The social survey has become an essential tool in modern society, providing crucial measurements of social change, describing social life, and guiding government policy. But the validity of surveys is fragile and depends ultimately upon the accuracy of answers to survey questions. As our dependence on surveys grows, so too have questions about the accuracy of survey responses.

Authored by a group of experts in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and survey research, Questions About Questions provides a broad review of the survey response problem. Examining the cognitive and social processes that influence the answers to questions, the book first takes up the problem of meaning and demonstrates that a respondent must share the survey researcher’s intended meaning of a question if the response is to be revealing and informative. The book then turns to an examination of memory. It provides a framework for understanding the processes that can introduce errors into retrospective reports, useful guidance on when those reports are more or less trustworthy, and investigates techniques for the improvement of such reports. Questions about the rigid standardization imposed on the survey interview receive a thorough airing as the authors show how traditional survey formats violate the usual norms of conversational behavior and potentially endanger the validity of the data collected.

Synthesizing the work of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Cognition and Survey Research, Questions About Questions emphasizes the reciprocal gains to be achieved when insights and techniques from the cognitive sciences and survey research are exchanged.

"these chapters provide a good sense of the range of survey problems investigated by the cognitive movement, the methods and ideas it draws upon, and the results it has yielded." —American Journal of Sociology

JUDITH M. TANUR is professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is co-chairperson of the Social Science Research Council Committee on Cognition and Survey Research.

CONTRIBUTORS: Robert P. Abelson,  Herbert H. Clark,  Robert T. Croyle, Robyn M. Dawes,  Cathryn S. Dippo, Jack F. Dovidio,  Russell H. Fazio,  Judith Fiedler,  Ronald P. Fisher,  Nancy H. Fultz,  Anthony G. Greenwald,  Robert Groves,  Brigitte Jordan,  Mark Klinger,  Jon A. Krosnik,  Elizabeth F. Loftus,  Elizabeth Martin,  Janet L. Norwood,  Robert W. Pearson,  Kathryn L. Quigley,  Michael Ross,  Michael F. Schober,  Kyle D. Smith,  Lucy Suchman, Judith M. Tanur.  

Honorable Mention, 1989 William T. Goode Award, Family Section of the American Sociological Association

Changes in family and household composition are part of every individual's life course. Childhood families expand and contract; the individual leaves to set up an independent household; he or she may marry, raise children, lose a spouse. These transitions have a profound effect on the economic and social well-being of individuals, and the relative prevalence of different living arrangements affects the very character of society.
 

American families and Households takes advantage of the large samples provided by the decennial censuses to document recent major transformations in the individual life cycle and consequent changes in the composition of the American population. As James Sweet and Larry Bumpass demonstrate, these changes have been dramatic—rates of marriage and childbirth are down, rates of marital disruption are up, and those who can are more likely to maintain independent households despite the rapid acceleration of change during recent years, however, the authors find that contemporary trends are continuous with long-term changes in Western society.
 

This meticulous work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the American Family and the individual life experiences that are translated into the larger population experience.
 

"Jim Sweet and Larry Bumpass provide detailed descriptions of three components of the households and families of Americans: family transitions; the prevalence of different family and household arrangements; and the economic and social circumstances of people living in different types of families and households....As a reference work, the volume is a gold mine, with many rich veins of useful information....Anyone interested in American families and how they have been changing will want to refer to this volume." —American Journal of Sociology
 
JAMES A. SWEET and LARRY L. BUMPASS are professors of sociology at the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

"It is no doubt true that neoclassical economics has many splendid accomplishments to its name. But it is equally clear that the current type of analytical economics has failed to integrate a social perspective into its analyses, and that this prevents it from ultimately becoming a truly successful social science. It is in this situation that economic sociology comes into the picture. Economic sociology may be defined as the attempt to analyze economic phenomena as social phenomena or as resulting from human interaction, within the context of broader social structures."
-from the Preface

"This is an impressive volume. It is a compendium of most of the major research projects in the area of economic sociology in the 1990s. As such, it makes a significant contribution to the development of this reawakening field."
-Mitchel Abolafia, State University of New York at Albany

Since the mid-1980s, as public discourse has focused increasingly on the troubled economy, many social scientists have argued the need for more analysis of the social relationships that undergird economic life. The original essays in Explorations in Economic Sociology represent the most important work in this renewed field and employ a rich variety of research methods—theoretical, ethnographic, and historical—to illustrate its key concerns.

