Recent uclasoc_oapdeposits items

“We Got Witnesses” Black Women’s Counter-Surveillance for Navigating Police Violence and Legal Estrangement

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract Police violence shapes the lives of racial and ethnic minorities, and while much has been written about strategic responses to police, missing is an examination of how black women navigate interactions with officers. Based on 32 interviews with black women, we find that they use witnessing, or the mobilization of others as observers to police encounters. Research demonstrates the rising role of videos and smartphones in documenting encounters with officers. We find that black women adapt witnessing techniques based on their surroundings, available resources, and network contacts. Three forms of witnessing are observed: physical witnessing, mobilizing others in close proximity to interactions with officers; virtual witnessing, using cellphone or social media technology to contact others or record interactions with officers; and institutional witnessing, leveraging police or other institutional contacts as interveners to interactions with officers. Black women mobilize...

Debt Stress, College Stress: Implications for Black and Latinx Students’ Mental Health

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Educational debt is an economic stressor that is harmful to mental health and disproportionately experienced by African American and Latinx youth. In this paper, we use a daily diary design to explore the link between mental health, context specific factors like “college stress” and time use, and educational debt stress, or stress incurred from thinking about educational debt and college affordability. This paper utilizes data from a sample of predominately African American and Latinx college students who provided over 1000 unique time observations. Results show that debt-induced stress is predictive of greater self-reported hostility, guilt, sadness, fatigue, and general negative emotion. Moreover, the relationship may be partly mediated by “college stress” reflecting course loads and post-graduation job expectations. For enrolled students then, educational debt may influence mental health directly through concerns over affordability, or indirectly by shaping facets of college...

Abolition Feminist Storytelling as Methodology: Lessons Within the Stories We (Re)Tell About Punishment and Violence

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper engages abolition feminist storytelling as a methodology for feminist criminologists to identify, reflect on, grapple with, and ultimately confront carceral logics in the stories we (re)tell about violence and punishment. Drawing on over a decade’s worth of research, advocacy, and community organizing, we identify three carceral tensions that emerged within our own storytelling: the victim-offender binary, researcher complicity, and a survivor standpoint. Building on prior black feminist scholarship, we then illustrate how an abolition feminist approach to storytelling allows us to confront these tensions through relationality, an ethic of love, accountability, vulnerability, and commitment to justice.

A Network Approach to Assessing the Relationship between Discrimination and Daily Emotion Dynamics

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Discrimination-health research has been critiqued for neglecting the endogeneity of reports of discrimination to negative affect and the multidimensionality of mental health. To address these challenges, we model discrimination’s relationship to multiple psychological variables without directional constraints. Using time-dense data to identify associational network structures allows for joint testing of the social stress hypothesis, prominent in discrimination-health literature, and the negativity bias hypothesis, an endogeneity critique rooted in social psychology. Our results show discrimination predicts negative emotions from day-to-day but not vice versa, indicating that racial discrimination is a risk factor and not symptom of negative emotion. Furthermore, we identify sadness, guilt, hostility, and fear as a locus of interrelated emotions sensitive to racism-related stressors that emerges over time. Thus, we find support for what race scholars have argued for 120+ years...

Poor People's Survival Strategies: Two Decades of Research in the Americas

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Nearly a half-century ago, two scholars north and south of the US border called attention to the role played by reciprocity networks in poor peoples’ survival strategies. This article provides a synthetic picture of the qualitative research on those strategies, focusing not only on mutual aid networks but also on clientelist politics and popular protest. These are, we argue, oftentimes complementary ways of everyday problem-solving. Furthermore, most research on survival strategies has overlooked state and street violence as literal threats to poor people's daily survival. Our review systematically describes the individual and collective strategies poor residents use to navigate daily dangers. We advocate for the incorporation of personal safety into the study of poor people's survival strategies and identify as a promising research endeavor a simultaneous attention to ways of making ends meet and coping with interpersonal and state violence.

Gendered Violence, Genderless Frames: The Politics of Domestic Violence in Russia and Ukraine on the Eve of Full-scale War

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Although policies against gender-based violence gained widespread acceptance in the twentieth century, seemingly global gender standards have not evenly diffused. Indeed, despite shared (post)socialist experiences, Ukraine has criminalized domestic violence (DV) while Russia has not. However, discursive analysis of 127 public texts published from 2011 to 2021 reveals that public talk on DV in both countries retains a similar genderless character—a surprising finding for Ukraine, which continues to harmonize with liberal European gender norms. Extending the work of Popova and Shevel, I argue that the “escalatory cycle” characterizing Russo–Ukrainian relations in the post-Soviet period can explain their divergent policies on DV, as well as their shared frames. This study highlights the limited salience of Western feminist frames in DV prevention efforts. It contributes to scholarship on norm diffusion and backlash, exploring how push–pull mechanisms and geopolitics guide the adoption...

