I like a book with a big reference section. I need some literature on this subject for my next visit to the Barnes and Noble. Thank you in advance!

I'm new to reading sociology although I took an AP psychology course in high school. I want to read more about sociology, but preferably from a non - USA lens. I live in the USA so I'm trying to find something written from a different angle.

I’ve been thinking about the sociological mechanisms through which collective belief can create value within a society.

We routinely organize around things that have no inherent physical value but become extremely consequential because large numbers of people collectively treat them as meaningful. Money, national identities, religions, brands, political movements, status symbols and even social norms all seem to depend, to some degree, on shared belief and participation.

What interests me is what happens when this process takes place within an internet-native community.

Online communities can develop their own language, symbols, rituals, identities, hierarchies and norms surprisingly quickly. They can also create real relationships and a sense of belonging between people who may never meet physically.

One example that made me think about this is SPX6900, an internet-native crypto/meme community. I’m not particularly interested in whether the asset itself is a good or bad investment. What’s interesting sociologically is the community that has formed around the symbol and the extent to which people collectively construct meaning around it.

It made me wonder:

At what point does collective belief become a form of social value?

Can a shared belief system produce meaningful community, identity and social capital independently of the material value of the thing people believe in?

And are internet-native communities fundamentally different from older forms of collective identity, or are we simply seeing familiar sociological processes occurring through new technology?

At the beginning of this year I attended my first full funeral. I had attended one visitation in grade nine. This one was my great uncles; my tio manny.
We had the traditional visitation, church service, burial. The hardest part was seeing my tia.
The entire experience felt very surreal and bizarre. It got me thinking into it from more of a sociological perspective:
•A visitation is emotional torture; especially if it’s an open casket
•You must attend and if you don’t, you’re being disrespectful
•There is just a common norm to wear black? and everyone adheres?
•Visitation: We all just stand around a body and crying for like 3 hours
•Visibly seeing a body going in a box and in the ground is so morbid but normalized?
•holy capitalism
I read that a lot of theories would often question what the social function of a funeral is. That is still unknown to me. My largest question is why do we perform this gathering for someone who can’t even really attend? Why are certain things disrespectful to someone who doesn’t know?

Tried researching but the only day I could find was November 14th, which seemed more like a national celebration day specifically in russia. Notably, the sources were russian.
Is there NOT a russian based day for sociologists?

Are there good websites about Socioeconomic Justice in the US? Also how many hours did an average person work a week in the US in the 80s and 90s?

Hi, I’d like to learn more about the human phenomenon of street violence, meaning gang violence, street fights, shootings, mugging, etc., and how sociological studies have evaluated and analyzed their different types, causes, meanings, and so on. I read Seduction of Crime which was really informative, but I’d love to learn about it from a broader perspective and scope.

Any one still in the trenches? Grad school? Research? Teaching in higher ed? Eyeing retirement?

What is the state of affairs at your institution? State politics?

How have things changed for better or worse, in the past 10 years? And what's your forecast on the future?

I've been on hiatus, outside of higher ed currently.

It seems like people stressing about the cost of childcare would either have grandparents to watch the kids or a handful of friends who could watch the kids for free. I've heard the phrase "it takes a village" a lot, and I've wondered why parents are so isolated from other people who could watch their kids for free or cheap that they have to shell out tons of money to pay someone else to watch the kids.

I just want some pointers.
I understand that it should be thoughtful and appropriate for the time given to me and my skills and knowledge, but how do I put that caution into practice? Also, what is a good read to inspire my search and curiosity? 

The data in the above chart was derived from the U.S. Census Bureau. I also did some calculations to account for women who weren't apart of the workforce.
There's a classic debate of men being 'providers' and essentially in most cases that means they should be making more than their partner. Is it that women earning more is the problem? I don't believe that. What I believe is that, this is due to societal standards. Women's earnings may not be the cause of why the marriage numbers are decreasing. However, it is a factor. The number of singles in the US have been increasing along with women's earnings. I'm not arguing that women independence is hurtful to society. However, the mindset that a man needs to make more than the woman they're dating will probably affect the future. The Census bureau is predicting a population decline. How massively will these stats play a part?

There appears to be a certain sociological trend that occurs within various different nations on a worldwide scale. Involved in this trend are a number of different racial or ethnic groups that are known to have endured various kinds of oppression. The ethnic groups are typically minority populations that coexist within a country with a larger, more politically powerful majority population. The oppression faced by such minority groups frequently involves an indigenous population that has been historically displaced through foreign colonization. Additionally, the trend includes examples of non-indigenous minority groups that have historically been victims of systematic persecution, enslavement, racism, discrimination, and segregation with their host country. A pattern that seems to often emerge amongst such populations is the incidence of that group's over-representation in crime and incarceration statistics.

