Matthew Diemer, associate professor in MSU’s College of Education, talks about his paper “Practices in Conceptualizing and Measuring Social Class in Psychological Research.”
Social class has been linked to health, college attainment and other important outcomes, but the best ways to define and measure social class are still unclear to many, a Michigan State University scholar argues. (more…)
COLUMBUS, Ohio – A desire for expensive, high-status goods is related to feelings of social status – which helps explain why minorities are attracted to bling, a new study suggests.
Previous research had shown that racial minorities spend a larger portion of their incomes than do whites on conspicuous consumption – buying products that suggest high status. (more…)
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Just a few minutes of listening to mainstream rock music was enough to influence white college students to favor a student group catering mostly to whites over groups serving other ethnic and racial groups, a new study found.
However, white students who listened to more ethnically diverse Top 40 pop music showed equal support for groups focused on whites, African Americans, Arab Americans and Latino Americans. (more…)
The political outlook of blacks in America has undergone dramatic swings in the last ten years — from the depths of powerlessness during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, to the zenith with the election of the first black president, Barack Obama.
Now, with another presidential election looming, blacks are again confronting new issues as they judge and sometimes question the impact of Obama’s election, contends UChicago political scientist Michael Dawson, whose work finds sharp contrasts between how African Americans and whites feel about their country. (more…)
Conventional wisdom has long held that Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which advocated racial self-help and the unity of the African diaspora, grew out of the heady political and cultural environment of the Harlem Renaissance and benefited African Americans above all other black people. Any Caribbean role, according to this view, was separate and incidental to the primary legacy bequeathed to American race relations by the charismatic Jamaica native.
Now a UCLA historian argues the reverse in the first book of a multi-volume series on the Garvey movement and the Caribbean. From the UNIA’s organizational structure to its most valuable foot soldiers during its first half-decade, Garvey’s Caribbean links were indispensable to the movement’s success, and the region ultimately proved to be its most important theater, contends Robert A. Hill in “The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers: The Caribbean Diaspora 1910–1920.” (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— A Caribbean-born black person living in the United States will most likely be healthier than a U.S.- born Caribbean black person, according to a new national study on ethnic differences in health among the American black population.
University of Michigan researchers examined the relationships among ethnicity, nativity, depressive symptoms and physical health in the two largest groups of American blacks: African American and Caribbean blacks, said Derek Griffith, assistant professor in the U-M School of Public Health and lead author of the study. (more…)
Harvard graduate Kevin Lewis (left) and UCLA sociologist Andreas Wimmer are co-authors of a new Facebook study on how college students form friendships. Image credit: Luis Gomez
Race may not be as important as previously thought in determining who buddies up with whom, suggests a new UCLA–Harvard University study of American college students on the social networking site Facebook.
“Sociologists have long maintained that race is the strongest predictor of whether two Americans will socialize,” said Andreas Wimmer, the study’s lead author and a sociologist at UCLA. “But we’ve found that birds of a feather don’t always flock together. Whom you get to know in your everyday life, where you live, and your country of origin or social class can provide stronger grounds for forging friendships than a shared racial background.”
“We’ve been able to show that just because two people of the same racial background are hanging out together, it’s not necessarily because they share the same racial background,” said co-author Kevin Lewis, a Harvard graduate student in sociology. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Old memories die hard. Simply reminding college students of the O.J. Simpson trial can alter the quality of their working relationships, according to University of Michigan research.
