The study of social networks is increasingly central to health research for medical sociologists and scholars in other fields. Here, we review the innovations in theory, substance, data collection, and methodology that have propelled the study of social networks and health from a niche subfield to the center of larger sociological and scientific debates. In particular, we contextualize the broader

High-cost financial services allow economically insecure families to make ends meet but often contribute to additional financial strain in the long run. This study uses novel data from the Shift Project to describe the link between schedule unpredictability and high-cost debt (i.e., payday loans, pawnshop loans, auto-title loans, overdrafts, and problematic credit card debt) among service workers.

We present evidence from choice experiments on hypothetical triage decisions in a pandemic. Respondents have to decide who out of two patients gets ventilation. Patients are described in terms of attributes such as short-term survival chance, long-term life expectancy, and their current ventilation status. Attributes are derived from the ethical discourse among experts regarding triage guidelines during

The sexual identities of young women today are less binary and more fluid than ever before. Several theoretical perspectives imply that this fluidity could be accompanied by distress. To examine this, we analyzed four waves of data from Australian women born 1989 to 1995 (n = 11,527). We found no evidence of a universal association between sexual identity change and psychological distress. Instead

Since 1998, more than 6,000 public schools have closed in rural U.S. counties. Very little research considers how these school closures impact the future growth (or decline) of rural communities. Given rural schools' importance to parents, local labor markets, and civic life, closures could trigger or reinforce population loss. On the other hand, the configuration of schools may simply be a consequence

One in three U.S. households has experienced material hardship. The inadequate provision of basic needs, including food, healthcare, and transportation, is more typical in households with children or persons of color, yet little is known about material hardship in rural spaces. The aim of this study is to describe the prevalence of material hardships in Iowa and examine the relationship between rurality

This article investigates the political potency of ‘precarity’ as an organising axiom in contingent workers’ grassroots organisations. It studies a nationwide network of precarious researchers in Germany and deploys Frame Analysis to illuminate how the Network articulates diverse criticisms as parts of a coherent struggle against precarious academic work. Empirically, the article substantiates the

Postmortem diagnostic overshadowing—defined as inaccurately reporting a disability as the underlying cause of death—occurs for over half of adults with cerebral palsy. This practice obscures cause of death trends, reducing the effectiveness of efforts to reduce premature mortality among this marginalized health population. Using data from the National Vital Statistics System 2005 to 2017 U.S. Multiple

Western society associates knowledge with vision while affiliating blindness with ignorance. Following critical disability studies and drawing upon non-structured interview data and ethnographic observations with visually disabled people, the article opposes this idea by examining how blind assemblages construct knowledge and highlight its heterogeneous and dynamic character, usually obscured by visual

Despite women’s increased market employment and earnings, the gender housework gap persists. Drawing on US data from 1999 to 2017 waves of Panel Study of Income Dynamics (6643 dual-earner heterosexual couples, 19,602 couple-year observations) and using couples fixed effects, this study examines the impact of having children on the relationship between partners’ housework time and spousal relative income

This article analyses the creation of a union coalition that introduced a new employment relations institution: the Agricultural Advisory Panel for Wales. Building on social movement theory, the article argues that the union’s strategic framing within a conducive political opportunity structure enabled the coalition to form and pursue its goals. The union engaged in a specific frame alignment strategy

Societal beliefs about women's work have long been a metric for gender equality, with recent scholarship focusing on trends in these attitudes to assess the progress (or stalling) of the gender revolution. Moving beyond widely critiqued gender attitude questions thought to be the only available items for measuring change over time, this article considers women's and men's views toward their own work

Based on the case of a Belgian meat processing company that relies on posted workers employed by two subcontractors, this study investigates how posting affects client capital’s ability to control labour. Analysed through a Labour Process Theory lens, the findings reveal that posting fragments capital and substantially reduces the client firm’s control over workers’ effort and mobility power. This

Meta-work – the work that makes work possible – is an important aspect of professional lives. Yet, it is also one that remains understudied, in particular in the context of work activities characterised by continuous and global mobility. Building on a qualitative approach to online content analysis, this article sets out to explore the meta-work underlying digital nomadism, a leisure-driven lifestyle

This article analyses the commodification of professional labour and union responses to these processes within the employment heartland. It explores the category of fixed-contract or ‘temporary’ employment using Australian public school teaching as the empirical lens. Established to address intensifying conditions of labour market insecurity, the union-led creation of the temporary category was intended

