Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...

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Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

It is argued that P-values and the tests based upon them give unsatisfactory results, especially in large samples. It is shown that, in regression, when there are many candidate independent variables, standard variable selection procedures can give very misleading results. Also, by selecting a single model, they ignore model uncertainty and so underestimate the uncertainty about quantities of interest. The Bayesian approach to hypothesis testing, model selection, and accounting for model uncertainty is presented. Implementing this is straightforward through the use of the simple and accurate BIC approximation, and it can be done using the output from standard software. Specific results are presented for most of the types of model commonly used in sociology. It is shown that this approach overcomes the difficulties with P-values and standard model selection procedures based on them. It also allows easy comparison of nonnested models, and permits the quantification of the evidence for a null hypothesis of interest, such as a convergence theory or a hypothesis about societal norms.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/271063.pdf

Bayesian Model Selection in Social Research

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

We investigate whether income inequality affects subsequent growth in a cross-country sample for 1965-90, using the models of Barro (1997), Bleaney and Nishiyama (2002) and Sachs and Warner (1997), with negative results. We then investigate the evolution of income inequality over the same period and its correlation with growth. The dominating feature is inequality convergence across countries. This convergence has been significantly faster amongst developed countries. Growth does not appear to influence the evolution of inequality over time. Outline

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/81822/1/02-28.pdf

Economic growth and income inequality

While ideologies consistently influence public opinions on climate change in Western democracies, whether they affect the Chinese public’s climate attitudes is unknown. By applying a well-established measure of Chinese ideology, this study conducted a nationwide survey (n = 1469) on the relationships between climate attitudes and ideologies, conspiracy beliefs, and science literacy. It is the first study to empirically investigate the impact of ideological tendencies, conspiracy beliefs, and conspiratorial thinking in shaping people’s climate attitudes. Among a series of novel findings, ideology was found to be a crucial factor in Chinese attitudes toward climate change, and economic ideology, in particular, was most strongly related to climate attitude. Moreover, somewhat counterintuitively, we found a positive link between respondents’ conspiratorial thinking and their climate awareness, as well as the failure of the moderation role of science literacy on ideological factors that influence climate attitude. All these findings suggest a mechanism behind the Chinese public’s perception of climate change, primarily working on the individual–state relationship.

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Ideologies, Conspiracy Beliefs, and the Chinese Public’s Politicized Attitudes to Climate Change

Social-demographic correlates of mindset in China

Abstract The traditional approach to studying intergenerational influences has been limited to a single-stranded framework, with a focus on the transmission of socioeconomic status across two generations. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model of dual-pathway intergenerational influence over multiple generations and test the model by utilizing recent high-quality three-generation panel data from China. The model consists of two intertwined pathways: a socioeconomic pathway measured with educational attainment and a psychological pathway measured with mindset. We show that mindset is a fundamental psychological factor strongly associated with multiple outcomes, including cognitive skills, personalities, and attitudes. Intergenerational influences operate via the transmissions of both mindset and socioeconomic status as well as the cross-domain pathways between the two. Our results offer new insights for a better understanding of intergenerational mobility and immobility.

Dual pathways of intergenerational influence over multiple generations

This paper revises the traditional Coale-Trussell method for analyzing age-specific marital fertility schedules in three ways. First it uses more recent and more reliable data from the World Fertility Survey. Second it tests alternative loglinear and log-multiplicative models....Third it incorporates natural fertility into the analysis of controlled fertility.... (EXCERPT)

Revising the Coale-Trussell method for analyzing age-specific marital fertility schedules.

Although numerous studies have examined the Chinese public’s attitudes towards climate change, few have shed light on how sociopolitical factors related to the policy and the state have shaped such attitudes. This constituted our research goal. Against the background of China’s Dual Carbon Goals, a national survey (n = 1469) was conducted to investigate the relationships between climate attitudes and climate benefit perception, institutional trust, policy familiarity, nationalism, and environmental values. Findings showed that respondents shared a high score of nationalism and a high level of trust in Chinese institutions. Their national benefit perception of climate action, nationalism, and trust in national institutions were strong determinants of their attitudes towards climate change. The findings suggested that for many Chinese, a lower-carbon future will be accompanied by a coming stronger nation, which is a key driver for people to adopt positive attitudes towards addressing climate change. As such, the current study revealed an alternative landscape of the determinants underlying people’s attitudes towards climate change. To our knowledge, this is the first scholarly effort in China to empirically demonstrate the predictive role of nationalistic value in shaping climate attitudes and is one of the earliest efforts in climate communication to test the impact of the policy on such attitudes.

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Yu Xie

Papers

Ideologies, Conspiracy Beliefs, and the Chinese Public’s Politicized Attitudes to Climate Change

Social-demographic correlates of mindset in China

Dual pathways of intergenerational influence over multiple generations

Revising the Coale-Trussell method for analyzing age-specific marital fertility schedules.

Lower Carbon, Stronger Nation: Exploring Sociopolitical Determinants for the Chinese Public’s Climate Attitudes