New grad seminar syllabus: Gender, Work, and Family

I tried to balance mostly recent books and articles, qualitative and quantitative, review pieces and empirical studies.

Who wants to be Adele, filling the void with an endless emptiness unchained?

The Adele in the video has no relationships other than her "team" at work and her financial advisor. She fills the void with the endless emptiness of a self unchained.

Inequality work product: Visualizing unequal

I'm working on the fourth edition of The Family, and since it's an "accessible, data-driven introduction to contemporary sociological thinking on families," I figured I'd share a few figures I worked on for the chapter on social class and poverty. 1. Parents' education and educational attainment. The General Social Survey asks people what their parents'…

These are the datasets of our lives (43 of them, anyway)

43 current or ongoing surveys, with microdata from individual/household/family units of analysis, with US samples, publicly available data (some with permission required). More or less.

Demographic facts for students: 2022

Updating a series I started in 2013. Despite what people in my generation were told, it's not true that, "facts are useless in an emergency." Knowing basic facts is the key to detecting bullshit, which thrives in conditions of basic ignorance. In this post I suggest you and your students memorize a small number of…

Trigger warnings don’t work (in experimental settings)

The movement toward universal content warnings in college courses does not seem to have been justified by evidence of their effectiveness, especially in light of possible downsides.

Demographic facts all students should know right now

If anyone tells you that "facts are useless in an emergency," give them a bad grade.

Family Demography Seminar syllabus, 2021 edition

This week it's back to teaching Family Demography. I added a few weeks of pandemic related readings. And some things I never read before.

New COVID-19 and Health Disparities lecture

I recorded a new version of the lecture I created last spring: COVID-19 and Health Disparities. It defines health disparities, introduces the theory of fundamental causes, and then describes COVID-19 disparities by race/ethnicity and age with reference to education and occupational inequality. For intro sociology students. Using data from Bureau of Labor Statistics (inspired by…

Race and racism in America (video)

In my Social Problems class we're spending the next few weeks on race, racial inequality, and racial politics. Step one is this lecture on race and racism. After a tangent on racial identity, idealism and its enemies, I address biology and race, describing the classic racist racial categories in relation to vast human diversity in…