Causal Machine Learning: A Deductive–Inductive Framework for Sociological Research

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Causal explanation is central to sociological research, shaping both theoretical development and empirical inquiry. This paper argues that causal machine learning—which integrates deductive identification strategies with inductive estimation techniques—offers an analytical approach for modeling complex, nonlinear social processes within the potential outcomes framework. We argue that causal machine learning operates through an iterative feedback loop: Theoretical assumptions guide flexible estimation, which inductively uncovers complex heterogeneities and nonlinearities, and these discoveries subsequently refine and expand sociological knowledge. Drawing on a systematic review of recent sociological research (2014–2024), we highlight how causal machine learning is advancing work in three key areas: causal effect heterogeneity, causal mediation analysis, and time-varying causal inference. These developments expand the methodological tool kit available to sociologists and strengthen...

Digital Transformation of Retail Work: The Rise of Chaotic Rationalisation

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We examine how new digital technologies are transforming labour processes in frontline jobs in United States (US) store‐based retail, examining the US as an extreme case of labour market liberalisation. Research on technological change presents three scenarios: job displacement, job enrichment and ‘digital Taylorism’ involving heightened surveillance and control. However, this research typically overlooks the role of customers and the frequency of technology failure. Drawing on interviews with frontline employees and managers supplemented by other sources, we find little evidence for job enhancement and limited evidence of job displacement. Retailers have used digital technologies to heighten Taylorisation, speedup and surveillance in some frontline jobs. However, interviews reveal multiple sources of chaos in the jobs, including unpredictable customer interactions, staffing patterns that make it hard for retail workers to rely on co‐workers, and flaws in digital technologies...

Navigating restricted social rights: networked individualism as a coping mechanism for undocumented Chinese immigrants in the United States

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper explores how networked individualism was, as opposed to traditional migrant networks, utilized by post-COVID-19 undocumented Chinese immigrants to cope with restricted social rights and socioeconomic constraints upon arrival in the United States. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation in a Chinese ethnoburb in the San Gabriel Valley, Los Angeles, we found that these immigrants had few connections to established migrant networks and diasporic Chinese communities, but managed to exercise individual agency to leverage online platforms to crowdsource information and resources conducive to migrant adaptation. However, while it helped ease precarity in housing, employment, and legal status, networked individualism reinforced undocumented immigrants’ disengagement from both their ethnic community and the larger society, which exacerbated their double marginalization and posed challenges to their social mobility. Our paper contributes to migration scholarship...

Cohort Changes in Cognitive Function Among Mexican Older Adults from 2001 to 2021

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Multimorbidity (2+ chronic conditions) associated with faster cognitive decline among older adults, yet longitudinal evidence from low- and middle-income countries, including Mexico, remains limited. This study examines cohort differences in the annual rate of cognitive decline, measured by global cognitive function scores (GCFS), and tests whether the association between multimorbidity and cognitive decline differs between two cohorts aged 50-60 in 2001 and 2012. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: We assess two 10-year birth cohorts (Cohort 1: born 1941-1951, n = 5,345 Cohort 2: born 1952-1962, n = 4,378), at 3 time points (Cohort 1: 2001, 2003, and 2012; Cohort 2: 2012, 2015, 2021), at ages 50-60 at baseline. We examine cohort differences in average annual GCFS changes by fitting growth curve models incorporating random intercepts and slopes. RESULTS: Two key findings emerged. First, the earlier cohort (Cohort 1, 2001), experienced a faster average annual...

Who Is LIHTC Built for? The Distribution of Affordable Housing Units by Rents, Tenant Incomes, and Project Features in California

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program relies on housing developers to build affordable housing units. Developers consider financial feasibility and programmatic regulations when planning projects, and one central project feature is the affordability of units. Decisions around unit affordability directly shape housing supply and, in turn, affect where low-income tenants live. In this article, I analyze LIHTC projects in California and show that, among projects funded from 2011 to 2023, only a small share (15%) of units was affordable to extremely low-income (ELI) households. In contrast, ELI households comprised the majority of LIHTC tenants. The share of units affordable to ELI households increased over time due in part to program regulations, financial feasibility, and state priorities around housing formerly homeless individuals, though there was still a substantial mismatch between units’ affordability and tenants’ incomes during this period. Units affordable to...

Reflecting on the theory of segmented assimilation: an introduction

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This symposium draws from a panel of the Section on International Migration (IM) at the 2024 American Sociological Association (ASA) Annual Meeting. As a dual celebration of the 30th anniversary of the ASA IM Section and publication of segmented assimilation theory, the panel’s theme was to reflect on segmented assimilation theory and three decades of immigrant integration research. Four authors offer their critical commentaries on the theory with a rejoinder by the theory’s original authors. This introduction underscores some of the most significant ways in which the theory has stimulated intellectual debate and empirical research on the study of contemporary immigrants and their offspring.

