Word: sociologists
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...consumers so willing to become walking billboards? "Wearing these items is a way of broadcasting your preferences to the world," says Ellen Auster, a sociologist at Columbia University's business school. Many people want to assert something about their life-style, as in the case of young adults proclaiming their newfound privilege of drinking beer. Others want to reveal some hidden part of their personality. Says Auster: "The yuppie wears a Harley-Davidson shirt because it triggers a side of him that is most of the time suppressed...
That finding will not, of course, reassure the most hyperthyroid of press critics. They should be more worried about an article in the Columbia Journalism Review. In it, Columbia Sociologist Herbert J. Gans analyzes the original attack on press bias, known as the Rothman-Lichters survey, and finds that it was biased in ways that "depart from scientific practice." Journalists were shown a set of statements--some of them admittedly oversimplified--and asked if they agreed or disagreed. Their responses to individual statements not of their own phrasing were then, says Gans, treated "as strongly felt opinions...
...teen marriage is almost gone," observes Mark Testa of NORC. "Eventually these girls get married, but it might be years later and not to the father of the child." Young black women under age 24 are facing "a shrinking pool of marriageable--that is, economically stable--young men," explains Sociologist William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago, who coauthored a 1985 study titled Poverty and Family Structure. The reasons he cites for the dearth of eligible candidates: unemployment, incarceration and an appalling rate of murder, the leading cause of death of black males...
Guttmacher researchers concur, pointing out that countries like Holland, Sweden and France provide far more generously for indigent young mothers, yet have low pregnancy rates. Research by Sociologist Frank Furstenberg of the University of Pennsylvania further refutes the notion that teenagers who become pregnant are simply looking for a handout. In following 400 young black mothers in Baltimore, Furstenberg discovered that most were "surprisingly motivated to get off welfare." In fact, 17 years after bearing a first child, only one-quarter were receiving public assistance...
...choke off the opposition. It first closed down the popular Radio Soleil, run by the Roman Catholic Church, charging its management with broadcasting "alarmist" news reports. A general news blackout followed as other stations voluntarily abandoned public affairs programming. Police arrested Opposition Leader Hubert de Ronceray, a lawyer and sociologist, charging him with sedition after "subversive" documents were found in his home. Once a member of Duvalier's Cabinet, De Ronceray, 54, has persistently ridiculed last July's rigged national referendum, in which, the government contends, 99.98% of those who voted backed the Duvalier regime...