Authored Content

Research and public sociology

Youth’s Family and Non-Family Roles as Predictors of Subjective Adulthood in Three Low-Income Agricultural Settings

Erick Axxe, Sarah R. Hayford, Natalie D. Eggum Jan 2022
Subjective adulthood, or feeling like an adult, captures identity development relative to the local context that shapes life course processes. Most research on this topic is conducted in wealthy developed countries. Instead, we draw on household-based survey data from the Family Migration and Early Life Outcomes project (FAMELO) to estimate ordinal logistic regression models predicting how often adolescents aged 11–17 in Jalisco, Mexico (n=1,567); Gaza Province, Mozambique (n=1,368); and the Chitwan Valley, Nepal (n=1,898), identify as adults. The relationships between adult roles, family capital, youth characteristics, and youth’s adult identities vary substantially across the sites. The findings highlight how the transition to adulthood reflects the cultural and structural conditions of adult identities.

A Replication of O’Brien and Noy (2015)

Erick Axxe Sep 2020

Study Replication for SCORE Project (Center for Open Science)

We test the claim from O’Brien & Noy (2015) that although the post-secular perspective entails high levels of science knowledge as well as favorable views of science and religion, when scientific and religious perspectives conflict (e.g. evolution), the post-secular latent class almost unanimously aligned their views with particular religious accounts. This reflects the following statement from the paper’s abstract: “Overall, most individuals favor either scientific or religious ways of understanding, but many scientifically inclined individuals prefer certain religious accounts.” Participants’ responses to the General Social Survey (GSS) weresubmitted to a latent class analysis that resulted in a three-class solution characterized as representing traditional, modern, and post-secular perspectives on science and religion. Following this assignment, two-tailed t-tests were used to compare responses between the three groups; for the purposes of the SCORE project, the focal test is the comparison between the Traditional and Post-Secular groups on the question concerning evolution (‘Human beings developed from earlier species of animals’, yes or no). Members of the post-secular category were significantly less likely than members of the traditional group to respond that humans evolved from other animals (3 percent, significant at p < 0.05 on a two-tailed test, see Table 2, rightmost column).We replicate this study using the GSS years not included in the original survey. All variables remain the same.

Equalizing Opportunity by Stratifying Education? Intergenerational Mobility in Germany across Institution Types

Erick Axxe Sep 2019
This study analyzes class origins, social mobility and educational and occupational trajectories among Germans citizens using the National Educational Panel Study adult cohort survey (N=9,099). Relative to one’s origins, and using ordinal logistic modeling techniques, I first analyze the educational pathways that individuals of distinct social background tend to follow. Social origins matter, and significantly, for if and where one graduates, with respondents of the highest social origins graduating from the university and individuals of the lowest social origins attending the least prestigious education options. Secondly, my analyses interrogate the labor market implications of these patterns, focusing specifically on respondents’ eventual occupational status and income levels. Generally, social mobility relative to one’s parents only appears to occur for individuals with mid-tertiary degrees, but not for degrees of higher or lower prestige. This U-shaped relationship between social origins, education, and occupational destinations, recently seen in research from France and the United States, likewise appears to be prevalent in Germany despite unique economic and education structures. The bulk of my results point to some reproduction of existing inequalities within higher education and an important interaction between origins, career development and occupational trajectories that should be of interest to researchers and policymakers alike.

Advancing the Field of Immigration and Health

Reanne Frank, Erick Axxe, Coralia Balasca, and Melissa Rodriguez Jan 2019
In this edited volume, we turn our attention to furthering the evidence-based understanding of a frequently overlooked topic in the discourse on immigration the health of immigrants and their descendants. Health is a critical domain for this purpose for several reasons. Most consequently, a core tenet of medical sociology is that health and illness provide a window into how our social structure operates. A focus on health has the potential to shine a reflective mirror on the underlying social forces that pattern individual lives and how they interact with other domains to shape opportunities and life chances. A focus on immigrant health also has the promise to help move debates and the broader conversation on immigration beyond the politics of division and fear. This is particularly so in the case of health because its patterning cuts against much of the negative rhetoric swirling around immigration. Immigrants have better health, on average, than the native-born (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2015). This pattern “flips the script” from an emphasis on the negative impacts of immigration that dominate so much of the politicized rhetoric to a recognition of better outcomes among immigrants vis-à-vis natives.