Segmented assimilation: some reflections on a three-decade concept

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This rejoinder traces the origin of segmented assimilation theory and addresses the critical comments by highlighting some key points in the evolution of the concept and empirical research from the early nineteen nineties to the present.

Understanding Intraethnic Diversity

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper fills a scholarly gap in the understanding of intraethnic diversity by way of a case study of the formation of a Taiwanese American identity. Drawing on a review of the existing scholarly literature and data from systematic field observations, as well as secondary data including ethnic organizations’ mission statements and activity reports, we explore how internal and external processes intersect to drive the construction of a distinct Taiwanese American identity. The study focuses on addressing three interrelated questions: (1) How does Taiwanese immigration to the United States affect diasporic development? (2) What contributes to the formation of a Taiwanese American identity? (3) In what specific ways is the Taiwanese American identity sustained and promoted? We conceive of ethnic formation as an ethnopolitical process. We argue that this ethnopolitical process involves constant negotiation and action in multiple spaces beyond nation-state boundaries. We show that...

Social bonds and health: exploring the impact of social relations on oxytocin and brain–gut communication in shaping obesity

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Social relationships play a crucial role in shaping health. To better understand the underlying mechanisms, we explored the independent and interactive effects of perceived emotional support (PES) and marital status on body mass index (BMI), eating behaviors, brain reactivity to food images, plasma oxytocin, and alterations in the brain-gut microbiome (BGM) system. Brain responses to food stimuli, fecal metabolites, and plasma oxytocin levels were measured in 94 participants. Structural equation modeling was used to determine the integrated pathways linking social factors to obesity-related outcomes. Marital status and PES interact and independently influence lower BMI, healthier eating behaviors, increased oxytocin levels, food-cue reactivity in frontal brain regions involved in craving inhibition and executive control, and tryptophan-pathway metabolites related to inflammation, immune regulation, and energy homeostasis. These findings suggest that supportive human relationships,...

Involuntary transnationalism and regulated precarity: Lived experiences of skilled Chinese and Indian migrants in Singapore

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract Transnationalism is often perceived as an agentic practice in migration studies. While acknowledging such agency, we argue that transnationalism also involves forced‐choice decision‐making by migrants whose work and daily lives are subjected to structural constraints beyond individual control. We employ the concept of ‘involuntary transnationalism’ to capture this often‐neglected dimension of transnationalism. Based on analysis of survey data and in‐depth interviews of skilled Chinese and Indian migrants in Singapore, we find that skilled foreign migrants face employment insecurity and other vulnerabilities largely due to visa regulations and that they have to turn to transnationalism as a coping strategy to mitigate precarity and temporality.

Involuntary migration, context of reception, and social mobility: the case of Vietnamese refugee resettlement in the United States

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In this study, we examine the Vietnamese population of the United States as a case study in the integration of a refugee group. We first offer a brief review of Vietnamese refugee resettlement in the US and the making of a new ethnic community. We then provide a quantitative analysis of socioeconomic mobility among Vietnamese refugees using American Community Survey data from 1980 to 2015 and other national-level data. We examine how this ethnic population has changed over time by focusing on key socioeconomic indicators, such as levels of education, occupation, and income, as well as poverty rates. Third, we seek to explain what enables Vietnamese refugees and their children to overcome initial disadvantage and move up in society based on our own work over the span of 20 years with qualitative data. We consider how policies, institutions (government, civil society, and ethnic), and patterns of social relations in the Vietnamese American community have interacted with individual...

Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor

Prosperous places: processes, policies, and practices

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract Prosperous places provide more than just high levels of economic output. They also promote the well-being of their residents and ensure equitable access to community resources and opportunities. Prosperous places—picture Copenhagen, Melbourne, or Vienna—balance economic growth with social equity. Most communities, however, remain marked by stark inequalities. We examine the processes, policies, and practices that foster prosperity, a more equal distribution of resources and opportunities within places. We call attention to four organizational and community properties of these places: diverse organizational demographics, shared ownership structures, spatial and social integration, and cross-sector inclusive governance. We call for reimagining prosperity as a collective achievement—one shaped by deliberate choices that distribute benefits widely rather than deepening divides.

Mothers, sons, sisters and grief in the gangster economy: US necrogovernance in Philadelphia’s low-income Puerto Rican diaspora

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Drawing on long-term participant-observation in Philadelphia's hyper-segregated Puerto Rican retail narcotics markets, we document the gendered contours of exploding cycles of firearm violence among young males striving to dominate street sales and the grief violence generates. Mothers and sisters intervene eloquently in court (and on the streets) defusing lethal violence. They clarify entangled chains of self-blame, promoting dialogue, accountability, and forgiveness. Although ambivalent about their own outlaw pasts, their 'streetwise' credibility increases their peacekeeping effectiveness. They prompt male perpetrators to publicly hold themselves accountable, express grief, and recognize the trauma of firearm violence, chronic incarceration, and frustrated aspirations for legal employment. Meanwhile, low-income women earn below-subsistence-level legal wages to support male kin emotionally and financially during lengthy prison sentences. We analyze the biographies of mothers...

