Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

I stumbled across the Worldmapper project by accident and my first thoughts were “Wow! Brilliant for World Sociology”. Actually I suspect it will be useful for a wide range of things throughout sociology including poverty, gender and religion.

The key idea is to represent statistics on a range of topics in the form of a map, so that countries and regions change size according to the statistics - so for example for statistics of people living on less that $1 a day the US and Western Europe are tiny but Africa is relatively large. It is a very powerful visual way to display international comparisons and brings the statistics to life, making them easier to understand at a glance.

As well as viewing the maps online you can also download them as PDFs as well as the graphs and data that have been used to create them, meaning that as well as having a powerful overview of the statistics you can also look more in depth at different countries.

The project is ongoing so new maps will be added over time.
Worldmapper: The world as you’ve never seen it before

This is a link to a comment piece that appeared on The Times’ website today.  The article is about the situation of Asian (mainly Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi) women brought to the UK as brides and their often vulnerable position as victims of domestic violence with few options and choices for escape.
The secret violence that challenges Britain’s Asians-TimesOnline

Hundai raises issues around Asian communities’ and the authorities’ attitudes towards domestic violence and also expectations of womens’ roles as submissive and housebound, with brides often being “imported” with the expectation that they will be more submissive than British women.

Although it does not offer a huge amount by way of hard research-based evidence this article ties together several important threads and is a must-read for anyone studying gender, ethnicity or the family.

An interesting article from Michael Portillo in today’s issue of The Times.  It’s a comment article and is therefore about the author’s views rather than a factual account.  Portillo is essentially arguing that religion and politics (or rather faith and politics) don’t mix and raises some controversial and interesting points in the process.  Unfortunately he seems to see faith and fanatacism as one and the same which rather spoils his argument.

If God is talking to you, too, Mr Cameron – don’t listen-TimesOnline

Another example of needing to put the headlines into perspective.  The following article popped up on my desktop this morning:

BBC NEWS | UK | Unemployed ‘must learn English’

The immediate image this headline brings to mind is that the majority of unemployed people do not speak English. So then you read the article and find that the number whose poor English prevents them from finding a job is 40,000 - a large number of people - and that ethnic minority workers tend to earn 1/3 less than other people.

Sounds terrible, so I spent a few minutes thinking about it:

• although no specific link has been made, the implication is that a lack of English is depressing the earnings of ethnic minorities
• ‘earn 1/3 less than other people’ - does this mean on average across the whole workforce, or than other people in the same jobs? Is this all ethnic minority groups, or just specific groups?  We aren’t given the details, so is this another case of social class effects being mixed up with the effects of ethnicity?

Then I looked at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) website - the latest figures available state that in September 2006 1.4 million people were claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, which means that the 40,000 people the article states have problems with English make up about 3% of those claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance.  Given that the minority ethnic population of the UK runs at about 8% of the population, this would imply that lack of English is not as big a problem among ethnic minority groups as we might be led to believe from this article.
While it is important that people who struggle with English are helped to learn it if it will make them more employable, it does seem that this article is rather over-emphasising the scale and impact of the problem.

I’ve just read this article and it made me think about how we read the news and how it is written!

BBC NEWS | Education | Adults ‘wish for qualifications’

The article is about the findings of a survey of adults done by the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) (ie a governmental body with the purpose of funding and promoting further education) looking at their views on their education.

Have a read of the article - it all sounds quite positive, doesn’t it?

The findings have evidently been presented by the LSC (and by the BBC) in a way designed to promote the importance of formal education and qualifications.  While there is obviously a serious point to be made about education and the fact that adult education schemes do have a positive impact, I did have some thoughts on some of the figures stated:
“The survey of more than 2,000 adults also found 27% regretted not making the most of the opportunities at school.” - which does raise the question about the other 73% (or 7 out of every 10 people) -

• did they make the most of their opportunities?  Or do they still think that a lot of what they were taught in school was irrelevant? - Tooley (2000) argues that a lot of what is taught in school is irrelevant to students’ later lives.
  
• Or do they feel that they weren’t given opportunities at school?  Neo-Marxist sociologists such as Althusser and Apple argue that school exists to reproduce existing social inequalities and that therefore schools often restrict the opportunities available to working class children, preventing them from achieving educational success.
  

“more than one in four (30%) of those who had completed retraining said it had made them more employable and 17% had got a pay rise.” - so 70% had found that retraining had had no effect on their employability. Oh dear! that’s not quite the picture the LSC would want to present when the government is encouraging more people to take up work-related training and to stay in education for longer.  Also, while there are statistics to show that getting a degree does significantly raise your earnings, less than 1 in 5 people who had undergone retraining found that they ended up earning more money.

The article then goes on to talk about the government wanting to promote more work-related training and how important it is.  All in all another interesting example of the use of official statistics to show what officials want them to show.

I was looking for examples of different forms of nationalism to illustrate the concepts for my students and came up with the following which worked well:

“Banal nationalism” - Billig (1995) - this is the idea that nationalism is something that is part of everyday life and is expressed in lots of often un-noticed ways.  For this I used a recent BBC article about a soldier’s death in Iraq - from the outside it is just an ordinary news item but it also subtly reinforces national identity - the article is about a British soldier and it is his death that is focussed on rather than the ‘number of Iraqi casualties’ also referred to.  I could just have easily used a different news item or a song - something like Three Lions or Chumbawumba’s Vindaloo.

“Exclusive Nationalism” - Dowds & Young (1996) - this is a very narrow form of nationalism, usually focussed around one ethnic group and highly resistant to change.  To demonstrate this I used a section from the BNP’s (British National Party) website, which talks about their policy on immigration - it can be found at: http://www.bnp.org.uk/policies/policies.htm

 ”Inclusive Nationalism” - Dowds & Young (1996) - this is the opposite to exclusive nationalism, people who are inclusively nationalistic have a very broad definition of what it means to be British (or any other nationality) and are happy for a national identity to include many different cultural groups.  As an example of this I used a recent article in The Sun which looked at some of the words of abuse used against children from a range of social groups and which pointed out that they were all British.  The article can be found here: http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2007040816,00.html

Radio 4’s programme The Long View had an excellent programme this week on gun culture.  It looks at the history of gun use and links it to today’s use of guns as part of criminal culture.  It draws some interesting links with guns as symbols of masculinity and also looks at guns as part of youth culture today and their importance in establishing and maintaining status.

Interestingly it highlights the fact that worries about gun culture are nothing new, but rather can be traced back almost 400 years.  It also illustrates the different associations of guns with different social classes.
BBC - Radio 4 The Long View - Homepage

Unfortunately the sound file for this is only available on the website for one week (ie until Tuesday 6th Feb), so listen to it while you have the chance!