It is well known that socioeconomic background influences the success a child has in school. Having more resources at their disposal gives children from wealthy families advantages in school, where extra tutoring and material support can make a big difference in student performance. But we do not know whether the relationship between wealth and school performance has changed during the recent period of rising economic inequality. Do trends indicate that a child's educational attainment is more strongly determined by family income and education now than it was 30 years ago?

In 1991, the General Social Survey asked respondents 60 questions about everyday troubles, ranging across eight life domains: health, work, finance, housing, material hardship, family well-being, personal relationships, and criminal involvement and victimization. This group of questions, called the Study of Life Events (SLE) yielded a number of interesting results, most notably that poor inner-city single parents experienced far more troubles than did married, middle class suburbanites. Yet the SLE has not since been repeated.

For years, debates have raged over which social system does best for society’s least well-off. Liberals contend that free market systems leave many people behind, while conservatives argue that social democracies hurt the poor by creating adverse employment incentives and stifling growth. What does the evidence show?

Since its inception in 2000, the Social Inequality project at the Russell Sage Foundation has sought to determine whether and to what extent inequality in social domains has increased as economic inequality has risen over the last 30 years. The project has amassed an interesting dossier of findings and is beginning to integrate them and gain perspective on the larger picture of the recent upturn in American inequality.

Social scientists have long recognized that the family is an important source of political socialization. In the traditional framework, the older generation transmits a political orientation, specific policy attitudes, as well as a general propensity to be politically active to the younger generation. But how might this process differ for immigrant families, given that the older generation does not necessarily have a greater knowledge of the nation’s political system? When it comes to the immigrant experience, are the assumptions of the traditional model turned on their head?

The 1964 Civil Rights Act made employment discrimination on the basis of sex, race, or ethnicity illegal for firms with over 15 employees. Despite this landmark legislation, employment discrimination clearly persists in the workplace today. In 2004 alone, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed 280 discrimination lawsuits based on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

As the economic gap between rich and poor has grown over the past thirty years, a new system of social class differences may be asserting itself in the United States. Several indicators show that the wealthy enjoy better healthcare, better schools, and more political influence than the poorest segment of the population. But there may also be more subtle ways in which social class matters. With support from the Foundation, Annette Lareau, Dalton Conley, Michael Hout, and David Grusky will convene a conference to investigate the hidden workings of social class in America.

Hispanics in the greater Los Angeles area tend to reside in segregated areas. Yet it is difficult to determine whether these high levels of residential segregation result from exclusion or voluntary decisions to remain in certain areas. Recently, sociologist Susan Brown analyzed data from the Russell Sage-supported Immigrant and Inter-generational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) project. She argues that, in some cases, family and social obligations among Mexicans may slow spatial assimilation until the third generation.

Increasingly, legal scholars and empirical social scientists have collaborated to examine social issues and possible legal responses. However, little cooperative work thus far has been done on inequality. As a result, many social scientists have an overly simplistic view of the law’s ability to be put in place, interpreted effectively, and used to combat inequality. At the same time, legal scholars have a poor grasp on the empirical research done on inequality.

For young African-American men, incarceration is now more common than attending college or serving time in the military. In fact, over the past thirty years, the portion of the population involved with the U.S. correctional system at some point in their lives grew seven-fold to include 6 percent of the total adult male population and 25 percent of all African-American men. Although the population most visibly affected by the increase in incarceration is that of the black urban poor, the prison boom has affected, and been affected by, change in the general society.