Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza have published an article—“A Broken Public? Americans’ Responses to the Great Recession”—in the latest issue of the American Sociological Review. The paper, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation’s Great Recession Initiative, examines why support for income transfer policies among the American public declined between 2008 and 2010. Here is the abstract:

Did Americans respond to the recent Great Recession by demanding that government provide policy solutions to rising income insecurity, an expectation of state-of-the-art theorizing on the dynamics of mass opinion? Or did the recession erode support for government activism, in line with alternative scholarship pointing to economic factors having the reverse effect? We find that public support for government social programs declined sharply between 2008 and 2010, yet both fixed-effects and repeated survey analyses suggest economic change had little impact on policy-attitude formation. What accounts for these surprising developments? We consider alternative microfoundations emphasizing the importance of prior beliefs and biases to the formation of policy attitudes. Analyzing the General Social Surveys panel, our results suggest political partisanship has been central. Gallup and Evaluations of Government and Society surveys provide further evidence against the potentially confounding scenario of government overreach, in which federal programs adopted during the recession and the Obama presidency propelled voters away from government. We note implications for theoretical models of opinion formation, as well as directions for partisanship scholarship and interdisciplinary research on the Great Recession.

The Association of Public Policy and Analysis Management (APPAM) recently announced RSF Visiting Scholar Jane Waldfogel as its new president-elect. A professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University School of Social Work and a visiting professor at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, Waldfogel’s current research focuses on work-family policies, improving the measurement of poverty, and understanding social mobility across countries.  In her role on the leadership council of APPAM, she will oversee their 2014 Fall Research Conference.

Waldfogel is currently spending the 2013-2014 academic year in residence at the Russell Sage Foundation as part of a working group with Bruce Bradbury, Miles Corak, and Elizabeth Washbrook. The team will write a book on the transmission of inequality across generations, comparing the development of children in Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. to analyze differences in school achievement among children of different socioeconomic status in these four countries. They will also examine whether achievement gaps between rich and poor children are related to differences between countries in public policies, private resources, and educational institutions.

The Russell Sage Foundation is saddened to report the passing of Suzanne M. Bianchi, a former Visiting Scholar and co-author of several RSF books. Bianchi, who held faculty positions in sociology at the University of Maryland and UCLA, rose to prominence for her groundbreaking research on the changing dynamics of late-20^th-century American families, and in particular, for her demographic surveys on “time use”—or analyses of where, how, and with whom people spend their time. Her influential findings included the discovery that working mothers in the 1990s spent as much time with their children as stay-at-home mothers of the 1960s, averaging a weekly twelve hours of hands-on, close-contact time.

At the Russell Sage Foundation, Bianchi was a member of the working group Care Work in the United States and additionally served on the advisory committee of the U.S. 2010 program. A Visiting Scholar at the Foundation during the 2010-2011 academic year, she worked in collaboration with Judith Seltzer and Joseph Holtz to assess three primary pathways through which families transmit advantage or disadvantage to subsequent generations: genes and biology, economic resources and skills, and social ties and family obligations.

Bianchi was also the co-author of several books published by the Foundation, including American Women in Transition, Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, and Balancing Act: Motherhood, Marriage, and Employment Among American Women.

The Foundation’s U.S. 2010 project has published a new report, “Residential Segregation by Income, 1970-2009,” by Kendra Bischoff and Sean F. Reardon. The paper describes the patterns and trends in family income segregation over the last 40 years. The main findings include:

• Family income segregation grew in every decade from 1970-2009. The proportion in poor or affluent neighborhoods increased by 4.1 percentage points in the 1970s, by 4.6 percentage points in the 1980; by 4.2 percentage points in the 1990s, and by 5.1 percentage points from 2000-2009. The rate of growth in segregation in the 2000s was faster than in any of the three prior decades.
• Segregation by income among black families was lower than among white families in 1970, but grew four times as much between 1970 and 2009. By 2009, income segregation among black families was 65 percent greater than among white families.
• During the last four decades, the isolation of the rich has been consistently greater than the isolation of the poor. Although much of the scholarly and policy discussion about the effect of segregation and neighborhood conditions focuses on the isolation of poor families in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, it is perhaps equally important to consider the implications of the substantial, and growing, isolation of high-income families.

This feature is part of a new RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which will highlight some of the ongoing research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.

In this first installment, we focus on the work of Visiting Scholar Kathleen Vohs, Professor of Marketing and Land 'O Lakes Professor of Excellence in Marketing at the University of Minnesota. In collaboration with Professor Roy Baumeister, Vohs will spend the 2013-2014 academic year in residence at the Russell Sage Foundation investigating the self-sufficiency theory of money, or the idea that money is a source of independence for people that has both negative and positive effects on their behavior. How do people behave after they’ve been exposed to money?