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In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic created large-scale disruptions in American society almost overnight. Yet the federal government provided little coordination or guidance in the face of the crisis. State and local governments found themselves primarily responsible for enacting policies and communicating information about the virus with the public,resulting in a wide variety of responses to the pandemic, including in public health recommendations and mandates. In this issue of RSF sociologist Beth Redbird, political scientist Laurel Harbridge-Yong, communications expert Rachel Davis Mersey, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors explore how social and political factors shaped the initial responses to the pandemic and how this impacted individuals and communities.

The 11 articles in this issue examine how information about the pandemic was disseminated, the disparate impacts of COVID-19 on different groups, and the government’s response to the pandemic. Courtney Page-Tan and colleagues find that people who relied on information from close social networks and trusted formal institutions, such as the CDC, were more likely to engage in behavior aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19, such as staying home and avoiding crowded areas. Laura E. Evans and colleagues find that while Native Americans were disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, states in which Native Americans had greater representation and political power in state politics saw fewer COVID-19 cases on tribal lands. They also find that there were fewer COVID-19 cases on tribal lands with strong networks of community-based and tribally controlled health facilities. Claire Kamp Dush and colleagues find that individuals who identify as non-White or non-heterosexual experienced higher levels of COVID-19 stress and racial trauma stress, both of which are associated with poorer mental health outcomes. Sarah James and colleagues find that state variation in the collection and publication of COVID-19 data reflected state capacity. Yet the main driver of variation in state policy response and implementation of mitigation measures was primarily partisanship. Elizabeth Suhay and colleagues find that trust in federal, state, and local government all fell during the first year of the pandemic. However, individuals with more trust in state government and local health officials were more likely to engage in protective health behaviors, while those with higher trust in the federal government were less likely to engage in such behaviors.

While the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will continue for years to come, this volume of RSF begins the investigation into how the pandemic has altered social, cultural, and political dynamics in American society.

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Suburbs are home to almost half of all Americans and have undergone dramatic demographic shifts over the past 20 years. Yet, suburbs remain understudied, and we know little about the socioeconomic changes taking place in these communities. In this special double issue of RSF, R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, Natasha Warikoo, Stephen A. Matthews, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how suburbs have evolved and the growing inequality within and between them.

Issue 1 looks at the diversification of suburbs as well as inequality in suburban housing. Kasey Zapatka and Van C. Tran find that cities and suburbs in the New York City metropolitan area have seen a significant decline in segregated neighborhoods but that suburbs have seen a more dramatic decline. Devin Q. Rutan and colleagues reveal that the number of suburban evictions has steadily risen over time, even as urban evictions have remained stable. Jennifer Girouard examines the passage of a Massachusetts law, Chapter 40B in 1969, intended to ensure affordable housing is built in the suburbs. Local residents opposed to the law used tactics such as creating narratives of the town being victimized by predatory developers to resist the law and the development of affordable housing.

Issue 2 examines suburban schools, how social supports function in suburban areas, and suburban politics. Shruti Bathia and col-leagues find that between 2000 and 2015, suburban Latinx children’s exposure to white peers declined. Scott W. Allard and Elizabeth Pel-letier reveal that the nonprofit safety net is less developed in suburban areas than in urban centers, particularly those that have high levels of poverty and larger Black populations. Brenden Beck shows that suburbs with large Black populations also rely the most on fine-and-fee revenue, and further that municipalities that rely more on monetary sanctions have more police killings. Ankit Rastogi and Michael Jones-Correa find that the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election depended on turnout in heavily Black suburban precincts, which voted overwhelmingly for Biden, as well as Asian and Latinx precincts, which also supported Democrats.

This volume of RSF investigates the underexamined and pressing issue of inequality in suburbs and explores how it develops within and between suburban communities.

