Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 22, 1996

This essay characterizes “feminist methodology” as a field of inquiry rooted in feminist activism and in feminists' critiques of the standard procedures of social science. Feminist methodologists do not use or prescribe any single research method; rather, they are united through various efforts to include women's lives and concerns in accounts of society, to minimize the harms of research, and to support changes that will improve women's status. Recent writing on feminist methodology has addressed the uses of qualitative and quantitative research tools, possibilities and problems of research relations, epistemologies for feminist research, and strategies for developing more inclusive methodologies.

Gender relations—embodied in the sexual division of labor, compulsory heterosexuality, gendered forms of citizenship and political participation, ideologies of masculinity and femininity, and the like—profoundly shape the character of welfare states. Likewise, the institutions of social provision—the set of social assistance and social insurance programs and universal citizenship entitlements to which we refer as “the welfare state” —affect gender relations. Until recently, two broad approaches to gender relations and welfare states predominated: one which saw states contributing to the social reproduction of gender hierarchies, and a second which saw states having an ameliorative impact on gender inequality. More recently, two new strands of research have emerged emphasizing the variation in the effects of social policies on gender.

In this essay I review recent studies of adult child–parent relationships, with an emphasis on studies using nationally representative samples. Adult children and their parents have frequent contact and emotionally satisfying relationships, but exchanges of practical and financial assistance are uncommon. Continuing relationships between adult children and their parents depend on women's work as kinkeepers. Parental divorce greatly weakens adult children's relationships with their fathers and also tends to weaken relationships with mothers. Adult child–parent relationships are not stronger in black families than in white families. The most pressing need for future research is the development of new theoretical formulations.

The literature on the effect of exposure to media violence (including exposure to violent pornography) on aggressive behavior is critically reviewed. Evidence and theoretical arguments regarding short-term and long-term effects are discussed. Three points are emphasized: 1. Exposure to violence in laboratory and field experiments is as likely to affect nonaggressive antisocial behavior as it does aggressive behavior. The pattern is consistent with a sponsor effect rather than a modeling effect: an experimenter who shows violent films creates a permissive atmosphere; 2. the message that is learned from the media about when it is legitimate to use violence is not much different from the message learned from other sources, with the exception that illegitimate violence is more likely to be punished in media presentations; 3. the fact that violent criminals tend to be versatile—they commit nonviolent crimes as well—is inconsistent with explanations that emphasize proviolence socialization (from the media or other sources). I conclude that exposure to television violence probably does have a small effect on violent behavior for some viewers, possibly because the media directs viewer's attention to novel forms of violent behavior that they would not otherwise consider.

Over the past decade, focus groups and group interviews have reemerged as a popular technique for gathering qualitative data, both among sociologists and across a wide range of academic and applied research areas. Focus groups are currently used as both a self-contained method and in combination with surveys and other research methods, most notably individual, in-depth interviews. Comparisons between focus groups and both surveys and individual interviews help to show the specific advantages and disadvantages of group interviews, concentrating on the role of the group in producing interaction and the role of the moderator in guiding this interaction. The advantages of focus groups can be maximized through careful attention to research design issues at both the project and the group level. Important future directions include: the development of standards for reporting focus group research, more methodological research on focus groups, more attention to data analysis issues, and more engagement with the concerns of the research participants.

This paper reviews a diverse literature on gender and higher education. Gender inequality is more pronounced in some aspects of the educational systems than in others. The analysis distinguishes 1) access to higher education; 2) college experiences; and 3) postcollegiate outcomes. Women fare relatively well in the area of access, less well in terms of the college experience, and are particularly disadvantaged with respect to the outcomes of schooling. Explanations of gender inequality in higher education should distinguish between these different aspects of education and should explain those contexts in which women have attained parity as well as those in which they continue to lag behind men.

This chapter discusses the concept of class in an important subfield, the sociology of law. Class, a pivotal institution of society, was central to the earliest studies of legal institutions and of law and inequality in particular. More recently, class has played a less important role. This chapter argues for the continuing importance of class and provides examples of its potential use in contemporary sociolegal research. The first part reviews early work that employed class and instrumental models of the state. Grounded, anti-formal models of law provided a contrasting view. Following wider trends in the discipline, sociology of law turned from structural models to theories of law as an ideology, and most recently, as reviewed in the second part, to law as an element of consciousness and experience. While acknowledging the value of contemporary research that documents a deeply textured, paradoxical, and nuanced analysis of the role of law in society, the third part argues for theorizing the link between experience and context, including the role of social class, and presents a research agenda for a sociology of law, where the relationship between law and class is considered both as institution and experience.

