In January 1980 a panel of distinguished social scientists and statisticians assembled at the National Academy of Sciences to begin a thorough review of the uses, reliability, and validity of surveys purporting to measure such subjective phenomena as attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and preferences. This review was prompted not only by the widespread use of survey results in both academic and non-academic settings, but also by a proliferation of apparent discrepancies in allegedly equivalent measurements and by growing public concern over the value of such measurements.

This two-volume report of the panel’s findings is certain to become one of the standard works in the field of survey measurement. Volume I summarizes the state of the art of surveying subjective phenomena, evaluates contemporary measurement programs, examines the uses and abuses of such surveys, and candidly assesses the problems affecting them. The panel also offers strategies for improving the quality and usefulness of subjective survey data. In volume II, individual panel members and other experts explore in greater depth particular theoretical and empirical topics relevant to the panel’s conclusions.

For social scientists and policymakers who conduct, analyze, and rely on surveys of the national state of mind, this comprehensive and current review will be an invaluable resource.

CHARLES F. TURNER is professor of Applied Social Research at the City University of New York.

ELIZABETH MARTIN is research associate at the National Research Council.

CONTRIBUTORS: Robert P. Abelson, Barbara A. Bailar, Marian Ballard, Theresa J. Demaio, Otis Dudley Duncan, Baruch Fischhoff, Lester R. Frankel, William H. Kruskal, Michael B. Mackuen, Catherine Marsch, Elizabeth Martin, Sara B. Nerlove, Howard Schuman, Tom W. Smith, Charles F. Turner

Women, Politics, and Change, a compendium of twenty-three original essays by social historians, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists, examines the political history of American women over the past one hundred years. Taking a broad view of politics, the contributors address voluntarism and collective action, women's entry into party politics through suffrage and temperance groups, the role of nonpartisan organizations and pressure politics, and the politicization of gender. Each chapter provides a telling example of how American women have behaved politically throughout the twentieth century, both in the two great waves of feminist activism and in less highly mobilized periods.

"The essays are unusually well integrated, not only through the introductory material but through a similarity of form and extensive cross-references among them....in raising central questions about the forms, bases, and issues of women's politics, as well as change and continuity over time, Tilly, Gurin, and the individual scholars included in this collection have provided us with a survey of the latest research and an agenda for the future." —Contemporary Sociology

"This book is a necessary addition to the scholar's bookshelf, and the student's curriculum." —Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, professor of sociology, City University of New York Graduate Center

LOUISE A. TILLY is professor of history and sociology at the New School for Social Research and chair of its Committee on Historical Studies. She is president of the American Historical Association.

PATRICIA GURIN is professor of psychology and women's studies and a faculty associate of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

CONTRIBUTORS:  Kristi Anderson, Alida Brill,  Nancy F. Cott,  Elizabeth Faue,  M. Patricia Fernandez-Kelly,  Jo Freeman, Anna M. Garcia, Patricia Gurin, Nancy A. Hewitt, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Leonie Huddy, Herbert Jacob,  Jacqueline Jones,  M. Kent Jennings, Rebecca Klatch,  David Knoke,  Suzanne Lebsock, William Lehrman,  Jane Mansbridge, Ruth Milkman,  Barbara J. Nelson,  David O. Sears,  Kay Lehman Schlozmon,  Louise A. Tilly,  Sidney Verba, Susan Ware, Robert Wuthnow.

This bold and lively essay is one of those rarest of intellectual achievements, a big small book. In its short length are condensed enormous erudition and impressive analytical scope. With verve and self-assurance, it addresses a broad, central question: How can we improve our understanding of the large-scale processes and structures that transformed the world of the nineteenth century and are transforming our world today?

Tilly contends that twentieth-century social theories have been encumbered by a nineteenth century heritage of “pernicious postulates.” He subjects each misleading belief to rigorous criticism, challenging many standard social science paradigms and methodologies. As an alternative to those timeless, placeless models of social change and organization, Tilly argues convincingly for a program of concrete, historically grounded analysis and systematic comparison.

To illustrate the strategies available for such research, Tilly assesses the works of several major practitioners of comparative historical analysis, making skillful use of this selective review to offer his own speculative, often unconventional accounts of our recent past.

Historically oriented social scientists will welcome this provocative essay and its wide-ranging agenda for comparative historical research. Other social scientists, their graduate and undergraduate students, and even the interested general reader will find this new work by a major scholar stimulating and eminently readable.

This is the second of five volumes commissioned by the Russell Sage Foundation to mark its seventy-fifth anniversary.

"In this short, brilliant book Tilly suggests a way to think about theories of historical social change....This book should find attentive readers both in undergraduate courses and in graduate seminars. It should also find appreciative readers, for Tilly is a writer as well as a scholar." —Choice

CHARLES TILLY is at the New School for Social Research.

