Roger Clark

Family Constellations and Eminence: The Birth Orders of Nobel Prize Winners

Abstract Biographical data on 197 Nobel Prize winners were used to examine the relationship between birth order and eminence in various fields. Two new findings are presented: eminent scientists appeared to be earlier born than eminent nonscientists, even when family size is controlled, and laureates who won their prizes later in the century appeared to be later born, when family size is controlled. The first finding raises the question of whether there are different kinds of creativity and/or achievement-orientation required for different kinds of eminence; the second finding raises the issue of how declines in family size have benefitted later-borns.

Two steps forward, one step back: The presence of female characters and gender stereotyping in award-winning picture books between the 1930s and the 1960s

Since the late 1960s, there has been steady, progressive change in the depiction of gender in award-winning picture books for children (e.g., Clark, Almeida, Gurka, & Middleton, 2003). Female characters in Caldecott winners and runners-up have become increasingly visible and gender stereotyping has become decreasingly evident. In this article we consider whether this steady change can be projected back into the decades before the 1960s, or whether local, temporal variation in gender norms affected less monotonic change. We found that Caldecotts of the late 1940s and the late 1960s had fewer visible female characters than Caldecotts of the late 1930s and the late 1950s, but that characters in the 1940s and 1960s were less gender stereotyped than the characters of the 1930s and 1950s. We interpret these findings in terms of the greater level of conflict over gender roles that existed in the 1940s and 1960s, as well as the relatively greater status enjoyed by American women in those decades.

OF CALDECOTTS AND KINGS

The authors mark the twentieth anniversary of the classic study by Weitzman et al., which found considerable gender stereotyping in picture books for preschool children, by replicating and extending their study with an updated sample that includes books by Black illustrators. The authors find evidence that female characters and female relationships receive considerably more attention in recent books by both conventional illustrators and Black illustrators than they did in the late 1960s. They also find, consistent with the liberal feminist aims of Weitzman et al., evidence that male and female characters are shown in a more egalitarian fashion than they were in the late 1960s in books by mainstream authors. Finally, they discover that, consistent with the aims of recent Black feminist theorists, Black illustrators are more apt than others to highlight womens involvement in an ethic of caring and an ethic of personal accountability.

Why All the Counting? Feminist Social Science Research on Children's Literature.

This article addresses the question of why counting has figured so prominently in feminist social science studies of childrens literature. It documents the quantitative approach to childrens books used by both liberal and radical feminists, gives an account of why this approach has been so popular among feminist social scientists, and outlines some of the achievements and limitations of this approach. The article also indicates some reasons why recent, multicultural feminist, social science studies have used a more qualitative approach to childrens literature, as well as some reasons to expect that one might count on a greater balance of qualitative and quantitative studies in the future.

Picture This A Multicultural Feminist Analysis of Picture Books for Children

The authors provide a multicultural feminist analysis of picture books for children by looking at the illustrations and listening carefully to themes of oppression and resistance in 33 picture books that focus on characters that are on the powerless side of some powerless/powerful social dichotomy. The authors find many images that either depict oppression or celebrate difference. They also find stories that extol the virtues of cooperation among similarly oppressed others, cooperation among differently oppressed others, and escape. They annotate the books to provide some sense of the themes of oppression and resistance that appear in each of them.

The Face of Society: Gender and Race in Introductory Sociology Books Revisited.

