Sci-Hub, Sept 2015 – Feb 2016
	Articles	Downloads
American Sociological Review	239	693
Teaching Sociology	221	269
Journal of Health and Social Behavior	94	188
Social Psychology Quarterly	77	152
Sociology of Education	73	157
Sociological Methodology	57	76
Sociological Theory	44	93
Total	805	1628

---

On an annualized basis, that would be 750,000 Sage downloads, and 3,200 from ASA journals specifically. For comparison, the most popular article in ASR in 2017 was downloaded about 10,000 times from the Sage site, so it’s a small share of the legitimate traffic. So over the life of Sci-Hub it cost (and saved) ASA thousands of downloads, probably a few tens of thousands. [Note in the first version of this post, I had a coding error that multiplied the counts, and this read “hundreds of thousands”. I regret the error.]

The most-downloaded ASR paper for the entire period was:

Mears, Ashley. 2015. “Working for Free in the VIP: Relational Work and the Production of Consent.” American Sociological Review 80 (6): 1099–1122. (downloaded 33 times)

The most-downloaded from a different journal was:

Kanazawa, Satoshi. 2010. “Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent:” Social Psychology Quarterly, February. (29 times)

I looked at a couple of them in more detail, and found, for example, that Paula England’s 2015 ASA Presidential Address was downloaded by users in Seoul (South Korea), Durban (South Africa), New Delhi, London, Chicago, Washington, and Virgie (Kentucky).

Interestingly, at least one of the popular papers, Lizardo et al.’s introduction to their editorial tenure at ASR, is already ungated on the Sage site, so you don’t need to use Sci-Hub to get it. This suggests, as Bohannon also noted, that some Sci-Hub users are just using the site because it’s convenient, not because they don’t have access to the papers.

Do you Sci-Hub?

I use Sci-Hub a lot, often for things that I also have subscription access to. (I do not, however, contribute anything to the system; I free-ride off their criminality.) Why? I’m not in the paywall game business, I’m in the information business. I am always behind on my work, and adding a few seconds or minutes of hunting for the legitimate way to get each of the many articles I look at every day is not worth it. (And when I find my university doesn’t subscribe? Interlibrary loan is wonderful, but I don’t want to spend more time with it than necessary.) Does my choice cost the American Sociological Association a few cents, by reducing legitimate downloads, which somehow factors into the profits that get kicked back to the association from Sage? I don’t know.

Of course, one of the dumb things about the paywall system is that it’s expensive and time-consuming to manage who has access to what information — it’s not a small task to keep information from reaching millions of determined readers from all around the world. (I assume one of the reasons my university recently introduced two-factor authentication — requiring me to click a pop-up on my phone every time I log in to university resources [even when I’m in my office] — is because of Sci-Hub. Ironic!)

Chris Bourg is right: “let it be a lesson to us for what we should be doing differently.” Elbakyan may have committed the most efficient product theft in history, in terms of list price of stolen goods per unit of effort or expense on her part. Her archive has been copied and distributed to different sites around the world (it fits in a large suitcase). And it was made possible by the irrational, corrupt nature of the scholarly communication infrastructure. Her success is the system’s failure.

For more information, read my report, “Scholarly Communication in Sociology.“

 

The blog’s decade

Blogging is dead. Long live the blog!

At 268,000, visits to this blog are now down 37% from the peak year of 2015. At the same time, this year I had the fewest number of new posts, just 39. On the other hand, this year I had 25 million impressions on Twitter. Whatever that means.

In my case, and probably many others, the role of the blog has changed with the growth of Twitter. A lot of what the blog did was provide an immediate outlet for daily chatter and work in progress thoughts, a way to get feedback, check in with colleagues, learn new things and meet new people. That’s a lot of what I use Twitter for now, more efficiently (if more noisily).

The other squeeze on the blog is the imperative to do open science more systematically, for which I use the Open Science Framework to post data and code — in projects, which may include multiple files, and quick files for single documents. And of course I use SocArXiv for more formal working papers, reviews, and preprints (mine are here).

So what is the role of the blog? It’s the place for official news and announcements about new work — including notifications of stuff I’m publishing elsewhere — longer arguments, and informal work. It’s a way for people to subscribe to my news via email (it also goes on Facebook, which a lot of sociologists use).

In several talks I have tried to illustrate the total information strategy in something like this pentagulation:

For a wider perspective, I also wrote a report on Scholarly Communication in Sociology, which is intended especially for grad students and early career scholars.

I’m happy to hear suggestions (on any platform) for how to handle communication strategy.

Book aside

The tricky relationship between platforms and different media came home to roost in my book, Enduring Bonds: Inequality, Marriage, Parenting, and Everything Else That Makes Families Great and Terrible. That book was inspired by the success of this blog, which is what enticed University of California Press to consider it. Unbeknownst to the vast majority of my readers on other platforms, I worked pretty hard on it, selecting the best blog posts, and then combining, updating, and adding to them to make a collection of essays, with data. I don’t know how successful the book is compared with other academic books generally, but, with almost no marketing beyond my social media platforms, it has generated basically no buzz for me (media, invitations, etc.). That’s in contrast to working papers, tweets, and blog posts, which continue to bring in wider attention. I know other people have done amazing blog-to-book projects, but this experience definitely showed me that the successful translation is far from automatic. Live and learn! Maybe in the long run the book will be what persists from the first decade of this blog.

11 trends for your New Decade’s holiday party

There’s a lot to do this decade, and only a few days to do it. You need to look smart doing it. The best way to look smart is to be smart, and that means ingesting meaningful bits of data and turning them into useful knowledge. When you display data bits at a holiday party, they merge with those from the other people there, to become the common knowledge we need to get things done in the next decade, which we will do.

So here are a few meaningful bits of demographic data, presented with trend lines and easy-to-memorize fact statements. These aren’t the most important or most interesting demographic trends of the decade, but they’re all meaningful and readily interpretable — plus I was able to gather them on short notice between other last-minute decadal deadlines. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

Notes: We don’t have data through the end of the decade for all of these, so I just present the latest data. And I extend them back toward 1999 as far as I can for context. And I scaled them to show the change as clearly as possible, so watch out for y-axes that are compressed to the active range rather than starting at zero (file complaints here). If I don’t specify the time frame in the text, it refers to the last 10 years of data.

So just memorize the facts that interest you, and remember the associated images. Here goes.

---

Overdose deaths increased more than 80 percent.

---

Chlamydia cases increased by a third.

---

One-in-six 25-34 year-olds live with their parents

---

The share of college graduates majoring in sociology or history fell by more than a third.

---

The percentage of new mothers who are married has risen back over two-thirds.

---

For the first time in decades women over 40 may soon be more likely to have a baby than teenagers.

---

The divorce rate has fallen 20 percent.

---

People with college degrees are 19 percent more likely to be married than people without.

---

International adoptions fell by more than two-thirds.

---

Refugee admissions are at their lowest level since before 1980, and falling fast.

---

The newspaper industry was cut in half.

---

Happy New Decade!