Forests offer critical social, economic, and ecological benefits. As fifty-five percent of Georgia's forests are family-owned, management decisions of these forest landowners have a considerable impact on the state's environment and beyond. So far, little is known about what drives the conservation intentions of forest landowners and how these drivers vary by gender. However, several studies outside

The risk of multitasking is high in online surveys. However, knowledge on the effects of multitasking on answer quality is sparse and based on suboptimal approaches. Research reports inconclusive results concerning the consequences of multitasking on task performance. However, studies suggest that especially sequential-multitasking activities are expected to be critical. Therefore, this study focusses

Pioneering scholarship links retrospective childhood conditions to mature adult health. We distinctively provide critical evidence with prospective state-of-the-art measures of parent income observed multiple times during childhood in the 1970s to 1990s. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we analyze six health outcomes (self-rated health, heart attack, stroke, life-threatening chronic conditions

In this paper, we investigate how rurality is performed in online community groups, attending in particular to outdoor recreation and engagement with local nature. The starting point for our performative approach is that when places are digitally mediated, the technological intermediary is never innocent or neutral. Methodologically, we conducted an online ethnography in 20 rural community groups on

Suppose X and Y are binary exposure and outcome variables, and we have full knowledge of the distribution of Y, given application of X. We are interested in assessing whether an outcome in some case is due to the exposure. This “probability of causation” is of interest in comparative historical analysis where scholars use process tracing approaches to learn about causes of outcomes for single units

Experimental designs in the social sciences have received increasing attention due to their power to produce causal inferences. Nevertheless, experimental research faces limitations, including limited external validity and unrealistic treatments. We propose combining qualitative fieldwork and experimental design iteratively—moving back-and-forth between elements of a research design—to overcome these

We investigate time inequity as an explanatory mechanism for gendered physical activity disparity. Our mixed-effect generalized linear model with two-stage residual inclusion framework uses longitudinal data, capturing differing exchanges and trade-offs in time resources. The first stage estimates within-household exchanges of paid and family work hours. Estimates show that men’s employment increases

The aim of this study is the reconstruction of the multifaceted points of view related to the transition from work to retirement using a gender perspective. This article includes 40 interviews of ageing Italian workers, 24 women and 16 men, carried out in the cusp of retirement (wave 1) and two years after retirement (wave 3). The experiences related to the ‘decision to retire’ and ‘life after retirement’

The flourishing literature of valuation studies has shown how values are enacted and temporarily settled through sociomaterial processes, highlighting the contestations and dissonances inherent in valuing. We extend this concern through a study of a sudden collapse and reconstruction of value – what counts as good – in a US government agency. Using ethnographic case study methods, we explore how the

How does Judith Butler’s theory of ‘grievability’ relate to the neoliberal imperative to assume personal responsibility for one’s actions? And how can this be conceptualised in relation to a broader biopolitics of disposability that renders some lives dispensable and others worthy of protection? Focusing on the particular case of obesity and the UK government’s drive to reduce obesity rates in response

Growing awareness of environmental issues and their relation to consumption patterns has given rise to calls for sustainable consumption across the globe. In this article, we focus on the zero waste lifestyle movement, which targets high-consumption households in the Global North as a site of change for phasing out waste in global supply chains. Our article is concerned with asking how gender and household

Many commentators have suggested that Donald Trump's 2016 election emboldened discrimination against racial minorities. We focus on changes in weekly work hours among hourly paid employees during the five months following the 2016 election (relative to 12 months prior). Using two-wave panel data from the Current Population Survey, we find that black workers suffered temporary work hours and earnings

In Goffman's terms, qualitative interviews are social encounters with their own realities. Hence, the ‘situational critique’ holds that interviews cannot produce knowledge about the world beyond these encounters, and that other methods, ethnography in particular, render lived life more accurately. The situational critique cannot be dismissed; yet interviewing remains an indispensable sociological tool

We analyze time use data of four East Asian societies and 12 Western countries between 1985 and 2016 to investigate the gender revolution in paid work, domestic work, and total work. The closing of gender gaps in paid work, domestic work, and total work time has stalled in the most recent decade in several countries. The magnitude of the gender gaps, cultural contexts, and welfare policies plays a

