Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe stigma concept has been tremendously successful one. Before Goffman's influential book only a handful of papers used the term in the abstract or title of a paper—in 2020 there were 3464. While the reason for stigma's dramatic growth is likely over determined two possibilities are suggested. The first is the usefulness that the concept carries for understanding the shame, social awkwardness, rejection, misunderstanding, and exclusion that people frequently experience across so many stigmatizing circumstances. The second is that the complexity of the stigma experience provides an enormous number of research puzzles in need of investigation as there are so many different stigmatizing circumstances that are affected at multiple levels across multiple outcomes. The current special issue addresses this complexity by focusing on the particularly important domain of social relationships but at the same allows complexity in the types of stigmatizing circumstances considered and the levels at which they are investigated. In what might be a model for the stigma field as it faces its tremendous growth, Doyle and Barreto (2023) use the multiple contributions to the special issue to develop thematic questions that will guide future research into stigma and social relationships.

Fundamental cause theory (FCT) was originally proposed to explain how socioeconomic inequalities in health emerged and persisted over time. The concept was that higher socioeconomic status helped some people to avoid risks and adopt protective strategies using flexible resources: knowledge, money, power, prestige, and beneficial social connections. As a sociological theory, FCT addressed this issue by calling on social stratification, stigma, and racism as they affected medical treatments and health outcomes. The last comprehensive review was completed a decade ago. Since then, FCT has been tested, and new applications have extended central features. The current review consolidates key foci in the literature in order to guide future research in the field. Notable themes emerged around types of resources and their usage, approaches used to test the theory, and novel extensions. We conclude that after 25 years of use, there remain crucial questions to be addressed.

We previously proposed that socioeconomic status (SES) is a fundamental cause of health inequalities and, as such, that SES inequalities in health persist over time despite radical changes in the diseases, risks, and interventions that happen to produce them at any given time. Like SES, race in the United States has an enduring connection to health and mortality. Our goals here are to evaluate whether this connection endures because systemic racism is a fundamental cause of health inequalities and, in doing so, to review a wide range of empirical data regarding racial differences in health outcomes, health risks, and health-enhancing resources such as money, knowledge, power, prestige, freedom, and beneficial social connections. We conclude that racial inequalities in health endure primarily because racism is a fundamental cause of racial differences in SES and because SES is a fundamental cause of health inequalities. In addition to these powerful connections, however, there is evidence that racism, largely via inequalities in power, prestige, freedom, neighborhood context, and health care, also has a fundamental association with health independent of SES.

Social science research on stigma has grown dramatically over the past two decades, particularly in social psychology, where researchers have elucidated the ways in which people construct cognitive categories and link those categories to stereotyped beliefs. In the midst of this growth, the stigma concept has been criticized as being too vaguely defined and individually focused. In response to these criticisms, we define stigma as the co-occurrence of its components–labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination–and further indicate that for stigmatization to occur, power must be exercised. The stigma concept we construct has implications for understanding several core issues in stigma research, ranging from the definition of the concept to the reasons stigma sometimes represents a very persistent predicament in the lives of persons affected by it. Finally, because there are so many stigmatized circumstances and because stigmatizing processes can affect multiple domains of people's lives, stigmatization probably has a dramatic bearing on the distribution of life chances in such areas as earnings, housing, criminal involvement, health, and life itself. It follows that social scientists who are interested in understanding the distribution of such life chances should also be interested in stigma.

Abstract Students of crime have traditionally stressed the uniqueness of the criminal world and have developed special concepts in their attempt to explain the functioning of this "special" domain. In contrast, others in the field have asserted that the concepts used to investigate the coventional world can also be employed to provide insight into its criminal counterpart. This sentiment has been particularly evident among those who have utilized the concept of "occupation" to analyze criminal behavior. Building on the "crime as work" perspective, this research illustrates that, similar to conventional occupations, criminal work is stratified by prestige and stereotyped by sex. Further, the data suggest that Davis and Moore's (1945) functional theory may be a useful explanation not only of the stratification of conventional work but of criminal occupations as well.

Using data from a national survey of public attitudes toward homeless people, this paper evaluates the applicability of the contact hypothesis to in-group/out-group relations that fail to meet the optimal conditions specified in the contact literature. Past efforts are extended by (1) moving beyond face-to-face encounters to consider multiple types of ingroup exposure to a highly stigmatized out-group, (2) examining a variety of attitudinal outcomes, and (3) incorporating community context as a possible antecedent of such outcomes. Even after taking selection and social desirability processes into account, all types of exposure are found to affect public attitudes in the predicted (favorable) direction. Moreover, the size of the local homeless population—our primary measure of context-shapes opportunities for most forms of exposure and thus influences attitudes indirectly. These findings suggest that the scope of the contact hypothesis needs to be widened rather than narrowed.

Based on a survey of 539 residents of Cincinnati, this study assesses various explanations of gun ownership. The analysis reveals that gender and childhood socialization into a gun culture are significantly related to protective and general (or "sport") firearm possession. In contrast, only protective gun ownership appears to be linked to crime‐related factors. Conservative crime ideology and concern about the relative level of crime in one's neighborhood increase armament for defensive purposes, while informal collective security—the belief that neighbors will provide assistance against criminal victimization—reduces protective gun ownership.

This volume provides an overview of mental health research conducted by sociologists. It discusses dominant themes such as stress, the community and mental life, family structure, social relations and recovery. The unique contribution of sociology to the study of mental health has a long history stretching from the very foundations of modern sociology. Yet it was only twenty years ago that the Section on Sociology of Mental Health of the American Sociological Association was formed largely in response to a burgeoning rise in the sum and significance of research in the field. Today the section is a large and vibrant one with its own journal, Society and Mental Health. This book explores several of the themes that have occurred during that period, providing both perspectives of the past and prospects for the future. The volume is timely, following closely the 20th anniversary of the section's formation. Its coverage of key issues and its advancement of the scholarly debates on these issues will prove valuable to students and senior scholars alike