: The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

: The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College

Talent and technology in creative industries: introduction to the special issue

Thu, 3 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: This special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economics focuses on the profound impact of technological change on creative industries, with a spotlight on artificial intelligence (AI) and streaming. It provides an overview of how AI and streaming have been reshaping the creative industries and speculates as to what the future may hold. The issue also delves into the challenges and ethical considerations that arise from these technological advancements, for areas such as copyright and job displacement.

Perpetual encounters: reconceptualizing police contact and measuring its relationship to black women’s mental health

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: Research and media discussion of police contact routinely conceptualize it as time-constrained interactions between officers and civilians. However, extant literature documents preparation for encounters and post-encounter advocacy, which each challenge restricted understandings of contact and, importantly, its relationship to mental health. We introduce “perpetual encounters” to both theoretically and empirically move closer to the temporally unbounded and enduring way that police contact is experienced in black women’s everyday lives. Utilizing a novel, nationally representative dataset on their policing experiences, we explore how mental health is independently and conjointly associated with three dimensions of police contact: preparation, police stops, and advocacy against police violence. Beyond exemplifying how pervasive the police are in the day-to-day lives of marginalized communities, extending the scope of contact recognizes preparation as...

Gender and racial diversity socialization in science

Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Scientific collaboration networks are a form of unequally distributed social capital that shapes both researcher job placement and long-term research productivity and prominence. However, the role of collaboration networks in shaping the gender and racial diversity of the scientific workforce remains unclear. Here we propose a computational null model to investigate the degree to which early-career scientific collaborators with representationally diverse cohorts of scholars are associated with forming or participating in more diverse research groups as established researchers. When testing this hypothesis using two large-scale, longitudinal datasets on scientific collaborations, we find that the gender and racial diversity in a researcher’s early-career collaboration environment is strongly associated with the diversity of their collaborators in their established period. This diversity-association effect is particularly prominent for men. Coupled with gender and racial homophily...

Concentrated disadvantage and stress in daily life after prison

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Reentry from prison is a stressful life transition, which has consequences for recidivism, health, and well-being. Navigating poor and highly surveilled neighborhoods after prison is considered a primary stressor after release; however, it is methodologically challenging to document how poor places exert these invisible, day-to-day strains. Bringing together theories of stress with “activity space” research, we analyze nearly 300,000 GPS estimates and more than 5300 daily reports of emotions collected through mobile phones across 3 months among a cohort of men recently released from prison in Newark, New Jersey. Using a new approach to measure activity spaces, which we term “egocentric places,” combined with multilevel models that investigate within-person changes over time, we find that daily exposure to disadvantaged places is associated with increased negative emotions, specifically, stress. These associations are most evident when navigating commonly visited places (as opposed...

Accessing the right to vote among system-impacted people

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Recent efforts to dismantle felon disenfranchisement regimes have the potential to substantially expand electoral eligibility among people with criminal records; however, even among those with criminal legal histories who are eligible to vote, voting rates are often extremely low. Analyzing interview, focus group, and text message conversations among a multi-state sample around the November 2022 election, we identify and describe how administrative barriers to voting-including a lack of understanding about the voting process, confusion about legal eligibility, and perceived risks of rearrest of voting while ineligible-pose an access to justice issue among system-impacted people. These barriers are amplified by government mistrust, specifically the perception that barriers are intentionally constructed to suppress voting, and they are potentially mitigated by outreach by community organizations that are viewed as credible. The findings emphasize that legislative reforms repealing...

Modeling biological age and its link with the aging process

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Differences in health status at older ages are a result of genetic predispositions and physiological responses to exposure accumulation over the lifespan. These vary across individuals and lead to health status heterogeneity as people age. Chronological age (CA) is a standard indicator that reflects overall risks of morbidity and mortality. However, CA is only a crude proxy for individuals' latent physiological deterioration. An alternative to CA is biological age (BA), an indicator of accumulated age-related biological change reflected in markers of major physiological systems. We propose and validate two BA estimators that improve upon existing ones. These estimators (i) are based on a structural equation model (SEM) that represents the relation between BA and CA, (ii) circumvent the need to impose arbitrary assumptions about the relation between CA and BA, and (iii) provide tools to empirically test the validity of assumptions the researcher may wish to invoke. We use...

The impact of COVID-19 on life expectancy among four Asian American subgroups