When computer networks link people as well as machines, they become social networks. Such computer-supported social networks (CSSNs) are becoming important bases of virtual communities, computer-supported cooperative work, and telework. Computer-mediated communication such as electronic mail and computerized conferencing is usually text-based and asynchronous. It has limited social presence, and on-line communications are often more uninhibited, creative, and blunt than in-person communication. Nevertheless, CSSNs sustain strong, intermediate, and weak ties that provide information and social support in both specialized and broadly based relationships. CSSNs foster virtual communities that are usually partial and narrowly focused, although some do become encompassing and broadly based. CSSNs accomplish a wide variety of cooperative work, connecting workers within and between organizations who are often physically dispersed. CSSNs also link teleworkers from their homes or remote work centers to main organizational offices. Although many relationships function off-line as well as on-line, CSSNs have developed their own norms and structures. The nature of the medium both constrains and facilitates social control. CSSNs have strong societal implications, fostering situations that combine global connectivity, the fragmentation of solidarities, the de-emphasis of local organizations (in the neighborhood and workplace), and the increased importance of home bases.

National health systems throughout the world face a number of pressures in common related to demography, epidemiology, developments in science and technology, medical demand, and rising public expectations. These pressures are producing convergence in the objectives and activities of these systems in several key areas, including cost-containment, health promotion, expansion of access, primary health care, patient choice, and the linkage between health and social services. At the same time, it is also necessary to recognize the role of political and governmental processes, as well as clinical and professional variables, in shaping different societal responses to health care challenges.

Research on interlocking directorates has gained increasing prominence within the field of organizations, but it has come under increasing criticism as well. This chapter presents an in-depth examination of the study of interlocking directorates. I focus initially on both the determinants and the consequences of interlocking directorates, reviewing alternative accounts of both phenomena. Special attention is paid to the processual formulations implied by various interlock analyses. I then address the two primary criticisms of interlock research and evaluate the tenability of these criticisms. I conclude with a discussion of future directions for interlock research.

In this chapter we review research on the division of household labor and its consequences. The review summarizes research focused on issues of measurement, including research on methods of gathering data on housework time and time use in general and discussions of various ways to operationalize the division of household labor. Some attention is paid to historical and theoretical work on housework and women's responsibility for it in particular, followed by a more detailed discussion of current empirical approaches to explaining the division of household labor as well as criticisms of these approaches. Finally, we review research that examines the consequences of the division of household labor, focusing on those studies that examine its impact on labor force participation and wages, marital and family satisfaction, psychological well-being, and perceptions of fairness.

This chapter examines cross-national differences in individual values, attitudes, and behaviors. The central question raised is how social-structural and cultural factors account for the differences found. After discussing a series of theoretical issues raised by this question, the chapter reviews the findings of four quantitative sociological research programs on modern cross-national differences. The program on individual modernity led by Alex Inkeles established that social-structural conditions associated with industrialization are linked to an increase in individuals' being open to new experience, rejecting traditional authority, and taking a rational, ambitious, orderly approach to both work and human problems. The cross-national research on the Kohn-Schooler hypothesis that self-directed work increases intellectual functioning and self-directed orientations confirmed the generality of that hypothesis and established that the social status and social class differences in these psychological characteristics found within different countries are largely the result of social-structurally determined differences in the opportunity for occupational self-direction. Eric Wright's cross-national research program on class structure and class consciousness provides evidence that in a range of countries social classes directly affect political attitudes, while acting as tangible barriers to mobility and personal relationships. The research deriving from John Meyer's theories on institutionalization highlights the importance of institutions and socially constructed views of reality for the development and maintenance of cross-national differences and similarities in cultural values and their behavioral embodiment. All four of the programs provide evidence of the continuing importance of historically determined cultural differences. All are also congruent with the hypothesis that speed of change generally decreases as we go from psychological to social-structural to cultural levels of phenomena—a possibility whose confirmation would provide a valuable tool for understanding how culture and social structure affect cross-national differences in values and behavior.