Medical sociology gives limited attention to age—a surprising observation given the aging of the population and the fact that age is among the strongest determinants of health. We examine this issue through an analysis of articles published in Journal of Health and Social Behavior (JHSB) and Sociology of Health & Illness (SHI) between 2000 and 2019. One in 10 articles focused on age or aging, with

One of the most promising directions for reducing mental illness stigma lies in Allport’s contact theory, which suggests that intergroup interactions reduce stigma. Here, we argue that stigmatizing attitudes are driven by the nature, magnitude, and valence of community-based ties to people with mental illness (PMI), not simply their presence. Using the 2018 General Social Survey (N = 1,113), we compare

The establishment of local communal organizations is a unique strategy of rural communities to build resilience against economic challenges. Shirvareh is traditionally recognized as an important communal organization of women in Southwestern Iran for managing dairy production and securing their livelihood. Preserving this vital social institution and its associated indigenous knowledge was the main

Drawing on border theory, this article presents a study of the role that social class plays in the interplay between work and non-work life. A survey was used to collect subjective ratings of social class for class origin, home and work domains. Interviews were then conducted with 20 individuals to explore participants’ experiences of social class across their work-life domains. The analysis identified

The Challenge of Seeing Beyond our Differences: A Review of “Inventing the Ties that Bind: Imagined Relationships in Moral and Political Life” By Francesca Polletta University of Chicago Press, 2020, 272. pages. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo60081321.html

Review of Movements and Parties: Critical Connections in American Political Development By Sidney Tarrow Cambridge University Press, 2021. 288 pages. https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/american-government-politics-and-policy/movements-and-parties-critical-connections-american-political-development?format=PB&isbn=9781009013963

Although sociologists have devoted considerable attention to studying the role of education in intergenerational social class mobility using log-linear models for contingency tables, indings in this literature are not free from rescaling or non-collapsibility bias caused by adjusting for education in these models. Drawing on the methodological literature on inverse probability reweighting, I present

Despite global scientific consensus, climate change is a highly controversial and politicized issue in the United States. Grounded in two quantitative survey iterations with approximately 446 responses, 28 semi-structured interviews, and 4 focus groups with 60 undergraduate students from six state universities in the Appalachian region, this five-year study explores the role of place-based attachment

This article presents novel empirical evidence of fathers’ parental leave usage by introducing a family dimension in Spain. To test this hypothesis, a bivariate probit estimation was used to analyse the effect of the mother’s labour force participation on the father’s decision to take parental leave. This procedure allowed us to address the issue of simultaneous factors affecting the decisions of both

There is long-standing interest within sociological debate to understand social class inequality spatially. We contribute to this debate by using a spatially differentiated understanding of accent, used here as a ‘window’ to observe the formation of socio-economic difference across space. From a spatial perspective, using the work of Doreen Massey, we draw on a unique multi-sited qualitative dataset

Seafood production and trade have expanded dramatically over the last 40?years and comprise one of the fastest growing, and most environmentally impactful, sub-sectors of the global food system. While richer nations have increased their seafood consumption and displaced their environmental load, the marine environmental impact of fishery production has largely shifted to the waters of less-affluent

Labour market stratification and discrimination of disabled people remains a less researched topic compared to other minorities despite being a notably disadvantaged group. This article explores the employer side of discrimination against disabled jobseekers by using a field experiment conducted in Norway as its point of departure. Through qualitative follow-up interviews, this article investigates

This article investigates invisible work, as voiced by professionals in the interpreting sector in the UK. Informed by a practice theory approach alongside the sociology of invisible work, it re-frames invisibility as enacted according to the elements that organise and motivate work in terms of purposeful, normative and skilful actions. Drawing on a qualitative dataset of 20 observations and 46 interviews

By Armanda Lara-Millán, Oxford University Press. 2021, 256 pages. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/redistributing-the-poor-9780197507902?cc=us&lang=en&

Rural residents in the United States do not always agree on local development priorities, yet understanding and accounting for their preferences is a step towards more effective and equitable community development. We use survey data spanning different types of rural Intermountain West communities to gauge residents' preference weights for economic and environmental rural development goals. Given that

Our study bridges literatures on the health effects of job loss and life course employment trajectories to evaluate the selection into employment pathways and their associations with health in the short and medium terms. We apply sequence analysis to monthly employment calendars from a population-based sample of working-age women and men observed from 2009 to 2013 (N = 737). We identify six distinct

