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Sociology

Hours


I have various meetings during the week and hours at the reference desk; email at bamata@csus.edu or call 278-5672 to ask a question or request an appointment.

Monday-Friday,  Office 9am-5 pm;
Wednesday Office 9:00-5:00 pm except 3-4 pm (24/7 reference)

You can always ask for assistance at our Reference Desk: 916 278-5673

This Month in Sociology

American Middle Class Is Losing Ground, No longer the majority and falling behind financially.  Pew Research Center
The middle class is losing ground. After more than four decades of serving as the nation’s economic majority, the American middle class is now matched in number by those in the economic tiers above and below it. In early 2015, 120.8 million adults were in middle-income households, compared with 121.3 million in lower- and upper-income households combined, a demographic shift that could signal a tipping point, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/

Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065: Immigration’s Impact on U.S. Society Mixed.  Pew Research Center. 9/28/15.Views of  U.S. Foreign-Born Share Projected to Hit Record Milestone by 2065. Fifty years after passage of the landmark law that rewrote U.S. immigration policy, nearly 59 million immigrants have arrived in the United States, pushing the country’s foreign-born share to a near record 14%. For the past half-century, these modern-era immigrants and their descendants have accounted for just over half the nation’s population growth and have reshaped its racial and ethnic composition.
http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/modern-immigration-wave-brings-59-million-to-u-s-driving-population-growth-and-change-through-2065/

World Happiness Report
It is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness. The first report was published in 2012, the second in 2013, and the third on April 23, 2015. Leading experts across fields – economics, psychology, survey analysis, national statistics, health, public policy and more – describe how measurements of well-being can be used effectively to assess the progress of nations. The reports review the state of happiness in the world today and show how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness. They reflect a new worldwide demand for more attention to happiness as a criteria for government policy.  http://worldhappiness.report/

Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty.  BYLINE: Lyndsey Layton, Washington Post Blogs.  January 16, 2015 
For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of  U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

Real Reason Richer People Marry. By ANDREW J. CHERLIN.  New York Times.  December 7, 2014 Sunday .  A sociologist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of ''Labor's Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Work-ing-Class Family in America.''  |
"By now it is common knowledge that professionals are more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than are less educated workers. Among 20- to 49-year-old men in 2013, 56 percent of professional, managerial and technical workers were married, compared with 31 percent of service workers, according to the American Community Survey of the Census Bureau. Some people argue that the gap is largely a result of a decline in traditional values among working-class men, particularly whites who constitute the majority of them. Supposedly they are not as industrious in seeking employment as were their fathers and grandfathers and so fail to secure the steady jobs needed for marriage."

Consultant On Homelessness: Cities Enable The Poor  National Public Radio November 09, 2014 7:45 AM ET
"In many cities it is now illegal to feed the homeless. NPR's Rachel Martin talks to Robert Marbut, the man behind the push to make handing out food a crime, who favors getting people into programs.  Economic problems are often at the root of homelessness in America. And our next story is about a controversial way to help those people get off the street. The effort made headlines last weekend when 90-year-old Arnold Abbott and two pastors in Fort Lauderdale, Florida were arrested for feeding the homeless."
http://www.npr.org/2014/11/09/362737965/consultant-on-homelessness-cities-enable-the-poor

Mishandling Rape  BYLINE: By JED RUBENFELD. New York Times. 11/17/14.
A professor of criminal law at Yale Law School and co-author of ''The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.''  "Our strategy for dealing with rape on college campuses has failed abysmally. Female students are raped in appalling numbers, and their rapists almost invariably go free. Forced by the federal government, colleges have now gotten into the business of conducting rape trials, but they are not competent to handle this job. They are simultaneously failing to punish rapists adequately and branding students sexual assailants when no sexual assault occurred."

Last Updated: Jan 4, 2024 1:43 PM