SAGE Podcast

This article explores how the efficiency of Internet search is changing the way Americans find romantic partners. We use a new data source, the How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey. Results show that for 60 years, family and grade school have been steadily declining in their influence over the dating market. In the past 15 years, the rise of the Internet has partly displaced not only family and school, but also neighborhood, friends, and the workplace as venues for meeting partners. The Internet increasingly allows Americans to meet and form relationships with perfect strangers, that is, people with whom they had no previous social tie. Individuals who face a thin market for potential partners, such as gays, lesbians, and middle-aged heterosexuals, are especially likely to meet partners online. One result of the increasing importance of the Internet in meeting partners is that adults with Internet access at home are substantially more likely to have partners, even after controlling for other factors. Partnership rate has increased during the Internet era (consistent with Internet efficiency of search) for same-sex couples, but the heterosexual partnership rate has been flat.

Fran Shor, Professor of History at Wayne State University, discusses the racialized social system in the United States.

Crime stories, particularly homicide, are extremely prevalent in the media. The current study builds on previous literature by examining a nearly homogenous victim population (N = 223) to identify salient predictors of newsworthiness, particularly celebrated coverage, using The Baltimore Sun, the city's largest newspaper. Contrary to prior research, in this analysis, neither race nor gender were found to be consistent significant factors in receiving media coverage. Various factors, including females, older victims, White victims, and homicides by stabbings, asphyxiation, or other circumstances, were found to be indicators of several types of celebrated coverage.

Janet Gillespie interviews Susan D. Baker and Debra R. Comer about their article, "Business Ethics Everywhere," published in the February 2012 issue of JME.

Editor Ken Thompson interviews Mark Martinko, a co-author of "Fuzzy Attribution Styles," pubilshed in the February 2012 issue of JLOS.

Research on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony has expanded dramatically in recent years. Most of it concerns the issue of mistaken identification, not the problem of uncovering deceptive accounts of witnesses, which is the focus of this research. In the literature, a technique for lie detection has been proposed that induces cognitive load on liars by averting their rehearsal of deception: Time Restricted Integrity-Confirmation. The current authors tested it by instructing “witnesses” of actual crime videos to lie or tell the truth to related questions. Each of 145 adults was randomly assigned to a truth telling, an unrehearsed lying, or a rehearsed lying condition. The cognitive cues were response time, answer consistency, eye movements, and pupil dilation. Eye data were gathered with an infrared eye tracker. Truth tellers had the quickest response times and the fewest inconsistencies. Moreover, they generally had more eye movements, suggesting low cognitive loads. Discriminant analyses classified rehearsed liars, unrehearsed liars, and truth tellers up to 69% accurately, with few false positives. Further refinement is warranted.

Editor Ken Thompson interviews Christopher Neck, a co-author of "The Relation Between Self-Leadership and Transformational Leadership," pubilshed in the February 2012 issue of JLOS.

This study examined the effects of male attractiveness, sexual attitudes, and victimization history on women's ratings of sexual risk. Women with more liberal sexual attitudes rated vignettes as less sexually risky than women with more conservative sexual attitudes. There was an interaction between situational risk and attractiveness, suggesting the relationship between attractiveness and sexual risk ratings varies across high and low situational risk. Findings emphasize the importance of using high and low risk situations to evaluate sexual risk perception and of investigating variables that may moderate women's risk perception.

This article reviews current epistemological and design issues in the mixed methods literature and then examines the application of one specific design, a sequential explanatory mixed methods design, in an evaluation of a community-based intervention to improve postassault care for sexual assault survivors. Guided by a pragmatist epistemological framework, this study collected quantitative and qualitative data to understand how the implementation of a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) program affected prosecution rates of adult sexual assault cases in a large midwestern community. Quantitative results indicated that the program was successful in affecting legal systems change and the qualitative data revealed the mediating mechanisms of the intervention's effectiveness. Challenges of implementing this design are discussed, including epistemological and practical difficulties that developed from blending methodologies into a single project.

Youth in secure juvenile justice settings (e.g., detention, incarceration) often have histories of complex trauma: exposure to traumatic stressors including polyvictimization, life-threatening accidents or disasters, and interpersonal losses. Complex trauma adversely affects early childhood biopsychosocial development and attachment bonding, placing the youth at risk for a range of serious problems (e.g., depression, anxiety, oppositional defiance, risk taking, substance abuse) that may lead to reactive aggression. Complex trauma is associated with an extremely problematic combination of persistently diminished adaptive arousal reactions, episodic maladaptive hyperarousal, impaired information processing and impulse control, self-critical and aggression-endorsing cognitive schemas, and peer relationships that model and reinforce disinhibited reactions, maladaptive ways of thinking, and aggressive, antisocial, and delinquent behaviors. This constellation of problems poses significant challenges for management, rehabilitation, and treatment of youth in secure justice settings. Epidemiological and clinical evidence of the prevalence, impact on development and functioning, comorbidity, and adverse outcomes in adolescence of exposure to complex trauma are reviewed. Implications for milieu management, screening, assessment, and treatment of youth who have complex trauma histories and problems with aggression in secure juvenile justice settings are discussed, with directions for future research and program development.

Previous research on capstones in sociology and psychology has suggested that there is a typical capstone experience required by three quarters of all four-year colleges and universities in the United States. This article reports results from a national survey that confirm that sociology and psychology capstone courses conform generally to a common format. The findings further indicate that factors related to student limits and time limits predominate with respect to those variables that produce less successful course outcomes. A review of the social science capstone literature and the pedagogical best practices literature suggests that student limitations and time limitations can be attenuated by curricular, structural, and resource-allocation changes.

Despite the prominence of teaching in academia, we know little about how graduate students learn to teach. We propose the concept of a teaching community network (TCN), an informal social network that facilitates the exchange of teaching-specific resources. We explore the role of TCNs through a case study of a sociology doctoral program at a large state university. Results reveal that students rely heavily on informal ties within the graduate student community and existing formal programs to share teaching-related resources (e.g., information and social support) and develop their identities as instructors. We suggest that graduate programs facilitate TCNs through formal teacher-training programs and structural conditions that encourage informal, one-on-one interactions (e.g., shared offices). By cultivating TCNs, graduate programs can assist students in developing their teaching skills and identities as instructors, thus training students to balance the demands of research and teaching within an academic culture.

Carolyn Egri interviews the authors of "More Than a Game: Learning About Climate Change Through Role-Play," published in the August 2012 issue of JME.

Dan Clark from Oakland University discusses the struggles Detroit autoworkers faced in the 1950s.

In this podcast Prof. Joanne Cuille interviews Osam Edim Temple of the American University of Nigeria, Nigeria, on the metaphysical challenges of leadership, specifically in relation to African leaders. Prof. Cuille, in partnership with Prof. Vincent L. Luizzi and Dr. Petrus D.F. Strijdom, guest edited the February 2012 special issue of Leadership, Volume 8 Number 1. This special issue on 'Leadership Ethics in Africa' can be read at lea.sagepub.com.