Featured series 
Tag: ” Sociology
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Science & Tech
Researcher Mia Ong finds physics ‘glass ceiling’ intact
If you’re anything other than a middle-aged white guy, your appearance matters profoundly in physics, where appearances aren’t supposed to matter, found Graduate School of Education researcher Maria “Mia” Ong. Ong’s research emerged from a much larger study of physics undergraduates and graduates at a large research university. While conducting interviews with these students, she…
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Science & Tech
Diminishing returns
Election Night is one of the increasingly rare moments when large numbers of Americans gather in front of their television sets to hear about politics. Although a comparison of the 2000 election night broadcasts with those of 1968 indicates that these programs have increasingly employed sophisticated projection techniques, they now contain less of the content…
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Campus & Community
Project finds Hindus in New Jersey, Buddhists in Montana
An influx of new immigrants that began in 1965 when U.S. immigration laws were liberalized has changed our society in ways that contradict traditional assumptions about the correlation of religion and geography. Mapping this religious diversity is the goal of the Pluralism Project, founded in 1991 by Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian…
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Campus & Community
Worth more than the paper they’re written on
According to Beth Simmons, a professor of government at Harvard, governments care what others think of them. They want to be admired and can be publicly embarrassed, just like like people can. Such traits help explain why governments would enter international agreements on areas of mainly domestic concern, such as civil rights, women’s rights, race…
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Science & Tech
Who goes to college?
According to the College Board, people with a bachelor’s degree will earn, on average, $1 million more throughout their lifetimes than those with only a high school diploma. Yet with the average tuition price of private four-year colleges nudging $20,000 per year and their public counterparts charging, on average, more than $4,000, access to that…
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Science & Tech
Millions of Americans suffer from major depression
A Harvard Medical School study found high rates of depression throughout the U.S. population. The researchers analyzed the depression of over 9,000 Americans and evaluated depression’s effect on daily activities and treatment received, if any. Critics have theorized that depression has been reported as more widespread than it really is, said survey leader Ronald Kessler,…
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Science & Tech
In simulation, bioterrorist warning system passes test
Working within a bioterrorism scenario, an early warning system to detect attacks fulfilled its mission. Those who conducted the test say that, had it been real, millions of lives would have been saved. “We estimate that smallpox cases could have been reduced by as much as six or seven orders of magnitude, from 10 million…
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Science & Tech
Studies challenge claims that percent plans provide viable alternative to affirmative action
Although the Texas, California and Florida plans appear to be very similar, in fact they differ greatly. There are key distinctions that must be noted when considering their implementation and effectiveness. Current public discussion of percent plans seems to suggest that simply designating a percent of each high school class entitled to public university admission…
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Health
Wide variation in physician career satisfaction seen across local markets
Physician career satisfaction levels are relatively consistent from year to year, and a clear majority of physicians nationally are satisfied with their careers. However, a survey showed significant variation in satisfaction levels across local health care markets. It also found that nationally, 18 percent of physicians were somewhat or very dissatisfied. “Physician career satisfaction is…
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Science & Tech
A multiracial society with segregated schools
The nation’s public schools are becoming steadily more nonwhite, as the minority student enrollment approaches 40 percent of all U.S. public school students, almost twice the share of minority school students during the 1960s. Almost half of all public school students in the West and the South are minority students. The desegregation of black students,…
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Campus & Community
Students engaged but skeptical, survey says
“Contrary to popular belief, college students are engaged in their community and tuned into current events,” said Dan Glickman, director of Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a former U.S. Cabinet secretary and member of Congress. “But it is little wonder that they feel disengaged from politics when the campaigns focus most of their attention on…
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Science & Tech
Exploring black political thought, now and then
Professor Michael Dawson’s most recent book, “Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African American Mass Political Ideologies” (University of Chicago Press, 2001), brings a historical perspective to black political ideologies. “The work tries to assess, using public opinion materials as well as other types of archival materials, to what degree do some of the historically…
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Science & Tech
Boston bike messengers experience very high injury rate
Bike couriers have become as a much a part of the urban landscape as sky-scrapers and traffic-clogged streets. Boston messengers collectively make between 3,000 and 4,000 deliveries on a given day. It may seem obvious that messengers work in dangerous conditions, quickly maneuvering around cars and pedestrians during peak congestion times. But little is known…