Explorations in Economic Sociology forges innovative social theories of such economic institutions as money, markets, and industry. Although traditional economists have identified markets as driven solely by the forces of supply and demand, social factors frequently intervene. Sales at auction are determined not simply by a seller's personal knowledge of customers. Shareholder attitudes and employee organization influence everything from the way firms borrow money to the way corporate performance is measured. Firms themselves operate in social networks in which trust is a crucial factor in settling the terms for cooperation or competition.

Throughout the essays in this volume, the contributors point the way to developing a more healthy economy by fostering productive industrial networks, avoiding disintegration at management levels, and anticipating the consequences of the shift from manufacturing to service industries. Explorations in Economic Sociology is a pioneering work that bridges the gap between social theory and economic analysis and demonstrates the importance of this union in achieving an effective understanding of economic issues. The book should stimulate new interest in economic sociology by bringing together many of its most fundamental voices.

RICHARD SWEDBERG is professor of sociology at the University of Stockholm.

CONTRIBUTORS: Ronald S. Burt, Mark Granovetter, Paul M. Hirsch, Mark Lazerson, Patrick McGuire, Marshall W. Meyer, Mark S. Mizruchi, Charles Perrow, Frank Romo, Charles F. Sabel, Michael Schwartz, Charles W. Smith, Linda Brewster Stearns, Richard Swedberg, Michael Useem, Harrison C. White, and Viviana A. Zelizer

Two sociologists and a lawyer examine here the attitudes of both survivors and attorney on various problems surrounding inheritance—from will-making through estate settlement. Within a legal frame of reference, this book is a study of what happens within a family at death—and why. The authors use the "inheritance unit" as the basis for looking at the functions of inheritance in intergenerational family continuity and the general patterns of family relationship.

MARVIN B. SUSSMAN is professor and chairman of the Department of Sociology at Case Western Reserve University.

JUDITH N. CATES is research associate of the American Psychological Association.

DAVID T. SMITH is professor of law at the University of Florida.

This work is the fifth in a series of bulletins on the applications of sociology to various fields of professional practice prepared under the joint sponsorship of the American Sociological Association and the Russell Sage Foundation. Previous bulletins have dealt with applications of sociology in the fields of corrections, mental health, education, and military organization.

Dr. Suchman has performed an important service in his clear delineation of the great potential sociology and related disciplines have for sharpening our understanding of the social factors in health and disease, for intelligent planning and mounting of appropriate action programs, and for improving the organizational structure and institutional mechanisms of the health professions themselves.

EDWARD A. SUCHMAN is professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.

In recent years the decisions of the United States Supreme Court in the area of juvenile law and the growing public awareness of the delinquency problem have brought about drastic changes in American juvenile courts.

This book represents a major research effort to determine the effect of defense counsel’s performance on the conduct and outcome of delinquency cases. After a brief historical analysis of the factors leading to changes in juvenile law, the authors explore in detail the impact of the lawyer’s presence and performance on the outcomes of cases in two juvenile courts.

The analysis further explores the various factors influencing a lawyer’s defense posture and develops the thesis that the effectiveness of counsel is determined largely by the structure of the delinquency hearing and the willingness and ability of court personnel and procedures to adapt to the introduction of an adversarial role of defense counsel. What makes this study unique is the large-scale effort to combine legal analysis and sociological methodology to the study of an action-oriented program. The use of the classical experimental design, the selection of control and experimental groups by random assignment, and the extent to which the use of this methodology increases the validity of the results, will be of interest to both lawyers and social scientists. The book is a major contribution to the growing literature in the field of the sociology of law.

W. VAUGHAN STAPLETON is assistant professor of sociology at the State University College at Buffalo, New York.

LEE E. TEITELBAUM is associate professor of law at the State University of New York at Buffalo, faculty of law and jurisprudence.

"A wonderful compendium of everything you always wanted to know about trends in women's roles—both in and out of the home. It is a balanced and data-rich assessment of how far women have come and how far they still have to go." —Isabelle Sawhill, Urban Institute

"Based primarily on the 1990 population census, Balancing Act reports on the current situation of American women and temporal and cross-national comparisons. Meticulously and clearly presented, the information in this book highlights changing behaviors, such as the growing incidence of childbearing to older women, and unmarried women in general, and a higher ratio of women's earnings to men's. The authors' thoughtful analysis of these and other factors involved in women's fin de siècle 'balancing act' make this an indispensable reference book and valuable classroom resource."—Louise A. Tilly, Michael E. Gellert Professor of History and Sociology, The New School for Social Research

In Balancing Act, authors Daphne Spain and Suzanne Bianchi draw upon multiple census and survey sources to detail the shifting conditions under which women manage their roles as mothers, wives, and breadwinners. They chronicle the progress made in education—where female college enrollment now exceeds that of males—and the workforce, where women have entered a wider variety of occupations and are staying on the job longer, even after becoming wives and mothers. But despite progress, lower-paying service and clerical positions remain predominantly female, and although the salary gap between men and women has shrunk, women are still paid less. As women continue to establish a greater presence outside the home, many have delayed marriage and motherhood. Marked jumps in divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth have given rise to significant numbers of female-headed households. Married women who work contribute more significantly than ever to the financial well-being of their families, yet evidence shows that they continue to perform most household chores.

