Featured series 
Tag: ” Sociology
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Campus & Community
A short history: Psychiatry in modern Africa
Psychiatrists working in Africa during the colonial period held to the belief that Africans did not suffer from depression. They based this idea on the assumption that Africans lacked the ability to be self-reflective or self-critical and therefore depression had no chance of gaining a foothold in their psyches. Later research during the 1950s showed…
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Campus & Community
Eclipsed for decades, Harvard’s glass animals step out
Long overshadowed by their famed floral kin, some of the exquisite 19th century glass animals housed at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) have finally hit the road for a Minnesota exhibit – the first time in Harvard’s nearly 130-year ownership that the rare sculptures are known to have left Cambridge.
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Campus & Community
More blacks ‘misperceive’ weight problem
Overweight black Americans are two to three times more likely than heavy white Americans to say they are of average weight – even after being diagnosed as overweight or obese by their doctors, according to a new study led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers. Weight misperception was most common among black men and women, and…
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Campus & Community
Body art for the faint of heart
Ever wish you could get rid of that tattoo of barbed wire around your wrist, or the forearm-length dragon you once thought of as so stylish or macho? It’s not easy. You can go through a long, expensive series of laser treatments, and still not get it completely erased. You can have it sanded off,…
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Science & Tech
Study finds M-rated video games contain violence, sexual themes, substances, and profanity not labeled on game boxes
According to a study led by Associate Professor Kimberly Thompson of the Kids Risk Project at Harvard School of Public Health, 81 percent of a random sample of “mature”-rated video games included content that was not noted on the game box. This is the first independent, quantitative study to characterize content in M-rated games related…
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Health
Dominican insects, digitized
It’s the brilliant colors and otherworldly shapes of the Dominican insects that catch the eye and draw a viewer in. It’s the alien forms magnified for all to see clearly that keeps one standing before the images hung at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, studying them. The digital images are one-third of the center’s show…
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Campus & Community
Whites more likely than blacks to die soon after spouse’s death
A longitudinal study of 410,272 elderly American couples indicates that the “widowhood effect” – the increased probability of death among new widows and widowers – is large and enduring among white couples but undetectable among black couples, suggesting that blacks may somehow manage to extend marriage’s well-documented health benefits into widowhood. The results, by Harvard…
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Health
The ‘widow effect’ is real
In findings that highlight how health effects can reverberate through a social network, a researcher at HMS and his colleague report that the serious illness of an elderly spouse increases the risk of death of a husband or wife. In fact, a few illnesses in a spouse, such as dementia, may pose more of a…
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Campus & Community
Skocpol joins Radcliffe as senior adviser
Theda Skocpol, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), has accepted a three-year term as a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study senior adviser in the social sciences, effective Jan. 1.
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Campus & Community
Sidanius named professor of African American Studies
James H. Sidanius, a psychologist best known for establishing and refining an influential theory of social dominance along lines of gender, age, race, and class, has been named professor of psychology and of African and African American Studies in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, effective Jan. 1.
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Science & Tech
Report documents importance of playlists
Drawing from an early-adopter survey conducted through Gartner, Harvard College student Derek Slater and Mike McGuire, Gartner research director, found that consumer-to-consumer recommendation tools, like playlists, enable consumers to actively present their individual tastes to each other and are becoming increasingly common. According to survey results, nearly 20 percent of online music listeners reported listening…
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Campus & Community
Sexual attraction a matter of scent
An unexpected finding may settle an ongoing scientific debate by providing evidence that key reproductive behaviors in mice arise predominantly, if not exclusively, from olfactory input instead of input from the vomeronasal, visual, or auditory senses.
