Has Pandemic Threat Stoked Xenophobia? How COVID-19 Influences California Voters' Attitudes toward Diversity and Immigration.

Sociological theory and historical precedent suggest that pandemics engender scapegoating of outgroups, but fail to specify how the ethnoracial boundaries defining outgroups are drawn. Using a survey experiment that primed half of the respondents (California registered voters) with questions about COVID-19 during April 2020, we ask how the pandemic influenced attitudes toward immigration, diversity and affect toward Asian Americans. In the aggregate, the COVID prime did not affect attitudes toward immigrants, but did reduce support for policies opening a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and reduced appreciation of California's diversity. Respondents reported rarely feeling anger or fear toward Asian Americans, and rates were unaffected by the COVID prime. A non-experimental comparison between attitudes toward immigrants in September 2019 and April 2020 found a positive change, driven by change among Asian-American and Latino respondents. The results provide selective support for the proposition that pandemics engender xenophobia. At least in April 2020 in California, increased bias crimes against Asian Americans more likely reflected politicians' authorization of scapegoating than broad-based racial antagonism.

In the mix: Social integration and social media adoption.

What is the nature of the relationship between online and offline social life? Specifically, how does participation in the traditional forms of social life of a community shape social media adoption? Using a unique, two-wave panel dataset with saturated network data from over 20,000 students in 56 New Jersey middle schools, we test how measures of integration into a community are associated with adoption and discontinuation of social media platforms over the course of a school year. Social media adoption and discontinuation are related to the extent of students' bonding integration (social connections and social support) and competitive integration (related to status and dominance hierarchies) into the social life of the school, where more integrated students are more likely to adopt more social media platforms. Social media provides a space for community members to be in the know and to be known, both of which are more valuable with greater social integration.

Childbearing Worldviews and Contraceptive Behavior Among Young Women.

OBJECTIVE: To classify young women into groups based on their childbearing worldviews-patterns of attitudes about domains related to childbearing-and to test whether these groups predict contraceptive behavior. BACKGROUND: Contraceptive behavior-defined here as contraceptive use or abstinence-among young women in the United States illustrates the often puzzling relationship between attitudes and behavior. This study argues that considering sets of attitudes relevant to childbearing in relation to each other can explain apparent contradictions between attitudes and contraceptive behavior. METHOD: Using data from the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life study of young women (N=832), this study analyzes the relationships among attitudes about childbearing by using latent class analysis to partition survey respondents into meaningful groups, and then multinomial logistic regression analysis to examine the relationship between group membership and contraceptive behavior. Latent class analysis (LCA) identifies classes that share similar relationships between responses across a series of variables to measure childbearing worldviews. RESULTS: Latent class analysis identifies six classes of young women that share childbearing worldviews, four of which were predicted by existing literature. Membership in those classes is then shown to predict contraceptive behavior, an important behavioral outcome. CONCLUSION: The concept of worldviews and the method for identifying them will allow family researchers to identify meaningful groups in a population, as well as to generate theories about childbearing and contraceptive behavior.

Fertility Preferences and Cognition: Religiosity and Experimental Effects of Decision Context on College Women.

Better models of culture and cognition may help researchers understand fertility and family formation. We examine cognition about fertility using an experimental survey design to investigate how fertility preferences of college women are affected by two prompts that bring to mind fertility-relevant factors: career aspirations and financial limitations. We test the effects of these prompts on fertility preferences and ask how effects vary with respondent religiosity, an aspect of social identity related to fertility preferences. We find significant effects of treatment on fertility preferences when accounting for religiosity: less religious women who considered their career aspirations or financial limitations reported smaller desired family size, but this effect was attenuated for more religious women. Our study demonstrates how fertility preferences are shaped by decision contexts for some socio-demographic groups. We discuss how the findings support a social-cognitive model of fertility.

The Implicit Activation Mechanism of Culture: A Survey Experiment on Associations with Childbearing.

This paper proposes a mechanism by which exposure to forms of culture "in the world" activates individuals' cognitive associations beneath conscious awareness, making certain behaviors more likely. A survey experiment illustrates part of the proposed mechanism, testing whether cues that make salient a shared cultural representation affect the activation of individuals' associations with childbearing. Drawing on cultural beliefs regarding the ostensible contradiction between close relations and monetary exchange, we expect that making one of these spheres salient would inhibit activation of associations with the other sphere. As predicted, respondents randomly assigned to a cue regarding family have fewer associations between childbearing and finances. We demonstrate the relevance of these findings to respondents' fertility desires, a measure connected to behavior. We discuss the conditions under which this mechanism may exert the most influence on behavior and outline key future research questions that the proposed model introduces.

Changing climates of conflict: A social network experiment in 56 schools.

Theories of human behavior suggest that individuals attend to the behavior of certain people in their community to understand what is socially normative and adjust their own behavior in response. An experiment tested these theories by randomizing an anticonflict intervention across 56 schools with 24,191 students. After comprehensively measuring every school's social network, randomly selected seed groups of 20-32 students from randomly selected schools were assigned to an intervention that encouraged their public stance against conflict at school. Compared with control schools, disciplinary reports of student conflict at treatment schools were reduced by 25% over 1 year. The effect was stronger when the seed group contained more "social referent" students who, as network measures reveal, attract more student attention. Network analyses of peer-to-peer influence show that social referents spread perceptions of conflict as less socially normative.

The salience of social referents: a field experiment on collective norms and harassment behavior in a school social network.

Persistent, widespread harassment in schools can be understood as a product of collective school norms that deem harassment, and behavior allowing harassment to escalate, as typical and even desirable. Thus, one approach to reducing harassment is to change students' perceptions of these collective norms. Theory suggests that the public behavior of highly connected and chronically salient actors in a group, called social referents, may provide influential cues for individuals' perception of collective norms. Using repeated, complete social network surveys of a public high school, we demonstrate that changing the public behavior of a randomly assigned subset of student social referents changes their peers' perceptions of school collective norms and their harassment behavior. Social referents exert their influence over peers' perceptions of collective norms through the mechanism of everyday social interaction, particularly interaction that is frequent and personally motivated, in contrast to interaction shaped by institutional channels like shared classes. These findings clarify the development of collective social norms: They depend on certain patterns of and motivations for social interactions within groups across time, and are not static but constantly reshaped and reproduced through these interactions. Understanding this process creates opportunities for changing collective norms and behavior.

The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets.

Persistent racial inequality in employment, housing, and a wide range of other social domains has renewed interest in the possible role of discrimination. And yet, unlike in the pre-civil rights era, when racial prejudice and discrimination were overt and widespread, today discrimination is less readily identifiable, posing problems for social scientific conceptualization and measurement. This article reviews the relevant literature on discrimination, with an emphasis on racial discrimination in employment, housing, credit markets, and consumer interactions. We begin by defining discrimination and discussing relevant methods of measurement. We then provide an overview of major findings from studies of discrimination in each of the four domains; and, finally, we turn to a discussion of the individual, organizational, and structural mechanisms that may underlie contemporary forms of discrimination. This discussion seeks to orient readers to some of the key debates in the study of discrimination and to provide a roadmap for those interested in building upon this long and important line of research.