Browsing by Author "Healy, Kieran"

Social class is often discussed in crime and social control research but the influence of class in these contexts is not well understood. Stratification studies have identified effects of socioeconomic status on a diverse collection of important outcomes in many facets of society, but the influence of class on criminality and punishment remains largely unidentified. Scholars attempting to connect class position to criminal behavior or risk of arrest and incarceration have either concluded that a robust relationship does not exist, or been confronted with inconsistent or weak evidence. Indeed, despite substantial interest in the influence of social class on criminality and punishment, researchers have been unable to make very many empirical connections between the two. The present study advances understanding about the influence of social class on criminality and punishment, addressing limitations of previous research using new approaches and statistical methods across three studies: (1) a study of the relationship between immigration rates and societal preference for increased police protection and law enforcement spending, (2) a study of heterogeneity in the effect of class on latent categories of self-reported delinquency, and finally, (3) a study of illicit drug use and rates of drug arrest among young adults, and how college attendance may contribute punishment inequality for non-violent drug offenses.

This dissertation is a three-part analysis examining how the welfare state in advanced Western democracies has responded to recent demographic changes. Specifically, this dissertation investigates two primary relationships, beginning with the influence of government spending on poverty. I analyze two at-risk populations in particular: immigrants and children of single mothers. Next, attention is turned to the influence of individual and environmental traits on preferences for social spending. I focus specifically on religiosity, religious beliefs and religious identity. I pool data from a number of international macro- and micro-data sources including the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), International Social Survey Program (ISSP), the World Bank Databank, and the OECD Databank. Analyses highlight the power of the welfare state to reduce poverty, but also the effectiveness of specific areas of spending focused on addressing new social risks. While previous research has touted the strength of the welfare state, my analyses highlight the need to consider new social risks and encourage closer attention to how social position affects preferences for the welfare state.

Racial economic inequality is a major social concern in the United States. Sociological research on the issue has focused primarily on understanding disparities in the process of earning income and accumulating wealth. Much less clear, however, is what happens when individuals try to spend the money they already have. At similar income and wealth levels, can black and white families acquire the same quantity and quality of goods and services? This dissertation investigates this question by examining racial inequality in consumer market outcomes. Over the past thirty years, economic sociologists have argued that economic markets are complex social institutions that contribute to the production of social inequality. This insight, however, has been relatively confined to the study of labor and production markets. Consumption has instead been studied primarily from a cultural perspective that examines the use of good and services as markers of cultural capital and social distinction. This cultural sociology of consumption has made key contributions to the study of inequality, but it also misses some of the important stratification processes unfolding in consumer markets.

This dissertation addresses this gap by proposing an economic sociology of consumption that examines social structural sources of inequality in black and white households’ ability to acquire goods and services. Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to the three studies that comprise this dissertation. The first study is presented in Chapter 2. This study provides a critique of current cultural approaches to consumption and consumer markets and sketches a new approach for a future economic sociology of consumption. The construct validity of this approach is then tested using household expenditure data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES). The next two studies draw on this contribution to examine racial consumption inequality in the United States. Chapter 3 uses CES data again to provide a detailed empirical overview of racial spending disparities and shows that black households have lower average consumption levels than white households, net of racial differences in income and wealth. This chapter also shows important patterns of racial consumption disparities for specific categories of goods and services. Chapter 4 builds on the previous findings by evaluating one potential explanation for racial disparities in total household spending: unequal access to consumer credit. Using CES data and data on variation in payday lending laws across states, this chapter shows that differences in access to credit at the state-level are is associated with significant variation in the size of the racial spending gap. The final chapter provides general conclusions and outlines future research directions.

This dissertation investigates the moral perceptions of scientific misconduct on three different dimensions. Chapter 1 investigates how the signal of a retraction as a moral breach affects co-authors and those tangentially related to those at fault. Characterizing retractions as scandalous events, I examine the extent of stigma spillover in the network. Chapter 1 uses large-scale data collected from OpenAlex.com, an open- source database that aims to unify Microsoft Academic Graph, Crossref, Web of Science, and PubMed. Using future retractions as a proxy for stigma, I find that those directly related to a retraction are more likely to experience retractions in the future. I find no support for stigma spillover to coworkers in the network that are not directly associated with a retraction.Chapters 2 and 3 use original survey data to explore differences in perceptions of scientific misconduct along multiple dimensions. Chapter 2 presents a novel vignette survey experiment that measures moral reactions to different kinds of academic misconduct. The findings show a clear ranking in perceptions of morality, with data fabrication being the worst, plagiarism being slightly less bad, mistakes being highly forgivable, and honest and accurate research seen as highly moral. Chapter 3 uses a similar survey design as Chapter 2 to measure whether moral perceptions of plagiarism are based in cultural expectations about the profession engaging in plagiarism or are reactions to a transgression of the authenticity of the product. By asking participants a) how frequently they believe different professions to engage in plagiarism and b) how immoral they think the behavior is, we find that impressions of frequency are due to beliefs of cultural meanings of an occupation, and that immorality is better explained by violations of creativity and authenticity.