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Science & Tech
Undergraduates observe Rwandan attempts at justice
The Rwandan genocide memorial was a tiny one-room church, pervaded still by a penetrating stench. On a table in the church was a pile of human skulls and femurs, a startling reminder of the people who sought shelter there in 1994 when the killers came calling. “It just struck me that in this one church…
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Science & Tech
When problem-solving is a problem
If an ill-timed delivery left them short of linens, nurses observed by Harvard Business School doctoral student Anita Tucker found a way to borrow from another unit. Such initiative taking by empowered frontline workers is a good thing, right? Well, yes. And no. The bad news, said Tucker, is that the root causes of the…
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Science & Tech
What students know best
A research project called Pathways for Student Success has taken a unique approach to finding ways to help high school students achieve at a high rate. Rather than focusing on conclusions established by researchers, high school students themselves bore the responsibility of defining academic, demographic, and social factors that challenge their ultimate levels of achievement…
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Science & Tech
Building difference, breaking it down
Mica Pollock, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, taught and did dissertation research in a California high school where she observed students “bending” racial categories. “What interested me was how young people were simultaneously throwing up for grabs the very idea that race existed and holding this idea of being ‘mixed,’…
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Science & Tech
Study shows maintaining homeownership gains is key to strong economy
A June 2002 report by The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University documents the strong demographic foundation of current and projected future housing market activity. According to the report, the housing sector is poised to set new records for production, sales, and aggregate home equity in the years ahead, as strong growth in…
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Science & Tech
Religious private schools most segregated in U.S.
Black-white segregation is greater among private schools than among public schools, according to a research report from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Although 78 percent of the private school students in the nation were white in 1997-98, the average black private school student was enrolled in a school that was only 34 percent…
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Science & Tech
Radcliffe conference presents research on lethal school violence
Educators, policy-makers, law enforcement officials, and adolescent-development specialists came to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on May 21, 2002, for the National Conference on Lethal School Violence. The conference centerpiece was the report “Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence,” a qualitative and quantitative study of incidents of lethal school shootings released by the National…
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Science & Tech
Race, place, and segregation
Researchers for the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, using U.S. census data from 2000, examined whether three major metropolitan areas — Boston, Chicago and San Diego — continue to be segregated. They found that segregation persists, and has even expanded into new areas. Residents of Chicago’s metropolitan area , for instance, are redrawing the…
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Science & Tech
New online approach builds community around medical cases
A new suite of Internet tools is boosting student-faculty interaction in an engrossing twist on traditional case-based teaching at Harvard Medical School. Called ICON, for “interactive case-based online network,” the cases are run by a faculty-student-IT specialist trio at Harvard Medical School, backed by extensive cross-faculty collaboration. ICON is revamping neuroscience case-based learning by engrossing…
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Science & Tech
Black, Latino children with asthma receive lesser standard of care
Led by Tracy Lieu, associate professor of ambulatory care and prevention at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and Harvard Medical School, the researchers interviewed parents of children with asthma who were insured by Medicaid programs. Of the children, 38 percent were black, 19 percent Latino, and 31 percent white. The researchers studied the effects of ethnicity…
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Science & Tech
Mexican-American women navigate school and work more successfully than men
Only 19 percent of Mexican-American men in 1990 were upwardly mobile professionally, compared to 31 percent of women, and only nine percent of men worked in professional/technical jobs, compared to 17 percent of women. The study, “Gender, Ethnicity, and Race in School and Work Outcomes of Second Generation Mexican Americans,” also found that Mexican-American women…
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Science & Tech
American females at highest risk for murder
A female in the United States is three times more likely to be murdered than a female in Canada, five times more likely to be murdered than a female in Germany, and eight times more likely to be murdered than a female in England and Wales. The U.S. female homicide victimization rate is five times…
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Science & Tech
Minority patients face barriers to optimum end-of-life care
Eric Krakauer is an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and part of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Palliative Care Service. He and his colleagues have been concerned that, according to many national studies, minorities do not receive the same level of health care that non-minorities do. This is particularly true in the area of what…