Freda B. Lynn

A Sociological (De)Construction of the Relationship between Status and Quality

Although many sociologists are strongly wedded to the idea of “social construction,” the contextual factors that influence the magnitude of construction are rarely considered. This article explores the decoupling of an actor’s status from the actor’s underlying quality and examines the factors that influence the magnitude of decoupling. The authors specifically consider the role of quality uncertainty, diffuse status characteristics, and the self‐fulfilling prophecy. To analyze the impact of each mechanism on decoupling, they simulate the evolution of thousands of small groups using a dyadic model of status allocation. The authors discuss the results of these simulations and conclude with the implications for future research and the practical management of groups.

The Embedded Self: A Social Networks Approach to Identity Theory

Despite the fact that key sociological theories of self and identity view the self as fundamentally rooted in networks of interpersonal relationships, empirical research investigating how personal network structure influences the self is conspicuously lacking. To address this gap, we examine links between network structure and role identity salience. We identify two features of personal networks that potentially affect how social ties shape identity salience: (1) proportion and strength of ties to role-based others (RBOs) and (2) embeddedness of RBOs, or the breadth of access that a role-based group has to the rest of an individual’s network. Across three role identities (student, religious, and work), we find that our measure of embeddedness predicts role identity salience but that the proportion and strength of ties do not. Thus, our study does not support the proposition that identity salience is a product of an individual’s social and emotional attachment to role-based groups. Rather, our findings suggest that a role identity becomes more salient as role-based others become more tightly woven into an individual’s social fabric.

Is Popular More Likeable? Choice Status by Intrinsic Appeal in an Experimental Music Market

There is widespread agreement from many areas of status research that evaluators’ judgments of performances can be distorted by the status of the performer. The question arises as to whether status distorts perceptions differently at different levels of performance quality. Using data from the Columbia Musiclab study, we conduct a large-scale test of whether the effect of popularity on private perceptions of likeability is contingent on songs’ intrinsic appeal. We discover that choice status (i.e., popularity) can boost perceptions of a song’s likeability but only for songs of lower quality. In effect, the likeability halo created by popularity is one mechanism for why it is that “bad” songs can sometimes become more successful than songs that are intrinsically more appealing. But this same mechanism does not explain why “good” songs sometimes turn into superstars. This study suggests that status theories be refined to consider heterogeneous effects.

The Changing Relationship Between Fertility Expectations and Educational Expectations: Adolescents in the 1970s Versus the 1980s

This article examines the relationship between young women’s fertility expectations and educational expectations in late adolescence and at the outset of adulthood. Given progressive macro-level changes in the United States beginning in the 1960s, we compare the expectation patterns of youth from two cohorts using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys. We find that the relationship between education and fertility expectations is statistically negligible for those born in the height of the baby boom (1950s) and yet statistically positive for those born at the tail end of the baby boom (1960s). The crux of the change, however, is not driven by an increase in those who pair high educational expectations with normative or above-norm fertility expectations but rather an increase in young women who pair modest educational ambitions with low fertility expectations.