I checked 9 sociology journals on Monday, December 15, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period December 08 to December 14, I found 11 new paper(s) in 6 journal(s).

Social Forces

Review of “Birth Behind Bars: The Carceral Control of Pregnant Women in Prison”
Katie Quinn
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Converging or unequal retirement patterns? Late working lives, retirement trajectories, and pension income in Germany over three decades of cohorts
Kun Lee, Bernhard Ebbinghaus
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Scholars increasingly recognize retirement transitions as gradual, complex, and unequal processes that shape inequalities in later-life outcomes, while the patterns of retirement are strongly influenced by welfare state reforms and socioeconomic transformations. Germany presents a unique case where late working lives are highly stratified, yet early retirement trends have dramatically reversed since major reforms in the 1990s, while facing multiple recessions. Against this backdrop, our study examines the dynamics of social stratification in retirement processes and their relationship with pension income following major transformations in Germany after reunification. Using administrative pension insurance records linked with survey data, we combine sequence and cluster analyses with regression models to study the late working lives in Germany across three decades of birth cohorts until 2019. Results demonstrate a gradual shift from early retirement trajectories to the “standard” type of retirement, with persistent disparities by education level. Women’s rising later-life employment has been driven more by flexible/part-time trajectories than standard forms, while some convergence is observed between the East and West. Differences in retirement trajectories significantly explain variations in public pension income, net of socio-demographic characteristics and lifetime work histories.

Social Networks

Alter composition with overlapping group memberships
Martin G. Everett, Stephen P. Borgatti
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Social Science Research

How probability distributions felled the case for the beneficial effects of income inequality: and other adventures of probability distributions on the knowledge quest
Guillermina Jasso
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Sociological Methods & Research

An Ordinal Item Response Model for Understanding Attitudes
Ingrid Mauerer, Gerhard Tutz
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We present an item response model for ordinal public opinion data to understand individual-level variation in attitudes as a function of covariates. The approach allows investigating how individuals (or population subgroups) differ in substantive stances and attitude strength. It is a two-dimensional partial credit model that incorporates covariates linked to attitude direction and strength into the basic model. We exemplify the types of substantive insights into heterogeneity that can be obtained from the approach but not from existing models with two applications: attitudes toward gender equality (European Values Study) and the evaluation of presidential candidates (American National Election Study).

Sociological Science

The Forward March of Categorical Tolerance in the United States
Omar Lizardo
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How Do (Human) Child Welfare Workers Respond to Machine-Generated Risk Scores?
Martin Eiermann, Maria Fitzpatrick, Katharine Sadowski, Christopher Wildeman
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Generative AI in Sociological Research: State of the Discipline
AJ Alvero, Dustin Stoltz, Oscar Stuhler, Marshall Taylor
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Socius

Gender, Field Context, and the Unequal Returns to Research Specialization among U.S. Social Scientists and Humanities Scholars
Eehyun Kim
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Prior research suggests that women researchers face penalties for being less specialized, contributing to gender gaps in academia. However, how field characteristics shape these patterns remains underexplored. The author examines gender differences in research specialization and their impact on academic outcomes across different field contexts in social sciences and humanities. Using 1,120,175 publications by 39,135 social scientists and humanities scholars at U.S. universities (1950–2025) from OpenAlex, the author maps academic fields using word embeddings and analyzes specialization patterns by gender. The findings show that gender gaps in research specialization are deeply conditioned by field context. In male-dominated fields, women have significantly broader research interests than men, while this gap diminishes and reverses in more gender-balanced fields. Although broader publication trajectories help women increase publication output, this strategy carries steeper citation penalties for women than for men. The results suggest that academic fields act as sites of inequality production, channeling women toward research patterns that boost immediate productivity while undermining long-term scholarly influence. This calls for greater focus on meso-level analysis to understand how complex feedback loops create gendered pathways in academic careers.
It’s Not You, It’s the Market: When Satisfied Workers Contemplate Quitting
Scott Schieman, Alexander Wilson, Paul Glavin
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Conventional views of turnover intentions emphasize job dissatisfaction as a fundamental determinant. The authors investigate how generalized perceptions of most other workers’ quality of working life moderate the relationship between job satisfaction and turnover intentions. Using two nationally representative surveys of American workers from November 2023 and June 2024 ( n = 7,500), the authors confirm a negative association between personal job satisfaction and turnover intentions. The authors then discover, however, that the generalized perceptions of the quality of working life attenuate that negative association. The likelihood that satisfied workers report turnover intentions increases when they perceive that most others have high job satisfaction, good management-employee relations, secure jobs, fair pay, and meaningful work. These patterns hold net of personal job qualities. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for turnover cognitions and action and interpret the patterns within the frame of social comparison processes and generalized perceptions of the labor market.
Inequality on Top of the Hill: Race, Pay, and Representation among Congressional Staff Members
James R. Jones, Mireia Triguero Roura
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U.S. congressional staffers guide the federal lawmaking process. They assist and advise lawmakers in nearly all dimensions of congressional work. Because of their influence as policymakers in our multiracial democracy, the racial composition of staffers matters. The authors use congressional payroll data from 2001 to 2013, along with predictive algorithms, to investigate how racial groups are employed and compensated. First, the data show that Whites are overrepresented across all staff positions, most noticeably in top-paid positions. Second, the authors find that all racial groups have a significantly lower rate of pay compared with Whites. The results indicate that some, but not all, of this gap is driven by the underrepresentation of racial minorities in higher paying jobs. The consequences of a racialized congressional workplace are far reaching and shape policy creation as well as political participation. The authors contend that Congress must publish more reliable and better organized workforce data to become accountable for its hiring practices.