Balancing Act focuses on how American women juggle the simultaneous demands of caregiving and wage earning, and compares their options to those of women in other countries. The United States is the only industrialized nation without policies to support working mothers and their families—most tellingly in the absence of subsidized childcare services. Many women are forced to work in less rewarding part-time or traditionally female jobs that allow easy exit and re-entry, and as a consequence poverty is the single greatest danger facing American women. As the authors show, the risk of poverty varies significantly by race and ethnicity, with African Americans—most of whose children live in mother-only families—the most adversely affected.

This volume contributes to the national dialogue about family policy, welfare reform, and responsibility for children by highlighting the pivotal roles women play at the intersection of family and work.

DAPHNE SPAIN is associate professor at the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, University of Virginia.

SUZANNE M. BIANCHI is professor of sociology and faculty associate at the Center on Population, Gender, and Social Inequality, University of Maryland.

"Smith's research updates a long line of work that tries to understand the pattern of social supports in communities of concentrated poverty. She expands our understanding of the process by which acute deficits of human capital are converted into enduring disadvantage."
-CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

"Lone Pursuit significantly advances our understanding of the employment woes of poor African Americans, This book provides new insights on the structural, cultural, and psychological factors that contribute to the high rate of joblessness among low-skilled blacks. I highly recommend it."
-WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University

"Ever since the classic work by Granovetter, we have been aware of the powerful influence of social networks in labor market matching. But the question of what prompts a network tie to take the next step-to activate on behalf of a job seeker-has rarely been investigated. In this rich and engaging volume, Sandra Smith discovers the self-defeating rules of the game among poor African American job seekers who refrain from asking their network partners to help because they expect to be rejected. Hesitation by network partners combines with withdrawal on the part of the unemployed, leading to a devastating stalemate. Smith's work is sobering, insightful, and crucial in helping scholars under stand how the matching process breaks down for thousands of would be workers in the inner city."
-KATHERINE S. NEWMAN, Forbes '41 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University

"Lone Pursuit is an elegantly written and substantively rich book about the many challenges faced by poor black job seekers. Deftly navigating between structural and cultural accounts of these disadvantages, the story that emerges from Professor Smith's careful fieldwork is a subtle tale of how moral judgments about the importance of work internal to the working class African American community reflect and reinforce the values of mainstream society, and how those judgments structure the job seeking of disad vantaged blacks. This work is required reading for any serious scholar of race and inequality."
-ROBERTO M. FERNANDEZ, William F. Pounds Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management

"Lone Pursuit explains the seemingly inexplicable. Building on parallel arguments in Carol Stack's classic All Our Kin-that trust and distrust infuse relations among kin-Sandra Smith extends the interpersonal to the drama of the labor market as people search for jobs and try to find 'somebody' to trust. A deeply complex and original view of social capital that shows how family and friend networks fail to facilitate job search processes in poor black communities."
-MITCHELL DUNEIER, professor of sociology, Princeton University

Unemployment among black Americans is twice that of whites. Myriad theories have been put forward to explain the persistent employment gap between blacks and whites in the U.S. Structural theorists point to factors such as employer discrimination and the decline of urban manufacturing. Other researchers argue that African-American residents living in urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty lack social networks that can connect them to employers. Still others believe that African-American culture fosters attitudes of defeatism and resistance to work. In Lone Pursuit, sociologist Sandra Susan Smith cuts through this thicket of competing explanations to examine the actual process of job searching in depth. Lone Pursuit reveals that unemployed African Americans living in the inner city are being let down by jobholding peers and government agencies who could help them find work, but choose not to.

