Jessica Halliday Hardie

Behavioral Functioning among Mexican-origin Children Does Parental Legal Status Matter?

Using data on 2,535 children included in the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey, we investigate how the legal status of immigrant parents shapes their children’s behavioral functioning. Variation in internalizing and externalizing problems among Mexican youth with undocumented mothers, documented or naturalized citizen mothers, and U.S.-born mothers is analyzed using a comparative framework that contrasts their experience with that of other ethnoracial groups. Our findings reinforce the importance of differentiating children of immigrants by parental legal status in studying health and well-being. Children of undocumented Mexican migrants have significantly higher risks of internalizing and externalizing behavior problems than their counterparts with documented or naturalized citizen mothers. Regression results are inconsistent with simple explanations that emphasize group differences in socioeconomic status, maternal mental health, or family routines.

Other People’s Racism: Race, Rednecks, and Riots in a Southern High School

This article uses data drawn from nine months of fieldwork and student, teacher, and administrator interviews at a southern high school to analyze school racial conflict and the construction of racism. We find that institutional inequalities that stratify students by race and class are routinely ignored by school actors who, we argue, use the presence of so-called redneck students to plausibly deny racism while furthering the standard definition of racism as blatant prejudice and an individual trait. The historical prominence of rednecks as a southern cultural identity augments these claims, leading to an implicit division of school actors into friendly/nonracist and unfriendly/racist and allowing school actors to set boundaries on the meaning of racism. Yet these rhetorical practices and the institutional structures they mask contributed to racial tensions, culminating in a race riot during our time at the school.

The Dynamics and Correlates of Religious Service Attendance in Adolescence

This study examines changes in religious service attendance over time for a contemporary cohort of adolescents moving from middle to late adolescence. We use two waves of a nationally representative panel survey of youth from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) to examine the dynamics of religious involvement during adolescence. We then follow with an analysis of how demographic characteristics, family background, and life course transitions relate to changes in religious service attendance during adolescence. Our findings suggest that, on average, adolescent religious service attendance declines over time, related to major life course transitions such as becoming employed, leaving home, and initiating sexual activity. Parents’ affiliation and attendance, on the other hand, are protective factors against decreasing attendance.

DNA COLLECTION IN A RANDOMIZED SOCIAL SCIENCE STUDY OF COLLEGE PEER EFFECTS

We describe the DNA collection processes of an initial pilot and full study, which is designed to investigate joint peer and genetic effects on health behaviors and attitudes in a college campus setting. In the main study, 2664 (79.5%) students completed a Web survey and 2080 (78.7% of the survey completers after adjusting for the ineligible) provided a saliva DNA sample. The response rate for completing both the survey and the DNA portion of the study is 62.5%. Our DNA yields are of high quality. Overall, our experiences and results demonstrate that genetic data can be successfully collected as a part of traditional social science survey research projects. To aid others in doing so, we provide extensive details of our data collection experiences and offer recommendations to future researchers seeking to do or evaluate similar work.

The Broken Compass: Parental Involvement with Children’s Education:

the law. For two, while Richman describes the motivations for marrying as intertwined, the book does not mine how the different motivations interact with and/or offset one another except in a linear fashion. For example, in describing respondents who were initially motivated by protest but then married for love, Richman positions the political motivations as diminished and love as triumphant. But the interaction of these reasons must be more complex with, for instance, the experience of citizenship potentially encouraging strategic use of the law or resistance to the law and vice versa. Finally, it is not always clear how—or that—the experiences of couples who married in San Francisco differed from those who married in Massachusetts. In fact, Richman mentions at several points that the experiences of couples on the two coasts were quite similar. This is odd given Richman’s focus on the role of the law. The two locations experienced different legal circumstances with the San Francisco weddings tenuously legal and then annulled, while same-sex marriage in Massachusetts has remained legal since its inception in 2004. If the divergent legal scenarios did not matter, that undercuts Richman’s assertion that it is respondents’ relationship to the law that influences their experiences of marriage. As a newly available right (and hardly a universal one), marriage for same-sex couples poses intriguing questions for scholars of sexualities, gender, marriage, family, and the law, among others. Richman’s book offers a useful law-and-societyinformed perspective on the same-sex marriage phenomenon. Largely descriptive, this book is readable and engaging. Readers new to research on same-sex marriage and/ or legal consciousness will find this an accessible entry point, making this book appropriate for a variety of undergraduate courses, particularly classes on the sociology of the law and of family. The Broken Compass: Parental Involvement with Children’s Education, by Keith Robinson and Angel L. Harris. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 312 pp.

A Person-Centered Examination of Adolescent Religiosity Using Latent Class Analysis.

45.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780674725102.