I checked 9 sociology journals on Monday, August 24, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period August 17 to August 23, I found 13 new paper(s) in 4 journal(s).

Social Forces

Beneath consensus: political framing of gender-based violence in the Italian press, 2005–2023
Ester Fanelli
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Discourse on gender-based violence started as a political struggle driven by feminist movements allied with progressive parties in the 1970s. However, in recent years, both progressive and conservative Italian parties have proposed and approved laws to combat gender-based violence. The combination of cross-partisan legislation and sharp cultural divisions makes Italy an interesting case for examining how polarization can persist alongside legislative consensus. This study draws on a large corpus of newspaper articles (7,978) from progressive, moderate, and conservative national outlets to address the following questions: How did the distribution of frames of gender-based violence vary across the political spectrum between 2005 and 2023 (ideological polarization)? Did newspapers make explicit adversarial claims against the opposing political side (affective polarization), and if so, around which frames? Combining Structural Topic Modeling and qualitative content analysis, this article shows that the salience of gender-based violence increased across the political spectrum. However, ideological polarization persists regarding how newspapers describe gender-based violence and which solutions they privilege, with progressives increasingly focusing on preventive, rather than punitive, interventions. At the same time, gender-based violence became a catalyst for deep partisan divisions around gender identity and immigration, two discursive overlaps that fuel affective polarization. By examining the framing process as a site of both ideological and affective polarization, this study bridges the literatures on social problems and political polarization and provides a data-driven understanding about the actual content of opposing positions.
Review of “Fighting for a Foothold: How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle-Class Suburbia”
Max Besbris
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Defended neighborhoods, vulnerable routines: routine activities, collective efficacy, and the social ecology of discrimination
Nicolo P Pinchak, Christopher R Browning, Bethany Boettner, J Brandon Carter, Catherine A Calder
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We describe hypotheses about how features of urban settings—including location types, sociodemographic composition, and the extent of collective efficacy (CE)—are differentially related to Black and White individuals’ risks of experiencing discrimination while conducting routine activities. These hypotheses are then tested with data from a large, representative sample of caregivers in the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study (2014–2016). We find that Black individuals are twice as likely as White individuals to report experiencing discrimination in their routine activities, and this Black-White gap is further increased among workplaces, grocery stores, and businesses relative to other locations. Additionally, Black and White individuals report similarly increased probabilities of experiencing discrimination at schools. Consistent with an extension of research on “defended neighborhoods,” exposure to higher CE is positively associated with discrimination for Black individuals especially among areas high in socioeconomic status or high in proportion White population. However, for White individuals, exposure to higher CE is negatively associated with discrimination especially among areas low in socioeconomic status or low in proportion White population. This study underscores that measuring social processes at routine activity settings, rather than just in home neighborhoods, is essential for research on everyday well-being. Further, the findings complement calls to invest in the resource capacity of high-poverty and low-proportion White neighborhoods.
When hazards don’t make law: structural resonance in global disaster-law diffusion, 1960–2025
Maoxin Ye, Daniel P Aldrich
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This article asks why states adopt comprehensive national disaster laws. Rather than treating legislation as an automatic response to hazard exposure, we conceptualize disaster-law adoption as a process of structural resonance: regional diffusion pressures become consequential when they align with domestic governance needs and administrative capacity. Using a new country-year dataset of first adoptions across 204 states and territories from 1960 to 2025, we estimate Cox proportional hazards models with multiple imputation. Recent hazard exposure predicts adoption only in simpler specifications and loses significance once diffusion and state-structure variables are introduced. Regional adoption share strongly accelerates first adoption. Decentralization and government accountability are also associated with earlier enactment, and regional diffusion is amplified in more decentralized polities. The findings show that disaster legalization is not simply a functional response to risk. It is a sociological process in which external legal templates gain force where domestic authority is fragmented and the demand for administrative coordination is high.
Review of “Detroit Never Left: Black Space, White Borders, Latino Crossings”
Jessica Welburn Paige
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Review of “Becoming Boundless: Indian Transnational Entrepreneurs in the Global Economy”
Pyong Gap Min
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Social Science Research

Marriage endures, fertility evolves: Family dynamics and life satisfaction in China
Mengsha Luo
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The intersection of gender and education in care work: How work from home reshaped care-related travel
Sarah George
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Doing gender, doing health: Disentangling the relationship between gender and health lifestyles
Bing Han, Trenton D. Mize
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Sociological Science

Social Class Differences in Parenting? Revisiting Classed Childrearing through a Video-Ethnography of Mealtime
Joanne Golann, Karen Kozlowski, Kara Brennan
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Socius

The Dead among Us: A Population Pyramid of the Living U.S. Population and Their Deceased Close Relatives, 2020
Emily Smith-Greenaway, Ashton Verdery
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Sociologists increasingly recognize the significance of social ties with nonhuman entities, including the dead. Nearly one half of Americans report having direct contact with a deceased relative in the past year alone. Yet we lack knowledge of the size and contours of this shadow population that, for some, features significant social actors. The authors generated a population pyramid of deceased relative ties of the currently living population, focusing specifically on close family members, defined as deceased grandparents, parents, siblings, spouses, and/or children, using demographic microsimulations of kinship networks and population structures for Black and white Americans. The resulting figure demonstrates the need for further sociological efforts to study the significance of this large and distinctly structured population of deceased relatives who are still among us in the minds and the memories of the living.
The End of Friday Nights with Friends
Neal Caren
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This study examines how Americans’ time with friends has changed over the week, focusing not on how much social interaction has declined but on when it has. Using American Time Use Survey data from 2003 to 2024 (N = 243,095), I map hourly patterns of “friend time” across the days of the week. In the early 2000s, social life followed a clear weekly rhythm: Modest weekday interaction built toward pronounced peaks on Friday and Saturday nights. Since the mid-2010s, that rhythm has collapsed. Friday night, once a central site of social activity, now looks like a typical weeknight. Saturday remains elevated but less so than before. Overall, time with friends has fallen by more than half. The mix of social activities, however, has remained stable. Americans have not replaced one form of interaction with another; they have reduced social interaction across the board. These findings point to a temporal reorganization of social life marked by the disappearance of the “night out.”
A Cross-National Study of Beliefs in Science and Value-Beliefs-Norms Perspectives: How Does Exposure to Climate Change Shape Beliefs
Maliha Mahbub, Ronald Kwon
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Environmental values, beliefs, and norms (VBN) have long been an important framework to understand environmentally conscious behaviors. Scholars have only begun to integrate how emerging belief systems that include faith in science to solve environmental problems may be incorporated into VBN perspectives. Although scholars have made preliminary theoretical bridges, scholars remain divided over how technological optimism intersects with norms, values, and environmental behaviors. Using historical data from the 2020 International Social Survey Programme that covered 28 countries, we applied latent class analysis and identified four distinctive types of attitudinal clusters. Two of these clusters ranked high on technological optimism (i.e., eco-modernists) but notably differed in respect to VBN dimensions compared to other pro-environmental clusters that emphasized conservation, less consumption, and greater acceptance of economic degrowth. We also found evidence that direct exposure to environmental disasters may in some instances have increased the likelihood of being in the conservationist cluster that were defined by high environmental intentions, beliefs, and behaviors—findings that were largely consistent with VBN literatures. However, we also found that exposure to climate change may have also led to a doubling down in faith in science in other instances—findings that were consistent with faith in science literatures.