Lone Pursuit is a pioneering ethnographic study of the experiences of low-skilled, black urban residents in Michigan as both jobseekers and jobholders. Smith surveyed 105 African-American men and women between the ages of 20 and 40, each of whom had no more than a high school diploma. She finds that mutual distrust thwarts cooperation between jobseekers and jobholders. Jobseekers do not lack social capital per se, but are often unable to make use of the network ties they have. Most jobholders express reluctance about referring their friends and relatives for jobs, fearful of jeopardizing their own reputations with employers. Rather than finding a culture of dependency, Smith discovered that her underprivileged subjects engage in a discourse of individualism. To justify denying assistance to their friends and relatives, jobholders characterize their unemployed peers as lacking in motivation and stress the importance of individual responsibility. As a result, many jobseekers, wary of being demeaned for their needy condition, hesitate to seek referrals from their peers. In a low-skill labor market where employers rely heavily on personal referrals, this go-it-alone approach is profoundly self-defeating. In her observations of a state job center, Smith finds similar distrust and non-cooperation between jobseekers and center staff members, who assume that young black men are unwilling to make an effort to find work. As private contractors hired by the state, the job center also seeks to meet performance quotas by screening out the riskiest prospects—black male and female jobseekers who face the biggest obstacles to employment and thus need the most help.

The problem of chronic black joblessness has resisted both the concerted efforts of policymakers and the proliferation of theories offered by researchers. By examining the roots of the African-American unemployment crisis from the vantage point of the everyday job-searching experiences of the urban poor, Lone Pursuit provides a novel answer to this decades-old puzzle.

SANDRA SUSAN SMITH is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Amply documented and methodologically precise, this volume provides a definitive socioeconomic assessment of earnings inequality and racial divisions in Atlanta."
- Choice

"The Atlanta Paradox is among the most important contributions of the past decade to our understanding of racial patterns of economic disadvantage in U.S. metropolitan regions. If we rank metropolitan regions by how much we understand about such matters, Atlanta just moved to the top!"
- RONALD F. FERGUSON, Harvard University

"This is an important and rigorous book. It offers a unique statistical snapshot of the South's leading city in the late 20th century-demonstrating the extent of the Atlanta paradox and offering explanations for its persistence."
- Southeastern Geographer

Despite the rapid creation of jobs in the greater Atlanta region, poverty in the city itself remains surprisingly high, and Atlanta's economic boom has yet to play a significant role in narrowing the gap between the suburban rich and the city poor. This book investigates the key factors underlying this paradox.

The authors show that the legacy of past residential segregation as well as the more recent phenomenon of urban sprawl both work against inner city blacks. Many remain concentrated near traditional black neighborhoods south of the city center and face prohibitive commuting distances now that jobs have migrated to outlying northern suburbs.

The book also presents some promising signs. Few whites still hold overt negative stereotypes of blacks, and both whites and blacks would prefer to live in more integrated neighborhoods. The emergence of a dynamic, black middle class and the success of many black-owned businesses in the area also give the authors reason to hope that racial inequality will not remain entrenched in a city where so much else has changed.

DAVID L. SJOQUIST is professor of economics in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Ronald H. Bayor, Irene Browne, Obie Clayton Jr., Nikki McIntyre Finlay, Christopher R. Geller, Gary Paul Green, Roger B. Hammer, Truman A. Hartshorn, Cynthia Lucas Hewitt, Keith R. Ihlanfeldt, Sahadeo Patram, Travis Patton, David L. Sjoquist, Mark A. Thompson, and Leann M. Tigges

A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

A Generation of Change is an exceptional study of the nation's elderly, a population that has undergone profound changes in the years since World War II. As modern medicine extends the average life span and the baby boom generation begins to approach middle age, the number of older Americans is expected to more than double in the next century. Currently, 75 percent of U.S. health care expenditures go toward the elderly. But as national trends toward early retirement and low birthrate continue, an aging American population could face crises in meeting their financial and physical needs. According to Jacob S. Siegel in A Generation of Change, astute public planning must be informed by an understanding of the demographic, social, and economic characteristics of the older population, as it is today and as it will be in the coming years.

Siegel employs census and survey data from 1950 through the mid-1980s to describe a population constantly shifting in its ethnic and gender composition, geographic distribution, marital and living arrangements, health, employment, and economic status. Surprisingly, there is tremendous disparity in the quality of life among the elderly. Although their average poverty rate is below that of the general population, there are dramatic levels of poverty among older women, who are far more likely than men to live alone or in institutions. As the elderly progress from the "young old" to the "aged old"—those over 85—sharp differences emerge as income and employment decrease and degrees of chronic illness increase. In addition, residential location influences the quality of health care and public assistance available to the elderly, an effect that may account for the marked migration of older people to Florida and Arizona.

Siegel analyzes the full range of characteristics for this heterogenous population and, through comparisons with other age groups as well as with the elderly of the previous decades, portrays the crucial influence of social and economic conditions over the life course on the quality of later life. With our elderly population growing more numerous and long lived, accurate information about them is increasingly essential. A Generation of Change will serve as a valuable resource for policymakers seeking more effective solutions in critical areas such as housing, long-term health care, and the funding of Social Security and retirement programs.

JACOB S. SIEGEL is professor of demography at Georgetown University.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series