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Campus & Community
Armenia’s remarkable alphabet
Armenians pride themselves on being the first nation to adopt Christianity, an event that is supposed to have occurred in the early fourth century when St. Gregory the Illuminator succeeded in converting Trdat, the king of Armenia. But according to Harvard researcher James Russell, there is much evidence that after Trdat’s death, the country was…
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Science & Tech
Taking a look at how ant (and human) societies might grow
Edward O. Wilson has learned a great deal about life by studying ant societies. In this knowledge, he finds parallels between the social interactions of insects and those of birds, lions, monkeys, apes, and even humans. The last parallel got him into trouble in the late 1970s, but he now enjoys credit for establishing a…
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Health
Survey shows Harvard doctors practice what they preach
In the 30th anniversary year for the Harvard Health Letter, the editors decided to revive a tradition and ask Harvard doctors whether they follow their own advice – two similar surveys were conducted in 1982 and 1992. Results from the 2,115 faculty members (1,185 male and 930 female) who responded were reported in the October…
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Health
How ant (and human) societies might grow
Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus Edward O. Wilson remains fascinated with the highly organized societies of ants, bees, wasps, termites, and humans. He and Bert Holldobler, with whom he shared a Pulitzer Prize for their book “The Ants,” have published a paper about how such societies originate, which appears in the Sept. 20, 2005 issue of…
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Health
Home from the hospital: almost half of patients are discharged with test results still pending
According to Christopher Roy, M.D., a hospitalist at BWH who studies patient safety, “We found that while approximately half of the patients in this study had test results that were unavailable at discharge, only a very small percentage of pending results impacted the patient’s care plan.” The researchers followed 2,644 consecutive, discharged patients from two…
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Health
Child early intervention programs make for healthier adults
The Brookline Early Education Program (BEEP), a community- based child health and development program, was initiated by the Brookline Public Schools and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and ran from 1972-1979. Enrollment was open to families in Brookline, Mass., and to some urban families in neighboring Boston. The program provided health, educational, and social services…
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Science & Tech
High school AP courses do not predict college success in science
A survey of 18,000 college students enrolled in introductory biology, chemistry, and physics has found little evidence that high school Advanced Placement (AP) courses significantly boost college performance in the sciences. The study by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Virginia (UVA) found the best predictors of success in college science courses to…
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Science & Tech
Racial, ethnic gap in youth violence linked to social factors
A study conducted by Robert J. Sampson of Harvard University and Jeffrey D. Morenoff and Stephen Raudenbush of the University of Michigan shows that the longstanding gap in the racial burden of violence follows a social anatomy and is not immutable. The odds of committing violence are almost double for blacks as compared to whites…
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Health
Study suggests obesity has lesser financial impact on African-Americans
The study published in the January 2005 issue of the American Journal of Public Health is among the first to examine how patient demographic factors affect the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and health-care costs. “From the perspective of the health-care system, obesity may be less costly among African-Americans than among whites,” says Christina…
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Science & Tech
Studying Boston’s race trends
Guy Stuart, an associate professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, is the author of a new study, “Boston at the Crossroads: Racial Trends in the Metropolitan Region in the 1990s and Beyond.” “The rest of America looks very different from Boston,” Stuart said. “Whites here are very isolated. When kids go…
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Campus & Community
Race, class still matter
Even as she was marching proudly through academia, earning a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale and a fellowship and ultimately assistant professorship at Harvard, Vivian Shuh Ming Louie saw family members and friends from her former Chinatown neighborhood struggling to stay in, or get into, college. Turning a scholarly lens on this experience, Louie produced…
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Health
Study finds that blacks are significantly less likely to undergo prostate cancer screening
In a study involving more than 67,000 men age 65 years and older, the researchers found that blacks were 35 percent less likely than whites to undergo prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing. The American Cancer Society estimates that nearly 30,000 men will die from prostate cancer this year and that 230,000 cases will be diagnosed. The…
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Science & Tech
The inside scoop on the Apostle Paul
Laura Nasrallah’s newest book, “An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity,” argues that, in early Christian communities, dreams, visions, and prophecies were often central to communication and to people’s understanding of the way things were — far different from the prevailing modern notion that such occurrences are always part of the fringe.…
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Science & Tech
Residential segregation in metro Boston goes beyond affordability
New research from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University shows that in a region where median home prices now exceed $400,000, affordability alone does not explain the continued patterns of racial segregation that exist in the Boston area. Research findings implicate a complex tangle of factors, including housing preferences and discrimination. “In metro Boston…