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The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare stark structural inequalities along the lines of race and ethnicity, gender, and class in the United States. Federal, state, and local governments responded with policies to help mitigate the potential devastation with varying success. In this issue of RSF, co-published with The JPB Foundation, public policy scholar Steven Raphael, sociologist Daniel Schneider, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine the effectiveness of government response on the socioeconomic consequences of the pandemic.

The 11 articles in this issue examine the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and federal and local responses to the crisis on social safety net usage, unemployment insurance (UI), parenting and gender disparities, housing, and experiences with the criminal justice system. Marianne P. Bitler and colleagues find that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) pandemic benefit increases were less generous to Black recipients. This was because Black recipients were more likely than other groups to have received the maximum benefit amount prior to the pandemic and the emergency allotment policy increased payments to the maximum amount for many recipients but provided no additional increase to those already receiving the maximum. Alex Bell and colleagues show that states with more liberal UI policies, such as higher weekly benefit amounts, saw higher rates of UI access during the pandemic, suggesting that policy played an important role in driving disparities in U.S. access across states. Liana Christin Landivar and colleagues reveal that remote schooling led to reduced employment among mothers compared to fathers and women without children, with Black mothers experiencing the largest reduction in employment. Vincent J. Reina and Yeonhwa Lee find that low-income renters who received emergency rental assistance during the pandemic had lower arrears, a lower likelihood of having rent-related debt, and a lower likelihood of experiencing debilitating anxiety. Samantha Plummer and colleagues show that individuals leaving jail or who had criminal cases during the early phase of the pandemic suffered high levels of housing and food insecurity as well as joblessness, but those with mental illness and substance abuse problems experienced the highest levels of material hardship.

This issue of RSF sheds light on how the pandemic and the cor-responding government response have both reinforced and reshaped socioeconomic inequality in the United States.

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Administrative burdens are the learning, compliance, and psychological costs—in other words, the bureaucracy—people encounter when interacting with public services. While some burdens are unintentional, others are deliberately constructed as barriers to limit claims to programs and services. Such burdens fall most heavily on marginalized groups, often preventing them from resources they need. In this double issue of RSF, sociologist Pamela Herd, economist Hilary Hoynes, political scientist Jamila Michener, public administration scholar Donald Moynihan, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors explore how administrative burdens shape inequality.

Issue 4 examines how administrative burdens impact Medicaid and health inequality, student loan repayment programs, and immigration to the U.S. Emily Rauscher and Ailish Burns find that reforms to reduce administrative burdens in the late 1980s increased Medicaid enrollment and improved infant health nearly as much as Medicaid expansion. Adam Goldstein and colleagues show that administrative burdens in student loan repayment programs cause borrowers from lower socioeconomic groups to be disproportionately excluded. Lilly Yu finds that changes to immigration policy during the Trump administration worsened inequality among undocumented immigrants’ access by hindering their right to legal representation.

Issue 5 looks at the role of administrative burdens in experiences with child and family support programs, the child welfare system, disaster and housing relief programs, and housing support programs. Carolyn Barnes and colleagues find that mothers’ perceptions of the costs and benefits of participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) vary over time and influence whether they choose to enroll or continue participating in the program. Ethan J. Raker and Tyler Woods find applications from poor communities of color for FEMA housing aid after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were disproportionately denied or delayed due to burdensome program requirements. Stephanie Casey Pierce and Stephanie Moulton reveal that efforts to reduce administrative burdens in foreclosure programs increased the rate of benefit receipt, while decreasing the foreclosure rate. Frank Edwards and colleagues show child welfare system-involved parents must navigate considerable administrative burdens in order to retain custody of their children.

This volume of RSF shows that by ensuring the public’s interaction with government is no more onerous than it need be, policymakers and administrators can reduce inequality, boost civic engagement, and build an efficient state that works for all citizens.

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Disruptive events such as economic recessions, natural disasters, job loss, and divorce can have a long-lasting impact when experienced during childhood, potentially altering children’s academic achievement, health and development, and later socioeconomic attainment. While much research has considered the overall impact of disruptive events on children’s lives, the consequences of disruption vary across groups. The same disruptive event may have profound negative consequences for some groups, minor or no impact for oth-ers, and even present a positive turning point for other groups. In this special issue of RSF, an interdisciplinary group of experts examine the disparate consequences of disruptive events on children.

