A 1975 study on graduate admissions at Berkeley found that male applicants had a substantially higher likelihood of being admitted, compared to women. However, upon closer examination the presence of aggregation paradoxes do not legitimize the conclusion that women were discriminated against.
Today, I am happy to present to you the first edition of the Curving Normality blog carnival. It is all about the quantitative social sciences, and aims at bringing together high quality blog posts about our lovely profession. With just a few weeks of preparation, I am very pleased with the number of submissions, and especially glad with their quality. Apparently, the quantitative social scientists are quite well represented in the blogosphere!
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Last saturday, leader of the Dutch right-wing liberals (VVD) Mark Rutte, presented a concept version of his new declaration of principles. His members, however, disagreed on some of the principles but focused mainly how some sentences were formulated. Is that all, you might think: linguistics only?
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How well do migrant’s children fare in the schooling systems of the receiving countries? That has been the main question of sociologists Levels ((I personally know and work with the main author of this publication.)), Dronkers, and Kraaykamp. Using advanced statistical techniques on newly available (survey) data, they were able to improve upon existing research in the field of educational sociology in exiting ways.
The authors of the article — recently published in American Sociological Review — were able to take into account influences from both (characteristics of) country of origin, country of destination, and the migrant community in the country of origin. The did so by estimating advanced Cross Classified hierarchical regression models on the newly available data from the 2003 wave of the Project for International Student Assessment (PISA). Student performance of migrant’s children was measured at the hand of their math test scores.
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I’ve just started on my sociology today ‘project’ and already I’m running late. At least one week of daily posts should be do-able, wouldn’t you think?
Well, today for the blogs. I often read some blogs on planeetgroenlinks.nl, so today a selection of what I read on June 11.
Just started today, I wrote another Sociology Today, trying to catch up on the news. I’m not sure whether or not this is going to be a daily section, but perhaps that would be a nice challenge, forming a nice way of selecting the news that is important to me and to structure it neatly.
While the debate on the selection of embryo’s (see yesterday’s Sociology Today) is still roaring in the Netherlands, Piet Schenkelaars argues that gene technology should be relieved from its bad image. This closely connects to the question how technology and our means of food production connects to the way people think. According to Gerhard Lenski, with his ecological-evolutionairy theory, mode of food-production in societies has developed, strongly influencing the structure of society (division of labour) and mode of thought (more activistic attitude). Perhaps the possibilities delivered by gen-tech and the promise to increase food production even further will have strong influences on human thought and morality indeed.
There is always a lot of news on inequality. What to choose? Today I did not select the poor position of rejected refugees in South Africa, but a more positive development regarding inequality. Absolutely one of the more important issues in the newspaper today. But no, for today a somewhat more optimistic issue.
In a short article on the increasing number of students not completing their higher education, it is also mentioned that the number of migrants finishing a higher education is relatively increasing. So, their unequal education position is starting to become more even.
According to the newspaper article, people living in the Dutch city Rotterdam have had more nuisances and problems with immigrants from the Antilles. Clearly, this connects to the main sociological question of who has contact with whom, and, more directly, who has conflicts with whom. It could however have been categorized under ‘inequality’ just as well, for to a large extent different patterns of criminal behavior can be attributed to differences in social economic position.
The reason that I mention it, is that I think that the headline on the article is misleading: it sounds like that these people have started to misbehave more seriously. But, according to the police, it is due to their changed policy: the police started using a zero tolerance policy. Thereby, the conclusion should be that we’re only talking about a methodological issue, not a substantive one.