Category Archives: Uncategorized

Disadvantaged youth

The Media may like to portray youth as out of control, ‘feral’ yobs – the recent riots certainly pandered to that image – and while there may be some truth in the fact that young people do tend to be more criminal than older we also need to remember just now disadvantaged present school leavers are compared to their parents. There appears to be a worrying age divide emerging in the UK –

For starters, there are very few jobs out there for younger people – youth unemployment currently stands at 22% for 16-24 year olds – and as of July this year there were nearly one million 16-24 olds unemployed and the future looks to be one characterised by a ‘jobless core’

The rate has actually been growing for some years now – and 2/5ths of all unemployed people are now 16-24

The knock on effect of this is that younger people are less able to buy into the ‘British’ dream – home ownership appears to be out of the question for many until they are 30 – generation rent

Instead of this –

Some people are critical of all of this – lets not forget how the age of criminal responsibility has been adjusted and is comparatively very low indeed.

 

Single parents and poverty

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I was particularly interested in the middle section of this infographic which compares the life chances of children of dual-parent households with those of children from single parent households – while controlling for household income. It suggests that there is a rather strong correlation between single-parent households and an increased likelihood of their children falling into low income jobs in the future…

For the top income bracket, for example, children whose parents are in the top third of income earners are almost twice as likely as children from dual-parent households in the same parental income bracket to end up in lower-tier income jobs themselves.

As with many infographs, this doesn’t seek to explain these statistics….

One thing to think about is the difference between day to day life in those two types of upper income household – Many of those upper income tier households would be able to afford to have one parent stay at home at least part-time, but for the single parent earning nearly 80k a year, which must mean a long-hours professional career in most cases and I can imagine the the child won’t be getting that much quality parenting in such cases.

Secondly, this might not be measuring the effects of single parents but the effects on a child of relationship breakdown (obviously the two tend to go hand in hand).

Finally, I’m uncomfortably aware of the patriarchal norms lurking behind these data – if having one stay at home parent is what’s behind the relative success of dual parent households, let’s face it, we all know it’s going to be the woman staying at home in 90% of cases, and in those single person households it will be the woman being the single parent in those cases and no doubt these stats will be uncritically wheeled out by the new right to support traditional ideas on the family

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China and Russia – Among the world’s worst human rights abusers

China and Russia have both been moved to the bottom tier of the U.S. human trafficking rank, joining the likes of North Korea, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, according to a recent U.S. State department report.

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In China, the one-child policy and a cultural preference for male children perpetuates the trafficking of brides and prostitutes. Chinese sex trafficking victims have been reported on all of the inhabited continents. Traffickers recruit girls and young women, often from rural areas of China, using a combination of fraudulent job offers, imposition of large travel fees, and threats of physical or financial harm, to obtain and maintain their service in prostitution.

Forced labour is also widely practised in China, in which both internal and external migrants are conscripted to work in coal mines or factories without pay, as well as its continued use of re-education hard labor camps for political dissidents.

In Russia, there are estimates that 50,000 children are involved in involuntary prostitution and about one million people are thought to be exposed to exploitive labor conditions, including extremely poor living conditions, the withholding for documents, and nonpayment for services.

Human Rights Watch has pointed out that some of Russia’s labour abuses have occurred during the preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, with some workers enduring “12-hour shifts with one day off per month, having their passports confiscated, being denied employment contracts, and facing unsanitary and overcrowded employer-provided accommodations, with up to 200 migrant workers living in a one single-family home.”

While the nature and scale of such absuses isn’t on a scale with what’s going in Syria, these two nations are not ‘rogue states’, they make up half of the BRIC nations. Given their status as rapidly growing and globoalising economic superpowers, combined with the size of their populations, the potential for further human rights abuses in these two nations profound.

It would be nice to think that this lower designation results in the U.S. imposing sanctions on these contries countries, such as voting against any IMF or World Bank loans. However, given the historical record of the U.S. tolerating and even supporting governments who champion capital over human rights, I don’t think sanctions are likely anytime soon.

Rapidly Developing Countries – Set to become rich countries full of poor people?