We have updated Ferree and Halls (1990) study of the way gender and race are constructed through pictures in introductory sociology textbooks. Ferree and Hall looked at 33 textbooks published between 1982 and 1988. We replicated their study by examining 3,085 illustrations in a sample of 27 textbooks, most of which were published between 2002 and 2006. We found important areas of progress in the presentation of both gender and race as well as significant areas of stasis. The face of society we found depicted in contemporary textbooks was distinctly less likely to be that of a white man, very prominent in the 1980s texts, and much more likely to be that of a minority woman. Thus, while only 34 percent of the pictures of identifiable individuals in the textbooks examined by Ferree and Hall were of women, almost 50 percent of such pictures were of women in the recent texts. Moreover, while the percentage of white men portrayed dropped from about 45 percent to 30 percent, the percentage of portrayals of minority women rose from about 11 percent to 22 percent. Another sign of progress has been the decreasing likelihood of textbooks to depict race and gender as being nonover-lapping categories: while women of color apparently “had” only race in the sample examined by Ferree and Hall, they “had” both gender and race in the sample we studied. Still, our examination of pictures as a whole as a unit of analysis found that blacks continue to be more likely than any other racial group to be depicted in the presence of other racial groups and, thus, to idealize the degree of social integration in American society. We also still see non-white women enjoying very little (in fact, no) visibility in sections devoted to theory, despite developments in feminist theory, generally, and multicultural feminist, specifically. In general, though, our analysis suggests that the various criticisms of introductory texts that have appeared in this forum and others can have an impact on the content of those texts and, by extension, the sociology we teach.

Cross-National Perspectives on Female Crime: An Empirical Investigation

This paper identifies three theoretical perspectives on changing patterns of female criminality: a Durkheimian-Modernization perspective; a Marxian-World System perspective and an Ecological-Opportunity perspective (see Neuman and Berger, 1988). It draws convergent and divergent hypotheses from these perspectives and tests them with data from up to 49 nations. The empirical evidence suggests that all three perspectives are useful for understanding cross-national differences in female criminality. THIS PAPER ADDRESSES a triply underpursued line of criminological research: female criminality from a cross-national, multitheoretical perspective. In doing so it, first, contributes to the recent upsurge of research on female criminality. Second, it brings to bear a comparative or cross-national perspective to the test of available theory. Finally, it tests hypotheses derived from three theoretical paradigms, rather than relying on the dominant &dquo;Durkheimian-Modernization&dquo; paradigm that has informed most cross-national studies of crime (Huggins, 1985; Neuman and Berger, 1989), including studies of female crime (Hartnagel, 1982; Hartnagel and Mizanuddin, 1986). Theoretical Approaches Neuman and Berger (1988) have recently suggested that at least three theoretical approaches are available for the explanation of cross-national variations in crime: the Durkheimian-Modernization approach; the MarxianWorld System approach; and the Ecological-Opportunity approach. I discuss and clarify each approach by suggesting areas where convergent and divergent * Department of Sociology, Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island 02908, U.S.A. I would like to thank the Rhode Island College Faculty Research Committee for supporting this research. I also thank Michael Pay and Christine Zannella for their assistance in preparing data for the project.

Kicking and Screaming: How One Truculent Sociology Department Made Peace with Mandatory Assessment

The authors provide an account of their department’s minimalist and largely reluctant approach to mandatory assessment in the past decade. A decade earlier, the department had gone all out in an experimental assessment effort supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, an effort the department was neither willing nor able to make once the college’s accreditation agency mandated assessment in 2000. The authors describe another “less-than-ideal design” that has nonetheless involved many of the assessment elements described elsewhere (e.g., alumni and student surveys, classroom assignments, external reviewers, research papers) and has nonetheless yielded usable and utilized feedback for both teaching and curriculum construction.

Toward a Multicultural Feminist Perspective on Fiction for Young Adults

Feminist social science investigations of childrens books over the past 20 years have employed the liberal feminist assumptions that marked the paradigmatic study by Weitzman, Eifler, Hokada, and Ross. The authors illustrate the value of a multicultural feminist approach to childrens literature by “listening” to themes of oppression and resistance in 16 recent young-adult novels about non-White, non-American, or nonheterosexual characters. Their findings point to a greater variety of such themes than they might have heard if they had used only a liberal feminist lens in their reading of childrens books. The findings also lead to elaborations of current multicultural and global feminist theories themselves.

Modernization and Status Change among Aged Men and Women

This study investigates the differences between the relationship between elderly occupational status and modernization for men and women. Consonant with previous findings [1], it finds that economic development is associated with relative losses of elderly men in professional and technical occupations. Augmenting those findings, however, it finds an even stronger association between development and such losses for women. In accounting for the differences, several explanations are advanced and tested, using data from fifty-one nations.