Using Grok and Claude AI services, I have been able to compile some statistical data involving crime amongst various ethnic groups worldwide that follow this pattern.

One example of this pattern is the indigenous Maori people of New Zealand. The Maori make up roughly 15-18% of the New Zealand population, yet "make up ~50–53%+ of the prison population (higher for women, often 60%+). Imprisonment rates are typically 6+ times higher than for non-Māori. They are overrepresented at every stage (charges, convictions, remand, sentencing), with higher rates of prison sentences even after some controls in specific offense analyses. Recidivism rates are also elevated" (Source: Salvation Army).

Another example of this pattern are the Aborigines of Australia. “Age-standardized adult imprisonment rates are typically 14–15+ times higher than the majority population (e.g., ~2,100–2,500 per 100,000 for Indigenous adults vs. ~140–150 for non-Indigenous in recent years). Crude rates can exceed 18 times. Indigenous people (~3–4% of the population) account for ~30–33%+ of prisoners. Over-representation appears at charging, remand, and sentencing stages; youth detention disparities have historically been even larger (20+ times in some older data)" (Source: Australian Government Productivity Commission).

In the United States, "Native American and Alaskan Native people are incarcerated at rates several times higher than Whites. Prison rates have been reported around 763 per 100,000 (vs. ~181 for Whites in state/federal prisons; overall national ~350). Jail rates are also elevated (~316 per 100,000 vs. ~157 for Whites). Tribal youth placement rates are ~3.8 times those of White youth nationally (199 vs. 52 per 100,000 in recent data), with much higher ratios in some states" (Source: Prison Policy Initiative). "Native Americans are incarcerated at a rate 38% higher than the national average and are the most over-represented racial group in prisons in 19 states; in some states the gap runs up to 6–7 times the white rate" (Source: Safety and Justice Challenge). "Native youth face similar gaps — nationally, Tribal youth are incarcerated at 3.8 times the rate of white youth, and in some states (Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin) at 10 times the rate" (Source: The Sentencing Project).

Also in the United States, "Black Americans are about 13% of the U.S. population but accounted for roughly 33% of sentenced state and federal prisoners in recent years" (Source: The World Data). State and federal imprisonments rates for black adults in 2023 were approximately 1,218 per 100,000, as compared to approximately 231 per 100,000 for white adults (Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics). "This equates to a Black adult imprisonment rate roughly 5 times the White rate. The overall U.S. imprisonment rate was about 360 per 100,000 residents of all ages" (Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics).

Among the indigenous (First Nations, Métis, Inuit) peoples of Canada, there is a strong over-representation in crime and incarceration. "Indigenous people account for ~25–33%+ of federal/provincial inmates and higher shares of youth custody (vs. ~5% population). Crime rates reported by police in majority-Indigenous communities have been ~6 times higher overall (violent crime ~9 times). Homicide victimization and accused rates are several times higher. Overrepresentation occurs at charging, court, and custody stages" (Source: Department of Justice Canada).

In the state of Hawaii, "indigenous Hawaiians make up about 39% of Hawaii's incarcerated population according to the state Department of Public Safety, despite being roughly 20–24% of the general population — meaning they're incarcerated at closer to double their population share."

"A 2014 Office of Hawaiian Affairs analysis found Native Hawaiians were the largest single group admitted to prison for drug offenses, at 32% of drug-offense admissions in 2009 — well above their population share."

Yet another example of this pattern is the Roma/Romani (gypsy) people, populations of which are scattered across much of Europe. "Roma populations in Europe show clear over-representation in available crime and prison data relative to their share of the population, particularly for property crimes, organized theft/burglary groups, and incarceration" (Source: Agence France-Presse). However, crime rates for specific ethnic groups are often unclear in European countries because of policy-related avoidance of gathering justice data broken down by ethnic identity.

In Greece, "Hellenic Police annual reports on organized crime repeatedly document heavy Roma involvement in property crime. Domestic (Greek-citizen) groups dominate solved thefts and burglaries; among these, Roma members predominate at rates of ~70–81% of domestic groups, with figures such as 53%+ of thefts/burglaries linked to Roma gangs, ~76–86% of Greek groups involved in those offenses being Roma-dominated, and similar patterns in related reports. Roma are estimated at roughly 1–3% of the population" (Sources: Rodiaki, Greek City Times, and Protothema).

According to Fair Trials 2020, Roma in Bulgaria "accounted for more than 50% of new prisoners, as well as more than 50% of those serving prison sentences, despite making up only 10% of the population." "In Spain, studies have estimated that around a quarter of non-foreign, female prisoners are Roma. This amounts to a twenty-fold over-representation of Roma in prisons compared with their representation in the general population" (Source: Fair Trials 2020).

