SAGE Journal Articles

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Research That Matters: Fligstein, Neil, Orestes  P. Hastings, and Adam Goldstein. 2017. "Keeping Up With the Joneses: How Households Fared in the Era of High Income Inequality and the Housing Price Bubble, 1999-2007." Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 3:1-15.

Journal Article 1: Gray, E., Jennings, W., Farrall, S., & Hay, C. (2015). Small Big Data: Using multiple data-sets to explore unfolding social and economic change. Big Data & Society2(1), 1–6.

Abstract: Bold approaches to data collection and large-scale quantitative advances have long been a preoccupation for social science researchers. In this commentary we further debate over the use of large-scale survey data and official statistics with ‘Big Data’ methodologists, and emphasise the ability of these resources to incorporate the essential social and cultural heredity that is intrinsic to the human sciences. In doing so, we introduce a series of new data-sets that integrate approximately 30 years of survey data on victimisation, fear of crime and disorder and social attitudes with indicators of socio-economic conditions and policy outcomes in Britain. The data-sets that we outline below do not conform to typical conceptions of ‘Big Data’. But, we would contend, they are ‘big’ in terms of the volume, variety and complexity of data which has been collated (and to which additional data can be linked) and ‘big’ also in that they allow us to explore key questions pertaining to how social and economic policy change at the national level alters the attitudes and experiences of citizens. Importantly, they are also ‘small’ in the sense that the task of rendering the data usable, linking it and decoding it, required both manual processing and tacit knowledge of the context of the data and intentions of its creators.

Journal Article 2: Kang-Brown, H. & Kang-Brown, J. (2014). Mapping the Flavors of New York City. Contexts13(3), 62–70.

Abstract: Artist Hanna Kang-Brown and Sociologist Jacob Kang-Brown explores food as a medium for understanding the U.S. census, representing neighborhood data with spices and using the tasting experience to create a new conversational space in which to talk about the ways in which we identify ourselves and others and how that is shaped by census design.

Journal Article 3: Upright, C. (2017). The converging gender wage gap 1980–2012. Contexts16(1), 72–74.

Abstract: The story of wage gaps in American labor is generally a story of improvement, but by separating data by cohort to follow women by age group across decades, we can spot persistent wage gaps–and even some that are widening.