Investigating the Social World
SAGE Journal Articles
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Research That Matters: Fallon, Katherine M., Liam Swiss, and Jocelyn Viterna. 2012. "Resolving the Democracy Paradox: Democratization and Women's Legislative Representation in Developing Nations, 1975 to 2009." American Sociological Review 77(3):380-408.
Journal Article 1: Lindner, A. M. & Schulting, Z. (2017). How movies with a female presence fare with critics. Socius, 3, 1–6.
Abstract: This study explores one potential mechanism contributing to the persistent underrepresentation of women in film by considering whether movie critics reward or penalize films with an independent female presence. Drawing on a sample of widely distributed movies from 2000 to 2009 (n = 975), we test whether films that pass the Bechdel Test (two or more named women speak to each other about something other than a man) have higher or lower Metacritic scores net of control variables, including arthouse production label, genre, production budget, including a top star, and being a sequel. The results indicate that the mere inclusion or absence of an independent female presence has no effect on a film’s composite critical evaluation. These findings suggest that while critical reviews are not a major factor contributing to women’s exclusion from film, movie critics as a whole do not advocate for films with an independent female presence.
Abstract: Drawing on two projects which develop the methodological model of Bourdieu’s Distinction in the UK and Finland, this paper explores the issues raised by the use of multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and mixed methods in comparative work on cultural tastes. By identifying the problems in the construction of two comparable yet nationally relevant research instruments, the paper considers the importance of the similarities and differences in the meaning of items in different national spaces for Bourdieu-inspired comparative analysis. The paper also reports on the evident similarities between the two constructed spaces and draws on the dialogue between quantitative and qualitative methods enabled by MCA in examining what different positions in social space appear to mean in these countries. It concludes by suggesting that, whilst Bourdieu’s model provides a robust set of methods for exploring relations between taste and class within nations, when used appropriately, it can also provide particular insight for the comparison of national fields.
Journal Article 3: Silver, P. (2015). “You don’t look Puerto Rican”: Collective memory and community in Orlando. Memory Studies, 9(4), 405–421.
Abstract: Although the 2010 US Census counts documented a large Puerto Rican community in and around Orlando, Florida, 30 years earlier in 1980 Puerto Ricans were living scattered about the area practically unnoticed. A 2008–2009 oral history collection of Puerto Rican memories in Orlando from the 1940s to 1980s gives evidence that middle-class social relations mitigated racial dissonance for some in Orlando’s black-white binary, making it possible to almost disappear into the dominant society. This article posits collective memory as a sociocultural process not an outcome and argues that in that almost is a space of dissonance and difference, where strategic moments of forgetting and re-remembering inform the dynamics of collective memory formation. The memories recorded in the collection describe a slippery space between an invisibility emerging from pressures to assimilate and a hypervisibility emerging from US colonial history in Puerto Rico and widespread stereotyping of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States.