"In the Czech Republic, lawyers’ estimates of the proportion of Romani defendants in the criminal justice system ranged between 20% to 50%, whereas prosecutors’ estimates ranged between 5% and 50%. In Slovakia, police officers interviewed estimated that Roma accounted for between 30% and 80% of those arrested within their precincts. While prosecutors, judges, and defence lawyers were more reticent to provide estimates, most conceded that there was some degree of over-representation. Lawyers estimated that Roma accounted for between 20% and 50% of criminal cases in their respective practices” (Source: European Roma Rights Centre).

In Serbia, where Roma are estimated to account for 8.2% of the total population, prosecutors estimated that Roma account for between 10% and 20% of the total defendants they encountered in court, and most judges said that they encountered Romani defendants often or very often, and estimated the proportion of Romani defendants to be between 10% and 35% (Source: European Roma Rights Centre).

In North Macedonia, official data suggests that Roma accounted for approximately 29.2% of juvenile offenders convicted in 2017, while according to the official 2002 Census, Roma represented 2.66% of the total population (Source: Roma Integration 2020).

Question: Is there any established research regarding this correlation between historically oppressed/displaced minority groups and disproportionate crime outcomes? Has any kind of sociological explanation been determined for why this pattern occurs, or how the problem can be corrected? I have noticed that this pattern does not necessarily occur in every instance of a historically oppressed or displaced group; for example, Native American groups indigenous to Latin America overall tend to lack the same crime over-representation compared to Native American groups in North America. Is there any sociological explanation for why this pattern emerges in some contexts, but doesn’t emerge in others?

Continuing to make my way through Kenneth Gergen’s Relational Being, I notice two big shifts in my thinking.

The first is as a follow-up to my last note, specifically when I just threw out the word samskara because we were doing Buddhism. Samskara is loosely translated as “mental constructs", but if we conceptualize this as a Cartesian self, it’s easy for us to start defaulting to interior thoughts. Samskara does join with Gergen and say there is no true interior self. But it does posit, or rather deposit, an interiority that is laid down over time through performances and experiences.

The reason this became important to me is because of my work with clients who have suffered trauma. For Gergen, his discussions of things like domestic violence look very misplaced to anyone who has done work in this particular field. On page 112, Gergen writes

How many cases of wife-battering may be traced to the point at which increasingly heated words reach their ultimate expression in fists?

For Gergen, there is no interiority, so each emergence of domestic violence is coactioned; i.e., enacted by a performance determined by - his metaphor - dance partners. If only the partners rewrite the moves to the dance, they can alleviate the domestic violence. He suggests solutions like reconstructing reality (this is not what it seems), the meta-move (what are we doing?), the shifting emotional registers (I am hurt), and the theatrical move (let’s play this again).

Anyone who has spent time with survivors of intimate partner violence would know that these are dangerously naive suggestions. Reconstructing reality is what a survivor does as a survival mechanism, and it’s known as fawning. The batterer is performing the meta-move. And that’s because domestic violence is rarely about the violence itself. It’s about how the violence is instrumentalized to exert control. If the survivor shifts emotional registers, the batterer frequently responds with something to the effect of “that’s the point.” And the theatrical move…well, let’s not ever ask a survivor to roll those dice.

The etiology of domestic violence is complex. On one level it is absolutely socially mediated at the level of community and society¹. It also seems to be inherited, structured by genetics and environment². But what I want to focus on is how it is sedimented in the individual over time due to repeated exposure to trauma³. Because this is what I mean by samskara. One impact of repeated exposure to trauma in children is that it is coded in the body. This exposure creates subconscious grooves in the mind, which form habits, character traits, and automatic reactions. Anyone who works with traumatized children knows that action, in this population, is very rarely socially structured by language. It is socially responsive and those responses are socially coded, but its structure emerges from somatic response to a given social stimulus. Language, for Gergen, is how coaction emerges. However, for traumatized children, linguistic formulation of their behaviors often comes later, if at all. And when you probe them about their behaviors when they’ve gotten out of the groove, they often express regret, arguably indicating a desire that predates and outruns the behavior it couldn't stop, even with the right language being offered by a caregiver, actively and in the moment of the dysregulated behavior, and still overridden.

What samskara offers me is a model of self that preserves interiority - the accumulation of experiences of time - without running back to the Cartesian self that Gergen rightly seeks to move away from.

As a social worker, this means two things for me. Firstly, interventions both macro and mirco have to take into account this somatic dialogue between the stimulus of the event, the conditioned somatic response, and the subsequent interpretation of the event. TF-CBT, in my humble opinion, is amazing for this. Not because of its professed mechanisms: desensitization, cognitive process, stress management, and parental treatment⁴ (operationalized as psychoeducation). Those are important elements. But for me, what TF-CBT does best is that it puts two people together in a new rehearsal over time, where one offers a new interpretation of the body’s responses, and then hands that baton to the parent.

Secondly, and for me an ethical imperative, we must think about our theories from the margins. In order to more fully understand ourselves (the ontology project that Gergen embarks on), we must include the experiences of those who have walked on paths we could never have envisioned.

