Jane R. Zavisca

The Status of Cultural Omnivorism: A Case Study of Reading in Russia

The literature on cultural consumption documents the displacement of highbrow snobbery by cultural omnivorism among high status groups. This article interrogates the status meanings of cultural omnivorism through a case study of reading in Russia. Post-socialist transformations have destabilized the status of social groups and the honorability of cultural practices. Survey analysis suggests that omnivorism has become the dominant taste pattern among the educated and the well-to-do. However, qualitative data reveal a discursive divide among educated omnivores who have become rich or poor since the collapse of the Soviet Union. When omnivores articulate their tastes, they invoke discourses of moral decline vs. moral defense of the new capitalist order to make conflicting claims about whether its beneficiaries are worthy of status honor.

BIC and Alternative Bayesian Information Criteria in the Selection of Structural Equation Models

Selecting between competing structural equation models is a common problem. Often selection is based on the chi-square test statistic or other fit indices. In other areas of statistical research Bayesian information criteria are commonly used, but they are less frequently used with structural equation models compared to other fit indices. This article examines several new and old information criteria (IC) that approximate Bayes factors. We compare these IC measures to common fit indices in a simulation that includes the true and false models. In moderate to large samples, the IC measures outperform the fit indices. In a second simulation we only consider the IC measures and do not include the true model. In moderate to large samples the IC measures favor approximate models that only differ from the true model by having extra parameters. Overall, SPBIC, a new IC measure, performs well relative to the other IC measures.

Contesting Capitalism at the Post-Soviet Dacha: The Meaning of Food Cultivation for Urban Russians

bate about dachas. The positions people take in this debate reflect their dispositions toward capitalist transition, and their trajectories in the shift

A Comparison of Bayes Factor Approximation Methods Including Two New Methods

Bayes factors (BFs) play an important role in comparing the fit of statistical models. However, computational limitations or lack of an appropriate prior sometimes prevent researchers from using exact BFs. Instead, it is approximated, often using the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) or a variant of BIC. The authors provide a comparison of several BF approximations, including two new approximations, the Scaled Unit Information Prior Bayesian Information Criterion (SPBIC) and Information matrix-based Bayesian Information Criterion (IBIC). The SPBIC uses a scaled unit information prior that is more general than the BIC’s unit information prior, and the IBIC utilizes more terms of approximation than the BIC. Through simulation, the authors show that several measures perform well in large samples, that performance declines in smaller samples, and that SPBIC and IBIC provide improvement to existing measures under some conditions, including small sample sizes. The authors illustrate the use of the fit measures with the crime data of Ehrlich and then conclude with recommendations for researchers.

Does Russian Propaganda Work

Since the onset of the Ukraine crisis, the Russian government has stepped up efforts to promote a narrative it first introduced in the mid-2000s regarding the faults of the United States and the We...

The Socioeconomic, Demographic, and Political Effects of Housing in Comparative Perspective

Few sociologists treat housing as a key independent variable, despite the emergence of disparate bodies of research analyzing how housing affects outcomes that traditionally interest sociologists. Scholars across the social sciences have proposed and tested mechanisms whereby housing could shape subjective wellbeing, socioeconomic status, demography, and politics. We review the evidence for causal effects across these domains. Next, we make recommendations for research designs to advance this literature. Most studies only test effects of homeownership, and most are focused on the United States and Western Europe. The evidence for causation is often weak, although studies increasingly employ complex techniques for identifying effects. Throughout, we emphasize studies beyond the United States, and we conclude by discussing distinctive insights yielded by comparative research. We advocate for a comparative perspective and more expansive conceptualization of housing status as a means to build theory and evidence regarding the conditions under which housing exerts effects.

From the Margins to the Mainstream The Curious Convergence of Pierre Bourdieu and US Sociology

xThe late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is a prominent figure in the field of sociology in the United States today. Practically all of his major empirical monographs have been translated into English. His writings are regularly cited in articles appearing in the discipline’s main journals. Several books about his life and work have been published by major American university presses. And, perhaps most tellingly, many of his major concepts have entered the general sociological lexicon in the United States. One need not be a specialist in culture or education to understand the significance of “cultural capital” for reproducing inequality across generations. No longer a philosophical or social psychological oddity, the idea of the “habitus” informs research across a variety of subfields. And few are the sociologists in the US today who are not familiar with Bourdieu’s use of the “field” concept to describe various meso-social orders. The extent to which the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu have been integrated into and become integral to the practice of sociology in the US today can be considering surprising for a number of reasons. His work is highly theoretical and integrates ideas from a variety of fields; while US sociology has long been characterized as an empirical and relatively insular discipline [Ross 1991; Gulbenkian Commission 1996]. Indeed, US sociology has proved relatively impermeable to several other Francophonic traditions (the early canonization of Emile Durkheim notwithstanding), for the most