Nice article here outlining some arguments for the continued relevance of dependency theory – ending on a particular pertinent prophecy by Joseph Stiglitz – that our world is set to become one of more rich countries full of poor people – but is this true?

Looking at the world’s 10 fastest growing economies there seems to be mixed evidence-

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If we consider the GINI inequality rankings for each of these countries, which are as follows – there is mixed evidence

Brazil scores 54 – is no. 13 in the inequality league table, and by far the largest population country up that high – so Stiglitz theory seems correct here…

China scores 47 and so has relatively high inequality, possibly reflecting the differences between the huge wealth in the East and rural poverty in the West. Then again, does this matter for development because China has a very similar level of inequality to the USA ( not that that’s a good thing of course!)

Russia scoring 40 is in mid table obscurity – so no comment for now

India scoring 33 – has low inequality, making it more equal than Britain, then again it is the poorest in terms of current GNP per capita so these levels of inequality might just reflect the fact that there are masses of poor people. Given the rapid increase in billionaires recently i don’t hold out much hope for india staying low in the inequality stakes!

Video Sources for teaching Research Methods

This post is simply a list of good videos for teaching and revising research methods

Social Surveys

Doing Sociological Research – If you can get over the desperate attempt to be ‘down with the kids’, then the section on survey research in education offers a very useful explanation of sampling and operationalising concepts such as social class.

Experiments

Milgram’s obedience experiments (youtube) – Link takes you to a contemporary version of Milgram’s experiment, which reveals depressingly similar results to the original.

The Stanford Prison Experiment (youtube)

A good example of a field experiment measuring how the public respond differently to differnt ethnicities engaged in stealing a bike.

This is a second field experiment measuring how the public respond differently to differnt ethnicities engaged in vandalising a car from the everyday sociology blog (videos removed but a good explanation on the blog)

Unstructured and Semi-Structured Interviews

Many episodes of Louis Theroux are good for unstructured interviews – I especially recommend the following –

America’s Medicated Kids (Youtube) – Louis even talks about ‘being a T.V. interviewer in the introduction. Also it should be fairly obvious why ‘unstructured interviews’ are suitable for researching these children.

Louis Theroux Behind Bars (Youtube) In which Louis interviews a man sentenced to over 500 years in jail

This is an interview with Louis Theroux (Youtube) talking about why he likes ‘unstructured interviews’ – about 1.13 in

OK – It’s not a video, it’s a podcast – but from about 5 minutes in there are some interesting results from research based on interviews with 18-25 year olds on the question of ‘why they drink to excess’. Their insights tell you much more than stats ever can about youth binge drinking today.

Participant Observation

Tribe with Bruce Parry is a good, basic introduction to the advantages and Limitations of using Overt PO to research traditional societies in remote rural settings. I especially recommend the episode on the Suri in Ethopia.

For Covert Participant Observation, the standard ‘classic video’ from the late 1990s is Donal Macintyre’s research with the Chelsea Headhunters (link is to college’s estream and requires password)

Another ‘covert classic’ is the Secret Policeman – College estream link (needs password)

Official Statistics

The Office for National Statistics has a huge array of videos on youtube. Some of the most interesting include – (1) Immigration Stats (2) Household Wealth (3) Cohabitation in the UK (4) The Latest on the Labour Market, including unemployment stats

Secondary Qualitative Data

The Freedom Writers – (link to college estream, requires pass word) A film based on a true life story of a teacher who gets her disinterested English literature students to tell their own stories using diaries

The BBC’s who do you think you are is an accessible way to introduce the usefulness of secondary qualitative data. This is a link to one episode on estream (password required)

TED Talk – what we learned from 5 million books – using google ngrams to quantify the content of books

Longitudinal Studies 

The Marshmallow Experiment (Youtube)  – Measures deferred gratification in children and then tracks the children through childhood to see the effects of deferred gratification on future test scores in education.

Another classic is 7 Up – This is the original 1964 documentary and the trailer for 56 up 

Other Videos

It’s a bit long winded, and it is a cartoon – but this is a good xtranormal video (link to youtube) that goes over the pros and cons of quantitative versus qualitative research – using the topic of researching children with ADD as an example.