Winner of the 2009 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography

Winner of the 2009 Distinguished Contribution to Research Award from the Latino/a Section of the American Sociological Association

Winner of the 2009 Pacific Sociological Association's Distinguished Scholarship Award

Honorable Mention 2009 Thomas and Znaniecki Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association

Foreword by Joan W. Moore

"In its empirical findings and conclusions, Generations of Exclusion represents a major contribution that should be consulted by anyone seriously pondering the American, and the Mexican American, future."
-POPULATION REVIEW

"Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz have brought back to life the significance of the Mexican American Study Project of the 1960s. Most importantly, the follow-up interviews they conducted with respondents from the 1960s, combined with other research, make for yet another benchmark study that gives us penetrating analyses of the socioeconomic progress and challenges Mexican Americans have encountered over the past generation. Generations of Exclusion is a must read for everyone interested in Latinos in American society, past and present."
-ALBERT M. CAMARILLO, professor of history and Hass Centennial Professor in Public Service, Stanford University

"Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz marshal incontrovertible, if disconcerting, evidence that the urban integration machines in Los Angeles and San Antonio have not served people of Mexican origin well. Already lagging in educational attainment before the post-1965 immigration surge, Mexican Americans' educational deficits proved costly for their offspring who entered the workforce as the returns to skill rose. A masterfully executed, if sobering account of Mexican Americans' stymied mobility, Generations of Exclusion challenges students of race relations and immigrant assimilation to rethink old paradigms based on the integration experiences of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants and African Americans who made their way to northern cities."
-MARTA TIENDA, Maurice P. During '22 Professor in Demographic Studies and professor of sociology and public affairs, Princeton University

"In their landmark new study, Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz offer unique data and path-breaking methods to analyze America's most complex and misunderstood minority. Their exhaustive analysis of Mexican Americans from the first to the fifth generation shatters the myth of Mexican resistance to assimilation to reveal the true source of the group's lagging economic progress: an ongoing legacy of racialized subordination and exclusion from the American mainstream. Generations of Exclusion will be a touchstone not only in Latino Studies, but also fields such as immigration, stratification, and race-ethnicity."
-DOUGLAS S. MASSEY, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University

"With Mexican immigration to the United States at an all time high, the question of whether Mexican Americans will move ahead or find their search for progress impeded stands at the top of the public and social science agenda. For insight, the reader will want to consult Generations of Exclusion: using a unique data source, Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz explore the question deeply, doing so as no one else has done before. This clearly written, carefully analyzed study of the Mexican American experience in its many dimensions is must reading for anyone interested in the America emerging before our eyes."
-ROGER WALDINGER, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

When boxes of original files from a 1965 survey of Mexican Americans were discovered behind a dusty bookshelf at UCLA, sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz recognized a unique opportunity to examine how the Mexican American experience has evolved over the past four decades.  Telles and Ortiz located and re-interviewed most of the original respondents and many of their children.  Then, they combined the findings of both studies to construct a thirty-five year analysis of Mexican American integration into American society.  Generations of Exclusion is the result of this extraordinary project.

Generations of Exclusion measures Mexican American integration across a wide number of dimensions: education, English and Spanish language use, socioeconomic status, intermarriage, residential segregation, ethnic identity, and political participation. The study contains some encouraging findings, but many more that are troubling. Linguistically, Mexican Americans assimilate into mainstream America quite well—by the second generation, nearly all Mexican Americans achieve English proficiency. In many domains, however, the Mexican American story doesn’t fit with traditional models of assimilation. The majority of fourth generation Mexican Americans continue to live in Hispanic neighborhoods, marry other Hispanics, and think of themselves as Mexican. And while Mexican Americans make financial strides from the first to the second generation, economic progress halts at the second generation, and poverty rates remain high for later generations. Similarly, educational attainment peaks among second generation children of immigrants, but declines for the third and fourth generations.

Telles and Ortiz identify institutional barriers as a major source of Mexican American disadvantage. Chronic under-funding in school systems predominately serving Mexican Americans severely restrains progress. Persistent discrimination, punitive immigration policies, and reliance on cheap Mexican labor in the southwestern states all make integration more difficult. The authors call for providing Mexican American children with the educational opportunities that European immigrants in previous generations enjoyed. The Mexican American trajectory is distinct—but so is the extent to which this group has been excluded from the American mainstream.

Most immigration literature today focuses either on the immediate impact of immigration or what is happening to the children of newcomers to this country. Generations of Exclusion shows what has happened to Mexican Americans over four decades. In opening this window onto the past and linking it to recent outcomes, Telles and Ortiz provide a troubling glimpse of what other new immigrant groups may experience in the future.

EDWARD E. TELLES is professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

VILMA ORTIZ is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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.