Modood et al. (1997) + various studies on migrant groups.

I've noticed this in my own experience when visiting family in Pakistan. For every 1 niqab I saw, I saw ~150 trans people^* (How could you tell?). In the UK, I see more Pakistanis in niqabs (though - to be fair - Pakistanis don't wear niqabs that much)

Anyway, I thought that one reason would be cultural preservation and a sense of community. People would want to cling closer to something familiar, perhaps even more than back home. It's also important to note that these studies concerned migrant groups, especially in cities like Bristol, UK which is very diverse (in terms of religion and ethnicities - there is much diversity even within the religions).

But what other reasons could there be? And another important thing that hasn't been explored much - why is there significantly less religion in the majority countries?

Of course there are exceptions to the rule (Saudi Arabia for example).

*Note that I mainly went in a city, not a particularly famous/large one like Islamabad or Lahore but still a city of around ~312 000 and the wider district area of larger than a million and its literacy rate is one of the highest in the country, so it is a more modern part and naturally people are more welcoming to the LGBTQ community if it's a more developed area (this applies as a rule of thumb across the world). Another thing that should be noted is that these people have been here for a long time (minus the period when the British criminalised it during their rule) and so is familiar

Hi everyone! I am new to this subreddit, but I wanted to come here and ask, as a recent graduate student who has primarily worked with qualitative data, what are the top resources (ex., YouTube playlists) that have helped you understand quantitative data methods in social science? I am learning about regressions, p-values, statistics, and coding (Stata, R, and Python). This isn't an exhaustive list, but I have never taken a CS or Statistics course, so I am really new to this. If anyone can provide me with any direction to a specific resource, I would greatly appreciate it!

Edit: I want to specify that I am a graduate student in International Relations within political science.

A Swedish study linked nearly a decade of young adults’ employment histories with measures of their parents’ mental health.

Long-term unemployment, low-paid work and extended sick leave were associated with poorer parental mental health and vitality.

The strongest association was seen when adult children had experienced prolonged sick leave.

The study was observational, so it cannot show for sure that the adult children’s employment difficulties caused poorer mental health in their parents.

I've been thinking about an apparent tension between labeling theory, particularly Howard Becker's work in Outsiders, and contemporary sociological approaches that classify demographic populations according to systemic privilege and marginalization.

One of the central insights of labeling theory is that labels do not simply describe social reality. Through social reactions, expectations, and institutional practices, they can help construct and perpetuate that reality.

This raises what I think is an interesting question: To what extent might institutional classifications of groups as privileged or marginalized reproduce the very social divisions and inequalities they are intended to address?

I'm not disputing that systemic discrimination or unequal distributions of power can exist. Population-level inequalities are empirically measurable. My concern is what happens when those classifications are applied to individuals and become socially consequential identities.

For example:

1. Master status: Can membership in a supposedly privileged or marginalized demographic become a dominant identity that obscures individual circumstances, differences, and experiences?

2. Self-fulfilling expectations: Might repeatedly categorizing individuals according to systemic advantage or disadvantage influence their self-concepts, social interactions, opportunities, or perceived agency?

3. Moral entrepreneurship: Following Becker, isn't the institutional authority to define which groups are privileged, marginalized, or deserving of particular treatment itself an exercise of social power? How should that power be examined?

4. Reification: At what point does a useful statistical or sociological category become an essentialized identity attributed to individual members of a population?

5. Feedback effects: Could institutional responses based on these classifications reinforce group boundaries, generate antagonism, or otherwise perpetuate inequalities?

I recognize that labeling theory originally developed in the study of deviance, and applying it to these classifications requires theoretical justification. I also recognize that naming an existing inequality can empower people to challenge it rather than reinforce it.

What interests me is whether sociology has adequately explored both possibilities.

Are there established theoretical frameworks or empirical studies examining how institutional classifications of privilege and marginalization affect the people being classified?

I'm particularly interested in whether labeling theory, symbolic interactionism, or related approaches offer ways to distinguish between classifications that successfully identify and reduce structural inequalities and classifications that inadvertently reproduce them.

I've heard the claim (with the occasional supporting graph) that a major indicator of crime is wealth inequality (as opposed to absolute poverty).

I was having another conversation with someone recently about how overall crime has gradually decreased over time in the US (not withstanding that major crime spike in the 90s, and then that smaller one during COVID). That idea crossed streams with the title thought, and with the present trueism that wealth inequality in the US is growing rapidly, does the idea that "wealth inequality is reasonably predictive of crime" hold much water?

work can be book preferably or anything, I want something similar to Aristotle for philosophy for example, loved and known as one of the best by all in the field. I understand social science and philosophy are different but still I am curious for one that just seems to be great in some way and it can be more than 1 but 1 is preferred if possible. thank you

I look at people around me sometimes and wonder just how much people actually change as they grow older.

When I was young, I remember playing football with some guys who were incredibly rough. They would tackle, hit, and kick each other like they were actually fighting, even though they were friends. I used to wonder, “Why are you this aggressive toward someone you literally came to play with?” 😂

Looking back now, I sometimes wonder whether that was simply who they were at that age, or whether they were still learning how to express and control themselves. Maybe the aggression was always there, but as they grew older, they learned how to manage it differently.

It makes me think about how much of our personality is actually fixed and how much is shaped by age, experience, and our environment.

The Wenner-Gren Foundation has just published a thoughtful forum on the future of public anthropology. I agree with much of it. But reading it also left me wondering whether anthropologists sometimes make “the public” too abstract, and whether we overlook one of the most important ways anthropology already reaches people.
My own teaching and, more recently, the responses to my Substack essays have given me some thoughts about what actually makes anthropology matter to people.
More Saturday.
Wenner-Gren forum: https://wennergren.org/forum/public-anthropology-future