How do undergraduates make their first course decisions, and are these decisions fateful? Drawing on serial interviews (N = 200) of 53 students at an admissions-selective university, we show that incoming students with disparate precollege experiences differ in their orientations toward and strategies for considering first college math courses. Content repeaters opt for courses that repeat material

Qualitative secondary analysis has generated heated debate regarding the epistemology of qualitative research. We argue that shifting to an abductive approach provides a fruitful avenue for qualitative secondary analysts who are oriented towards theory-building. However, the concrete implementation of abduction remains underdeveloped—especially for coding. We address this key gap by outlining a set

Previous research has indicated that racial-ethnic minority communities lack a wide variety of health-related organizations. We examine how this relates to the early COVID-19 vaccine rollout. In a series of spatial error and linear growth models, we analyze how racial-ethnic residential segregation is associated with the distribution of vaccine sites and vaccine doses across ZIP codes in the five largest

Research suggests that economic declines contribute to mortality risks from suicide and drug poisoning, but how the economy impacts individuals’ risks of these deaths has been challenging to specify. Building on recent theoretical advances, we investigate how adolescent occupational expectations and preparation contribute to suicide and drug poisoning deaths in a shifting economy. We use High School

Prior research documents associations between personal network characteristics and health, but establishing causation has been a long-standing research priority. To evaluate approaches to causal inference in egocentric network data, this article uses three waves from the University of California Berkeley Social Networks Study (N = 1,159) to investigate connections between nine network variables and

Prevailing dualisms of work as formal, paid employment on the one hand or informal, unpaid domestic labour on the other, means volunteering is often overlooked. Although academic interest in voluntary labour is growing, it remains inadequately theorised in the sociology of work. A more sociological meaningful understanding of volunteering is needed. Through an analysis of voluntary body work labour

The digital game industry has embraced servitization – a strategic orientation toward customer centricity in production-based firms – to deeply monetize digital games. Though some note the resource-intensive nature of delivering services and suggest inherent risks in its adoption, extant literature is uncritical. This article draws on labour process theory to critique the impact of servitization on

This article conceptualises refugees’ endeavours for upward social mobility through subentrepreneurship. Subentrepreneurship refers to various self-employment forms that are undeclared to relevant authorities to escape superimposed historical, temporal, spatial, institutional and social contexts, which constrain actors’ entrepreneurial activities. Using a mixed theoretical underpinning combining Mixed

Active labour market policies (ALMPs) have evolved as pivotal social policy instruments designed to place the unemployed and other disadvantaged groups in sustainable employment. Yet, little is known about what drives employer participation in such initiatives. This article provides a nuanced account of the socio-economic aspects of the demand-side of ALMPs, by investigating employer embeddedness in

This article problematises the assumptions regarding work, family and employment that underlie the World Health Organization (WHO)’s COVID-19 guidelines. The scientific evidence grounding sanitary and social distancing recommendations is embedded in conceptualisations of work as skilled jobs in the formal economy and of family as urban and nuclear. These are Global North rather than universal paradigms

Affordable housing has declined in recent decades, yet limited research has examined the demographic and economic changes influencing place-level affordability—especially outside of large metros. In this study I examine the effects of county-level population growth and decline, population aging, and natural amenity development on rates of affordable housing, income, and housing costs across four types

Many scholars agree that both expert and lay knowledge are needed to gain a fuller understanding of environmental problems, both to find answers to the problems and to improve relations between experts and laypeople. When experts ignore lay knowledge, laypeople can resist by accusing experts of arrogance or conspiracy. Rural people who live among large carnivores like wolves and grizzly bears sometimes

Rural indebtedness is a major development challenge confronting India. In 2018, scores of farmers protested rising household debt, and the popular coverage of the time asserted that farmers were under crushing debt. Combining data from the All-India Debt and Investment Survey with other sources and using a class analysis, I interrogate this “crushing debt” narrative. Rural households, depending on

The “leaky pipeline” metaphor has been used to describe the dearth of women in science, technology, and leadership roles. For colleges of agriculture within land grant universities (LGUs), college leadership and tenured faculty in agricultural science disciplines have historically been disproportionately male, even though women earn nearly an equal number of doctorates. Conscious gender discrimination

Affective polarization—the tendency for individuals to exhibit animosity toward those on the opposite side of the partisan divide—has increased in the United States in recent years. This article presents evidence that this trend may have consequences for Americans’ health. Structural equation model analyses of nationally representative survey data from Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (n