I checked 9 sociology journals on Saturday, June 27, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period June 20 to June 26, I found 18 new paper(s) in 5 journal(s).

American Journal of Sociology

Kinship in Black and White Families: The Strength of Horizontal Ties
Thomas Leopold, Matthijs Kalmijn
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Social Forces

The development of inequality during primary education: investigating the genetic and environmental sources underlying learning differences
Kim Stienstra
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Are differences in educational performance between pupils at the start of schooling—and their underlying genetic and environmental sources—reproduced, accumulated, or compensated over the primary school career? I investigate this using reading comprehension and mathematics test scores of over 4,000 same-sex and opposite-sex twin pairs, identified in the Netherlands Cohort Study on Education (Grades 1–5). Biometric latent growth models show, first, that most of the achievement inequality is already present at the start of education and is related to genetic variance. Second, these initial achievement differences are somewhat compensated over time, more strongly for mathematics than for reading. This leveling is related to decreasing genetic and environmental differences. Third, at the same time, new sources of achievement differences emerge during primary education that are unrelated to initial achievement. These new sources of differences are captured by variance in growth rates and are mostly genetic. As a result, although inequality linked to initial achievement decreases, the total systematic inequality in achievement increases over time because these new sources of differences outweigh the compensation of initial differences. In other words, over the course of primary education, inequality based on where children start remains prominent yet gradually decreases, while “new” inequality based on how fast children learn is simultaneously opens up.
The triple burden: low-SES women and the binds of caretaking, work, and college
Kaylee T Matheny, Ilana M Horwitz, Natalie Milan
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Scholars have identified women’s simultaneous labor force and domestic responsibilities as a “double burden” but have not fully explored how these demands intersect with pursuing higher education. Research consistently shows women’s increasing participation in higher education, with women—especially from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds—outpacing men in bachelor’s degree attainment. Using nationally representative longitudinal surveys and matched educational outcome data, we examine students’ educational trajectories from their early teens through late twenties. Our findings reveal that despite gains in college enrollment and completion, low-SES women experience significantly more interruptions in their educational pursuits after enrolling in college than both low-SES men and high-SES women. Using longitudinal interviews with a matched subsample of 132 participants, we identify the presence of a “triple burden”: the simultaneous expectations of caretaking, work, and college for low-SES women. This concept contributes to the sociologies of gender, social class, domestic labor, and higher education, emphasizing the need for an intersectional understanding of the life course.
Review of “Laboring in the Shadows: Precarity and Promise in Black Youth Work”
Louise Seamster
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Review of “Labor Unions and Democratic Unrest in North Africa: Protest and Resistance in Tunisia and Morocco”
Colin Beck
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Review of “What We Inherit: How New Technologies and Old Myths Are Shaping Our Genomic Future”
Kristen Karlberg
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Review of “Colonial Surveillance: Technologies of Identification and Control in Japan’s Empire”
Patricia Steinhoff
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Do updates of group-level and individual-level information of ethnic minority applicants mitigate statistical discrimination in hiring?
Akira Igarashi, Susumu Cato
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Labor market discrimination against ethnic minority applicants remains persistent despite extensive research and policy interventions. While social scientists have thoroughly examined statistical discrimination—wherein employers rely on group-level information to infer candidates’ future productivity due to limited individual information in resumes—fundamental questions remain unanswered regarding the relative impact of different information types. Specifically, it remains unclear whether employers are more responsive to group-level or individual–level information updates in their hiring decisions. Through a two–stage survey experiment with hiring human resources (HR) professionals at Japanese companies, this study examines how updating different types of information affects hiring discrimination. The experiment randomly updated group-level information about ethnic minority workers’ productivity (specifically, that ethnic majority and minority workers are equally productive) and provided additional individual–level applicant information. Results demonstrate that while additional individual-level information completely eliminates ethnic discrimination, updating group-level information fails to reduce discriminatory practices. Moreover, group-level information updates actually nullify the positive effects of individual-level information. These findings suggest that HR professionals’ initially low expectations of minority applicants can be easily overcome through additional individual information. However, group-level information updates raise baseline expectations and the same individual-level information becomes insufficient to exceed these elevated thresholds.
Review of “Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality”
Alexandrea J Ravenelle
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The nonlinear nature of labor market sorting: explaining wage inequalities between and within sociodemographic groups
Lucas Sage
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Sociodemographic groups with higher average wages also exhibit higher internal wage dispersion, partly explaining the overrepresentation of older, educated men in top wage percentiles. Despite being widely documented, the origins of this relationship remain poorly understood. This article proposes an explanation rooted in sorting—the tendency for workers who already command higher wages to end up in the organizations and occupations that pay the most. I argue that sorting is not merely positive but also nonlinear: its strength intensifies at higher wage levels. Because higher-wage groups experience stronger sorting, their internal wage dispersion is inflated, which contributes to the relationship between group mean wages and internal dispersion. Using French administrative data, I employ variance decompositions and simulations to quantify these effects. I find that nonlinear sorting accounts for 13% of the covariance between micro-group mean wages and internal dispersion, and for 25% of the variance in wage dispersion across groups. Simulations combined with variance function regression identify education and age as the primary dimensions along which nonlinear sorting operates. In addition, the study confirms and extends prior findings on positive sorting, showing that it accounts for 38% of between-group inequality.

