I checked 9 sociology journals on Wednesday, October 28, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period October 21 to October 27, I found 13 new paper(s) in 5 journal(s).

American Sociological Review

Incentivizing Equality? How Work-Family Policies Affect Parenthood Penalties in 27 Countries
Allison Dunatchik, Pilar Gonalons-Pons
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Work-family policies are theorized to shape the division of paid labor after parenthood, but recent studies have cast doubt on their importance. Leveraging harmonized longitudinal data spanning 27 countries and an analytic focus on couples and couple dynamics, our study shows that work-family policies do shape how divisions of paid labor change with parenthood, and that they also moderate the importance of couples’ relative resources as a determinant of the division of labor. We find that moderate-length paid maternal leave and greater childcare availability reduce parenthood penalties in couples’ division of paid work time, while prolonged leave exacerbates penalties. Furthermore, by focusing on couples, we provide novel evidence that partners’ relative resources do not operate uniformly across work-family policy contexts, showing that policies can incentivize couples to divide paid work in ways their relative resource profiles would not otherwise predict. We find that moderate-length paid leave and greater childcare availability encourage egalitarianism among male-breadwinner couples, although extended leave encourages greater gender traditionalism among female-breadwinner couples. These findings reveal that classic theories of household specialization and bargaining are not universal, and highlight the need for greater theoretical attention to how country- and couple-level forces interact to shape gender inequality.
Simply a Sign of the Season? Christmas Trees as Cultural Ciphers in Local Government Management of Diversity
Gary J. Adler, Damon Mayrl, Eric Plutzer, Jonathan S. Coley, Rebecca Sager, Elise Wolff
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How do local governments symbolically manage the diversity of their residents? Drawing from an original representative sample of local government officials, we use a novel survey experiment with open-ended survey responses to examine preferences for cultural objects that symbolically manage religious diversity, an axis of difference that is increasingly salient to social conflict. Our experiment randomly varies the content of holiday displays on government property to measure diversity management strategies. Results show that government officials prefer the assimilationist strategy of a Christmas tree—by itself—over multiculturalist and exclusivist strategies, which both include sectarian religious content. Officials also evaluate Christmas trees as the content least likely to signal government endorsement of religion, compared to other holiday displays. We argue that these patterns can be explained by conceiving of a Christmas tree as a cultural cipher, a well-known cultural object that affords a range of meanings and resonates across social identities as innocuous. We argue that cultural ciphers are useful for an assimilationist approach to managing diversity because their ambiguity allows them to act as a vehicle of symbolic inclusion while also sustaining the meanings of majority groups. We also consider how cultural ciphers may lose their power for civic solidarity.
What Do “Most People” Believe? Race, Gender, and the Generalized Other
Natasha Quadlin, Trenton D. Mize, Long Doan, Bianca Manago
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When people form beliefs in social life, they often calibrate their own thinking against what they anticipate “most people” think. Although prior research demonstrates the importance of these inferences, scholars have yet to examine who is best proxied by “most people.” Given persistent inequalities in U.S. society that advantage White men, as well as theories of cultural hegemony, we hypothesize that “most people’s” imagined beliefs are closely proxied by those of White men. We test these ideas using an original survey experiment conducted with a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults ( N = 2,089) in which we adapt 64 core items from the General Social Survey. Respondents were randomly assigned to answer these questions either from the perspective of most people, or from the perspective of designated race-gender groups. Contrary to our hypothesis, we find strong and consistent evidence that White men are not seen as standard-bearers for most social issues. Instead, perceptions of what most people believe are highly aligned with the imagined beliefs of White women. Importantly, this pattern emerges not because White women are seen as influential, but because White women are perceived as less extreme than other groups. We also observe variation across respondents, such that respondents tend to center their own race-gender group in conceptualizing most people’s beliefs (with White women typically close behind).

Social Forces

Religion and early fertility in the United States: changes during the second demographic transition
Jeremy E Uecker, Riley S Peterson
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We assess how changes in early fertility varied among US women with different religious characteristics, and how the associations between religion and early fertility changed across birth cohorts from 1950 to 1993. Using data from the National Survey of Family Growth, we examine the timing of nonmarital, marital, and overall first births through age 24. Results from life tables and discrete-time event history models reveal that increases in early nonmarital first births were smaller among women who attended religious services more frequently in childhood, whereas early marital births declined at similar rates irrespective of childhood religious service attendance. Because early births became increasingly nonmarital across birth cohorts, women who attended religious services more frequently in childhood became less likely to have an early birth overall. Early fertility differences by religious tradition generally converged across cohorts, although women raised conservative Protestant continued to have higher likelihoods of early birth relative to women raised in other religious traditions net of controls. Women who were raised nonreligious remained similar to conservative Protestants in their likelihood of nonmarital childbearing across cohorts and became statistically similar to them in their overall early births in the latest cohort. Changes in early fertility during the second demographic transition therefore varied by religious background and reshaped the relationship between religion and early fertility.
Review of “Major Trade-Offs: The Surprising Truths About College Majors and Entry-Level Jobs”
Allison L Hurst
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Review of “Family Legal Vulnerability: How Immigration Policy Shapes the Lives of Latino College Students”
Edelina Burciaga
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Review of “Defending Democracy in the European Parliament: An Institutional Drama”
Elisabeth Clemens
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Social Networks

Exponential-family random graph models in resident-healthcare provider networks: An application using data from long-term healthcare facilities in the United States
George G. Vega Yon, Chong Zhang, Karim Khader, Nai-Chung Nelson Chang, Lindsay D. Visnovsky, Alun Thomas, Candace Haroldsen, Kristina Stratford, Matthew H. Samore
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Mechanisms reinforcing and countering segregation: How existing friendship and dislike ties impact friendship homophily and dislike heterophily among Muslim and non-Muslim students in German schools
Vieri Pistocchi, Filip Agneessens
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From lifestyle to citizenship: Social influence and political consumerism in egocentric networks
Xueying Zhang, Ting Wang
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Social Science Research

Postmaterial emancipative values emerge over time rather than solely through generational succession
Martin Schröder, Gordey Yastrebov
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Competing powers: An examination of the role of intra- and extra-household factors on fathers' leave take-up
Merve UzunalioÄźlu, Marie Valentova, Margaret O'Brien, Katherine Twamley
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Socius

As Online Dating Grew, Which Meeting Channels Lost Share among New Unions?
Zerui Tian
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This visualization uses current and retrospective partnership histories from the Generations and Gender Survey, Round 2, to examine how the expansion of online dating corresponded to changes in other partner-meeting channels among 38,772 coresidential unions across 11 countries and regions. Generations and Gender Survey–weighted descriptive estimates distinguish online dating from other online meeting and group offline channels into friends/family, school/work, public/leisure, and residual other settings. Online dating’s share increased in every context between 2002–2004 and 2017–2019, with gains ranging from about 4 to 20 percentage points. Yet the largest offline decline varied: friends/family in six contexts, public/leisure in four, and school/work in one. This heterogeneity suggests that digital intermediation is layered onto context-specific institutions and networks. A separate 2020–2021 end point is shown descriptively but excluded from the channel reallocation comparison because of pandemic disruptions. Adjusted robustness analyses yield substantively similar conclusions. The visualization documents compositional change rather than causal substitution, showing that a common technological expansion coincided with different reallocations across network-based, episodic, and institution-based meeting settings in different social contexts.