NPR has posted an AP story about how the reception women veteran’s receive when returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan differs from that of men: Back from combat, women struggle for acceptance. They are less likely to receive somthing like a heroes welcome, less likely to receive thanks for or their service, less likely to receive support in their attempts to deal with post-combat stress, etc.

Pew has a story up about research on the millennial generation (those currently in their teens and 20s): “The Millennials.” Providing a brief summary of key findings, they report that:

• They are the most ethnically and racially diverse cohort of youth in the nation’s history….
• They are starting out as the most politically progressive age group in modern history….
• They are the first generation in human history who regard behaviors like tweeting and texting, along with websites like Facebook, YouTube, Google and Wikipedia, not as astonishing innovations of the digital era, but as everyday parts of their social lives and their search for understanding.
• They are the least religiously observant youths since survey research began charting religious behavior.
• They are more inclined toward trust in institutions than were either of their two predecessor generations…

They also address changing attitudes about cultural norms such as inter-racial dating:

A link to their site devoted to research on millennials is available here.

The Institute for College Access & Success has released its annual report, “Student Debt and the Class of 2008,” [pdf] on student debt levels for 2008 grads as part of its Project on Student Debt.

They found that the average student loan debt for a 2008 graduate was $23,200. There was significant variation by state, school type, and individual schools. The District of Columbia had the highest average at $$29,793 followed by Iowa (where I live) at $28,174. The lowest was Utah at $13,041. Average debt also varied by school type: Public 4-year: $20,200; Private non-profit 4-year: $27,650; & Private for-profit 4-year: $33,050.  Individual schools varied from $5,000 to $106,000 in average debt.

An interactive map to see state-level variation is available here. Clicking on a state or on the drop-down menu on that page and selecting a state provides a pop-up box with data about individual schools in the state you select (unless you have pop-ups blocked in your browser). There is also an Excel file available on that page that provides averages for public, private, and overall debt load for each state.

Full report: Student Debt and the Class of 2008 [pdf]

Pew has a report up on the percentage of young adults moving back home: “Home for the Holidays…and Every Other Day: Recession Brings Many Young Adults Back to the Nest.” According to the article:

To measure changes in household arrangements, the Pew Research survey asked all adults if they lived in their own home or with one or both parents in the parents’ home. The survey further asked all adults if they had moved back in with their parents “as a result of the recession.” Overall, about 11% of all adults 18 or older live with their parents in their home and 4% of all adults say they were forced to move back with their parents because of the recession, a proportion that rises to 10% among those ages 18 to 34.

The full report, including data on the percentages of young people living alone, is available here.

The Washington Post has an article up on African American unemployment rates: “Blacks hit hard by economy’s punch“.  The numbers are particularly bad for young African American males:

Joblessness for 16-to-24-year-old black men has reached Great Depression proportions — 34.5 percent in October, more than three times the rate for the general U.S. population. And last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment in the District, home to many young black men, rose to 11.9 percent from 11.4 percent, even as it stayed relatively stable in Virginia and Maryland.

The article also includes quotes from sociologists Devah Pager and Algernon Austin.

The New York Times has an article up about classes to help prepare pre-K kids for kindergarten admission exams: “Tips for the Admissions Test … to Kindergarten.” According to the article:

Test preparation has long been a big business catering to students taking SATs and admissions exams for law, medical and other graduate schools. But the new clientele is quite a bit younger: 3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and talented public kindergarten classes.

The focus of the article is on how such preparation is most appealing to parents who cannot afford private school but have enough resources to try to get their children an edge into the gifted & talented track in public schools. This raises questions about the degree to which social class is reproduced within a system that is, in principle, committed to mertiocracy.

Sociologist Alice S. Rossi, the 74th president of the American Sociological Association and one of the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW), has died at age 87. The New York Times has a story highlighting some of her contributions. A brief snippet:

In her scholarship, Professor Rossi explored the status of women in work, family and sexual life. An early public advocate of abortion rights, she was often quoted by the national news media on an array of women’s issues. Her writings are widely credited with helping build the platform on which the women’s movement of the 1960s and afterward was erected.

Professor Rossi was best known for her studies of people’s lives — those of women in particular — as they move from youth to age.

Of her 1964 article, “Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal,” she said:

My theme was simple enough. For the first time in known history, I wrote, motherhood had become a full-time occupation for adult women, and motherhood was not enough. For the psychological and physical health of mother and child, for the sake of the trembling family unit, and for the progress of society, equality between men and women was essential and inevitable.

A statement of hers (from The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir, p. 407) that is frequently quoted:

The single most impressive fact about the attempt by American women to obtain the right to vote is how long it took.

Her 1983 ASA presidential address, “Gender and Parenthood,” is available here.

From C. Wright Mills:

Caught in the limited milieux of their everyday lives, ordinary men [and women] often cannot reason about the great social structures–rational and irrational–of which their milieux are subordinate parts. Accordingly, they often carry out series of apparently rational actions without any idea of the ends they serve.

From The Sociological Imagination: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 168.

Sociologist Mark Regnerus explored the topic of conflicting values in an opinion piece for the Washington Post titled, “Say Yes. What Are You Waiting For?” Based on sociological research he had conducted on young evangelical Christians, he discovered a tension between the sub-cultural expectation of no sex before marriage versus the normative practice of delayed marriage. He writes:

Sara, a 19-year-old college student from Dallas, equated thinking about marrying her boyfriend with staging a rebellion. Her parents “want my full attention on grades and school because they want me to get a good job,” she told me. Understandable. But our children now sense that marrying young may be not simply foolish but also wrong and socially harmful. And yet today, as ever, marriage wisely entered into remains good for the economy and the community, good for one’s personal well-being, good for wealth creation and, yes, good for the environment, too. We are sending mixed messages.

According to this article on Regnerus, the argument has generated more than a little controversy. Regnerus is a sociologist at the University of Texas and is the author of Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers.

Though this particular conflict is more specific to this group of religious believers, it might make for an interesting class discussion about how values can conflict, especially values that come out of different institutional spheres of our lives. In this case it sounds like there might be tension between basic economic expectations (e.g. get an education, establish yourself in a career, then get married) versus the religious expectations for this group of believers (e.g. abstinence only).

In other words, this conflict might be distantly related to tensions people feel due to the normative expectations between work and home. For example, I feel a constant struggle between my desire to be a good father (e.g. to be involved in my daughter’s lives, to attend school events, to know what’s happening in their classes, to drive them to and fro, simply to talk with them, etc.) and at the same time to be a responsible professor (e.g. to prepare for class, to grade exams, to provide useful feedback on papers, to be on top of committee work, to continue to write and research, to post on my blog, etc.). Part of the beauty of sociology is that it can help us to open our eyes to possible conflicting patterns and practices.

Pew has a report summarizing data on marriage and divorce from the Census’s American Community Project: The States of Marriage and Divorce. It includes state-level information on things such as median age of first marriage, share of the population currently divorced, percentage of the population that has been married three times or more, etc. It also includes national summary statistics, such as:

On the national level, the Census Bureau survey showed that a shrinking share of Americans are married — 52% of males ages 15 and older and 48% of females ages 15 and older. The proportion of Americans who are currently married has been diminishing for decades and is lower than it has been in at least half a century….Nationally, the median age at first marriage has been climbing for decades: It now stands at 28 for men and 26 for women.

Pew also provides an interactive map the reports data for each state and for both men and women.