Social Networks

When do acquaintance networks grow? Life events, civic participation, and social dynamics
Benjamín Muñoz, Alejandro Plaza, Vicente Espinoza
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Relationships between node degrees and hyperedge sizes in empirical hypergraphs
Bogumił Kamiński, Paweł Prałat, Aleksander Wojnarowicz, Mateusz Zawisza
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Introducing VINA: An engaging and ethically responsible interface to collect social network data including cognitive social structures on smartphones
Tom Nijs, Tobias H. Stark, ZsĂłfia Boda
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Social Science Research

Risk, return, and resonance: Symbolic considerations in everyday stock selection
Adam S. Hayes, Léna Pellandini-Simányi, Ambreen Tour Ben-Shmuel, Jan-Hendrik Bucher
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Reassessing the gendered link between maternal employment and adult children's labor market participation: A trajectory-based approach
Xueqian Chen
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Socius

Redefining Roles: Household Migration and Childhood Labor
Emma Labovitz, Sarah Hayford
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Migration by some household members has significant economic, social, and psychological impacts both on migrants and on members of the household who do not migrate, especially children. This study examines one dimension of children’s experiences of migration by exploring its associations with their time use, focusing on the sending context of Nepal, a country of high levels of primarily circular migration. Drawing on data from the Family Migration and Early Life Outcomes project, this study uses ordinary least squares regression to examine variation in time spent on household labor among children ages 5 to 17, comparing children in households with no migrants, households with only male migrants, and households with female migrants. We find that children in households with female migrants spend less time on household labor than children in households without migrants, with this association robust to controls for child and household characteristics and migrant remittances. Children in households with male migrants spend more time on household chores, but the magnitude and significance of this association vary across specifications. These results highlight migration’s complex associations with children’s time use and well-being, pushing migration scholarship toward a broader conceptualization of migration that incorporates multiple migrants and outcomes across multiple dimensions and domains.
Visualizing the Adoption of Large Language Models across Sociology Subfields
Likun Cao
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Generative large language models (LLMs) entered scientific writing at scale after the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022, but their adoption in sociological research remains largely unmapped. This visualization estimates the share of LLM-modified sentences in 1.49 million abstracts from sociology papers indexed in OpenAlex between January 2018 and December 2025, using the distributional alpha estimator developed by Liang and colleagues. By tracing change over time, across substantive subfields, and across author groups, it provides a field-level view of how rapidly LLM-assisted writing has diffused through sociology. The visualization highlights three patterns. First, estimated LLM modification rose from near zero before late 2022 to 24.3 percent of abstract sentences in July–December 2025. Second, adoption varies substantially and persistently across subfields: empirical and applied areas show the highest estimated uptake, while theory-oriented subfields remain lowest. Third, data from the post-ChatGPT era show that LLM-assisted writing is also more prevalent among younger scholars, authors from less prestigious institutions, and publications in less prestigious outlets. Together, these patterns show that LLM use in sociology has become widespread but remains unevenly distributed across scholarly communities.
Studying the West and Ignoring the Rest: Do Stylized Facts Established in the Christian West Generalize?
Landon Schnabel
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Social science seeks to uncover general patterns, yet much research centers on what the author calls WEIRDS (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, and secular) societies, which are dominated by one religion, Christianity, and shaped by its legacy and continuing influence. This WEIRDS focus is especially problematic in studies of religion, as it risks mistaking Christianity-influenced patterns for universal trends. Using global data from wave 7 of the World Values Survey covering 66 countries, this study examines three stylized “facts” about religion: (1) younger people are less religious than older people, (2) women are more religious than men, and (3) religiosity opposes scientific views. Findings reveal considerable variation across religious traditions and cultural contexts, challenging the global applicability of each. Across the world population, younger people are actually more religious than older people. Gender differences in religiosity vary by tradition, with men more religious in Muslim contexts depending on how religiosity is measured. And the relationship between religiosity and science attitudes is not universally negative, with some groups showing positive associations. By demonstrating that stylized facts from WEIRDS do not generalize globally, this study underscores the need for broader cultural representation in social science.