Drawing on accumulated insights of empirical work from several social science disciplines, including sociology, psychology, and economics, the editors provide a nuanced consideration of theoretical approaches and methodological challenges in identifying unequal impacts. They argue that variation in the effects of disruptive events depends on different, and sometimes offsetting, mechanisms. For exam-ple, Martha Bailey and colleagues find that more disadvantaged male youth were less negatively impacted by the macroeconomic shock of the Great Depression than more advantaged youth. Black youth, however, were more negatively impacted. Anna Baranowska-Rataj and colleagues find little evidence that parental job loss leads to worse birth outcomes or that effects vary across regions with different unemployment levels in Sweden, a nation with a relatively generous safety net and universal health care. Regarding the household disruption of parental incarceration, Kristin Turney and colleagues find that some children seamlessly step into new responsibilities, while others, especially older children who had witnessed their fathers’ frequent entanglements with the criminal legal system, consciously step away from these responsibilities. Stefanie DeLuca and colleagues argue that as youth grow accustomed to disruptive events, these exposures become less remarkable and impactful on their life outcomes. Looking at the disruption to education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Douglas Harris and colleagues find that high school graduation has remained remarkably steady since the onset of the pandemic, but entry into two-year colleges was hard hit, especially for colleges serving more people of color and those from low-income families. Finally, considering environmental disruptions, Nazar Khalid and colleagues show that severe floods in India have a stronger impact on the educational outcomes of children from marginalized communities.

Through its systematic examination of the variation in the consequences of disruption, especially in early life, this volume of RSF provides an insightful and practical resource for both researchers and policymakers.

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Slavery in the United States was a brutal, racialized system of forced labor which helped provide the startup capital for the  U.S. economy’s meteoric rise. Post-slavery legal race discrimination produced segregation not only the Jim Crow South but also in northern states, where Blacks were denied many benefits of the New Deal that helped lift whites into the middle class. The 60 years since the pas-sage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have witnessed mass incarceration, ongoing police killings of unarmed Blacks, continued discrimination in housing, employment, and credit markers, and a persistent devaluation of Black lives. This history of enslavement and discrimination has yielded disastrous intergenerational consequences for Black wealth and socioeconomic well-being, and calls for reparations have gained currency as a way to redress these historical wrongs. This special double issue of RSF brings together the most current social science research and policy options with regard to reparations for Black Americans.

While reparations have been issued to many peoples around the world, including in the U.S., reparations to Black Americans remain highly contested. Contributor Kathryn Anne Edwards and co-authors use case studies of previous reparations policies to offer important insights into the features that might shape reparations policy for Black Americans. Trina Shanks and colleagues argue that the structure of existing child development accounts provides a practical framework for delivering reparations payments to recipients of all ages through structured savings plans that promote asset growth and fiscal autonomy.

The political feasibility of reparations programs will largely depend on public opinion. Jesse Rhodes and colleagues draw on surveys administered between 2021 and 2023 to show that up to 28 percent of White Americans support cash reparations, up from a tiny 4 percent in 2000. Kamri Hudgins and co-authors suggest that public education on racial disparities may increase the feasibility of a reparations pro-gram. Thus, education on racial disparities in intergenerational wealth, income, health, homeownership, and education may prove to be crucial to affect a federal Black reparations program.

This important double issue of RSF employs rigorous social science research to shed new light on one of the most pressing and contentious policy proposals of our times. Engaging the debate over reparations from the past to the present and from the global to the local, this double issue of RSF provides a valuable roadmap to the issues at stake in the Black American reparations movement.