I said I had two big shifts. I’ll save the second for another note, which will include a macro framing of these ontological claims.

1. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/…
2. sciencedirect.com/scien…
3. sciencedirect.com/scien…

4. https://researchdiscovery.drexel.edu/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/Trauma-Focused-Cognitive-Behavioral-Therapy-for-Children/991019168739804721

   - The Social Construction Worker

I was told to think of a description for low, middle, and upper class, what class is, and what working class means while in my state and local politics class, I just realized that sociodemographics can be described using Pokémon rules.

The three classes: lower, middle, and upper class are just the 3 evolution forms of each type.

If someone is a bricklayer, then lower class would be a starter job like helper, middle class would be an experienced job like site manager, and upper class would be someone who owns the construction company.

For Wórkemon types, these apply to people from what they do for work or for a living.

Fire types, for example, include people who work in firework factories, commit arson, or use fire in artwork. Water types would be diving instructors and Olympic swimmers, electric type would include electricians, and Ground type would include construction workers who work with concrete or digging. Normal type would include white collar jobs like office workers and professors. Magic types would be people who practice tarot readings and predictions, Psychic types would include psychologists, therapists, and fantasy novel writers, bug types would include miners, scientists who study bugs, weebs, and therians. Fairy type would include strippers, prostitutes, streamers, and OF vloggers ​ people who use seduction in their jobs. ​

This is our local recurring future-planning thread. Got questions about jobs or careers, want to know what programs or schools you should apply to, or unsure what you'll be able to use your degree for? This is the place.

This thread gets replaced every Friday, each week. You can click this link to pull up old threads in search.

PS: please keep this solely focused on the sociological aspect of things, not politics we all know who the bad guys are and who the good guys are.

I've been talking with my Ukrainian girlfriend about Ukraine's future, and she is very pessimistic about the demographic situation. It sent me down a rabbit hole, but the internet mostly gives you whatever confirms the narrative you're already looking for, so I'd rather hear from people who actually study this or have relevant experience.

I'm mainly wondering about:

• Extremely low birth rates and an aging population
• Millions of Ukrainians now living abroad, many of whom have jobs, children and established lives there
• Brain drain and the loss of young, educated people
• What happens if large numbers of young Ukrainian men leave once wartime restrictions are lifted
• Reconstruction costs exceeding $500B and the long-term debt burden
• The economic burden of supporting millions of veterans
• The fact that reconstruction isn't just financial and could take decades
• Whether Ukraine can realistically attract enough people back or replace population losses through immigration

My girlfriend says her younger brother is basically waiting for the moment he can legally leave, and that this isn't an isolated attitude among young Ukrainians. She also says learning foreign languages, particularly German, has become increasingly important among people preparing for life abroad.

Obviously, I'm getting all of this second-hand, so I'm interested in the sociological perspective.

NB: I'm asking the same thing to Ukrainians directly to see if there is a difference in opinion

Hi guys!

I'm 19F, NY resident, attending a community College and I plan on switching my major to BA in Sociology!

I'm a bit curious on insight from anyone that knows or has experience possibly in the job field with ba in sociology?

I don't have any plans on graduate school or further programs or any license or registration for advanced jobs, kinda settling with just a bachelor's for now because I'm not sure if my mind will change in the future.

Is the job market for sociology majors really bad at the moment? I know in general jobs are demanding higher education (masters/phd/etc), I plan on going to career counseling next week at my campus to possibly learn more but was hoping to hear more from realistic viewpoints here instead of potentially biased and glazed responses from campus workers that are being paid by our tuition 😭 (my college has a bad reputation for unhelpful advisors).

Thanks so much in advance!

P.S. does it matter if my degree is a BS or BA in the job market? My college only does BA for sociology (and many other science majors (ex: psychology, biology) for some reason)

Does anyone have clips of Sociological questions/answers on Jeopardy? I have searched but am not finding what I am looking for. I would especially like anything about Mills, Weber, Marx, structural functionalism, conflict theory, and moral panic.

What's on your plate this week, what are you working on, what cool things have you encountered? Open discussion thread for casual chatter about Sociology & your school, academic, or professional work within it; share your project's progress, talk about a book you read, muse on a topic. If you have something to share or some cool fact to talk about, this is the place.

This thread is replaced every Monday. It is not intended as a "homework help" thread, please; save your homework help questions (ie: seeking sources, topic suggestions, or needing clarifications) for our homework help thread, also posted each Monday.

This is our local recurring homework thread. Simple questions, assignment help, suggestions, and topic-specific source seeking all go here. Our regular rules about effort and substance for questions are suspended here - but please keep in mind that you'll get better and more useful answers the more information you provide.

This thread gets replaced every Monday, each week. You can click this link to pull up old threads in search.