Log-linear methods provide a powerful framework and the statistical apparatus for rigorously analyzing categorical data. These methods were introduced and developed by Leo Goodman and others in the early 1970s. In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, Goodman, Alan Agresti, Clifford Clogg, Otis Dudley Duncan, and others showed how these models could help us to estimate associations between discrete variables, including ordered and unordered polytomies. The last decade has witnessed a set of diverse extensions of these techniques. This paper reviews the basic log-linear strategy and illustrates key concepts. Citations are given to other articles on these topics, many of which are nontechnical and contain substantive sociological applications.

In the last decade a revolution has occurred in the design of public opinion surveys. The principal breakthrough has been to combine the distinctive external validity advantages of the representative public opinion survey with the decisive internal validity strengths of the fully randomized, multifaceted experiment. The availability of computer-driven multifactorial, multivalent designs has encouraged a reorientation from narrowly methodological concerns to broader substantive issues. After a season in which the principal emphasis in survey-based experimentation was on standardization of measurement and methodological refinements, the emphasis now is on substantive discoveries and on innovation—new technology, new procedures, and new objectives. In this chapter, we survey the integration of experimental design and large-scale, representative, general population samples. After highlighting the limitations of the classic split-ballot experiment, we distinguish between nondirective and directive experimental variations, and, among the directive, between postdecisional and predecisional. We introduce a tripartite analytical scheme, sorting experimental variations as a function of whether they manipulate (i) the formulation of a choice, (ii) the context of choice, or (iii) the characteristics of the chooser. Finally we give an account of the experimental style now characteristic of general population attitude surveys, underlining its low emotional intensity and low cognitive demands, attributing both to features of (i) the interview site, (ii) the sample, (iii) the mode of interviewing, and (iv) considerations of ethics.

The far-reaching institutional change and societal transformation occurring in former state-socialist societies have attracted new social science interest in transition economies. This chapter reviews recent research on China, highlighting the theoretical arguments and findings of general interest to social scientists. The paper argues that a paradigm shift is taking place within research on China, from state-centered analysis to a theoretical approach that locates causal forces within a macrosocietal framework. Within a macrosocietal framework, state socialism is viewed as a distinctive institutional arrangement in which society, economy, and the state are integrated through society-wide redistributive arrangements. Forces in economic and political change emanate not only from political actors but from economic and social actors as well. The chapter reviews work in which a macrosocietal approach is used to address stratification, societal transformation, and marketization in reforming Chinese state socialism.

In this review of the relationship between marxism and East European transformations since 1989, we consider why Eastern Europe is so important to marxism and how marxists have addressed its transformations. We also point to similar analyses of these transformations generated by nonmarxists, and we review exemplary East European interpretations of marxism to demonstrate that the principal challenge in developing marxism in Eastern Europe lies outside its traditional substantive foci and methodological practices. We propose that in order for marxism to maintain itself as an integrated project without ignoring or dismissing Eastern Europe, it must do more than address questions of class and capitalist formation, problems that can be analyzed in parallel fashion without commitment to the normative aspect of socialism. It must also address directly the region's experience with, and rejection of, “really existing socialism,” rather than dismissing these and thereby allowing socialism to function as an ontologically absent but epistemologically structuring desire. In order for marxism to develop further in East European studies, we suggest it must find a way to rearticulate socialism's transcendent project within East European lifeworlds, a task grounded as much in discursive analyses of ideologies and identities as in the political economy of transformations.

Criminologists agree that the gender gap in crime is universal: Women are always and everywhere less likely than men to commit criminal acts. The experts disagree, however, on a number of key issues: Is the gender gap stable or variant over time and across space? If there is variance, how may it best be explained? Are the causes of female crime distinct from or similar to those of male crime? Can traditional sociological theories of crime explain female crime and the gender gap in crime? Do gender-neutral or gender-specific theories hold the most explanatory promise? In this chapter we first examine patterns of female offending and the gender gap. Second, we review the “gender equality hypothesis” as well as several recent developments in theorizing about gender differences in crime. Third, we expand on a gendered paradigm for explaining female crime first sketched elsewhere. We conclude with recommendations for future work.