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In recent decades, the social sciences have struggled to predict, monitor, and understand ongoing social crises. This is due in part to a lack of infrastructure to adequately do so. The American Voices Project (AVP), an experimental public-use platform for collecting qualitative data, was designed to expand the capacity of social science research by complementing existing research methods examining the everyday lives of Americans. The AVP was fielded in 2019-2022 as the country’s first nationally-representative, large-scale, multiple-domain qualitative data collection effort. In this double issue of RSF, sociologists Kathryn J. Edin, Corey D. Fields, David B. Grusky, Marybeth J. Mattingly, Kristen Olson, and Charles Varner, computer scientist Jure Leskovec, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors utilize data from the AVP to determine whether the platform can provide insight into the lives of Americans and address social science’s current shortcomings.

Issue 4 examines Americans’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, identifies and explores emerging crises in the U.S., and includes the first set of classical interpretive studies based on a public-use dataset. Kyle Fee and colleagues find that job loss during the pan-demic was associated with declines in financial and mental well-being, that expanded safety net programs did not disincentivize work, and that existing survey-based monitoring is missing important pockets of deprivation. Katherine Cramer and colleagues discover a more thoroughgoing “disaffection crisis” than has been appreciated to date, a crisis in which low- and middle-income earners often feel profoundly disconnected from politics and have little confidence in their ability to meaningfully effect change. Josefina Flores Morales shows that healthcare costs – even after recent and ongoing reforms in healthcare – remain insurmountable for many Latinx Americans, who must then rely on family for unexpected medical costs.

Issue 5 illustrates how the AVP can be used to uncover hidden populations and to explore how some types of crises, mindsets, or sensibilities can have cascading effects that impact multiple areas of people’s lives. Corey M. Abramson and colleagues use the AVP to uncover the population of Americans experiencing physical pain, showing that while pain is very prevalent, it has larger negative effects on the life trajectories of women and those without a college degree than on other groups. Shira Zilberstein and colleagues discover that when individuals discuss their lives they feature “agentic moments” in which they can claim agency despite facing constraints that could be seen as limiting choice and agency.

This double issue of RSF provides compelling insights into the lives of Americans and convincingly makes the case for building a permanent public-use platform for qualitative research.

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The census has registered more than two centuries of growth and transformation in America’s political, social, and economic life. It traditionally gives us the opportunity to ask big questions about and measure changes in American society. In this double issue of RSF, sociologist and demographer Zhenchao Qian, economist Trevon Logan, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how American society has changed—or stayed the same—from 2010 to 2020.

Topics examined in issue 1 include the impact of census counts, changes in neighborhood demographics, gender inequality in education, and racial inequality in employment. Lisa Neidert and colleagues find that the census consistently undercounts Hispanics, Blacks, and Native Americans and overcounts Whites and Asians, which has negative impacts on state and federal funding for vulnerable communities. Nima Dahir shows the arrival of Black immigrants into Black American neighborhoods often results in a decline in the native Black American population and an increase in White residents. Claudia Buchmann and colleagues reveal that women are now earning more advanced degrees than men in the U.S.; however, rising shares of women, including those who are pursing advanced degrees, are attending for-profit institutions and carrying student debt. Julie Y. Cai and Marybeth J. Mattingly find that workers with variable hours have lower incomes than those who have more stable hours and Black workers earn substantially less than their White counterparts when working jobs with volatile hours.

Themes explored in issue 2 include changes in living arrangements, divergent families, and rural America. Hyunjoon Park and col-leagues find that despite growing public concern about the potential rise in solitary living, the likelihood of living alone has not changed much over the last four decades except for older men, who have an increased likelihood of living alone. Christopher S. Carpenter and col-leagues show that gender minority individuals, including transgender and nonbinary individuals, are less likely to be married, more likely to be widowed, and less likely to live in a traditional two-adult household compared to their cisgender counterparts. Daniel T. Lichter and Kenneth M. Johnson reveal that while rural America is often envisioned as a monolith, it is made up of complex and diverse economic, social, and demographic conditions.

This double issue of RSF provides an updated and insightful snapshot of American society in the 2010s.