This article marks the occasion of Social Science Research's 50th anniversary by reflecting on th... more This article marks the occasion of Social Science Research's 50th anniversary by reflecting on the progress of sequence analysis (SA) since its introduction into the social sciences four decades ago, with focuses on the developments of SA thus far in the social sciences and on its potential future directions. The application of SA in the social sciences, especially in life course research, has mushroomed in the last decade and a half. Using a life course analogy, we examined the birth of SA in the social sciences and its childhood (the first wave), its adolescence and young adulthood (the second wave), and its future mature adulthood in the paper. The paper provides a summary of (1) the important SA research and the historical contexts in which SA was developed by Andrew Abbott, (2) a thorough review of the many methodological developments in visualization, complexity measures, dissimilarity measures, group analysis of dissimilarities, cluster analysis of dissimilarities, multidomain/multichannel SA, dyadic/polyadic SA, Markov chain SA, sequence life course analysis, sequence network analysis, SA in other social science research, and software for SA, and (3) reflections on some future directions of SA including how SA can benefit and inform theory-making in the social sciences, the methods currently being developed, and some remaining challenges facing SA for which we do not yet have any solutions. It is our hope that the reader will take up the challenges and help us improve and grow SA into maturity.
This study aims to investigate public protest slogans in response to the Biden Administration'... more This study aims to investigate public protest slogans in response to the Biden Administration's announcement of two COVID-19 vaccination regulations on November 4, 2021. We identified three protest themes: (1) support for individual freedom/rights, (2) opposition to government's control, and (3) anti-science reasoning/misinformation/disinformation. Major policy recommendations include implementing efforts to dispel unscientific misinformation/disinformation and to emphasize individuals' civic responsibilities for vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially considering the current spreading of the Omicron variants and the relaxing of mask mandates across the US.
Dyadic or, more generally, polyadic life course sequences can be more associated within dyads or ... more Dyadic or, more generally, polyadic life course sequences can be more associated within dyads or polyads than between randomly assigned dyadic/polyadic member sequences, a phenomenon reflecting the life course principle of linked lives. In this article, I propose a method of U and V measures for quantifying and assessing linked life course trajectories in sequence data. Specifically, I compare the sequence distance between members of an observed dyad/polyad against a set of randomly generated dyads/polyads. The U measure quantifies how much greater, in terms of a given distance measure, the members in a dyad/polyad resemble one another than do members of randomly generated dyads/polyads, and the V measure quantifies the degree of linked lives in terms of how much observed dyads/polyads outperform randomized dyads/polyads. I present a simulation study, an empirical study analyzing dyadic family formation sequence data from the Longitudinal Study of Generations, and a random seed sensitivity analysis in the online supplement. Through these analyses, I demonstrate the versatility and usefulness of the proposed method for quantifying linked lives analysis with sequence data. The method has broad applicability to sequence data in life course, business and organizational, and social network research.
Prior research has well established the association of ethno-racial and economic inequality with ... more Prior research has well established the association of ethno-racial and economic inequality with COVID-19 incidence and mortality rates across counties in the US. In this ecological study, a similar association was found between ethno-racial and economic inequality and COVID-19 full vaccination rates across the 102 counties in the American state of Illinois in the early months of vaccination. Among the counties with income inequality below the median, a county’s poverty rate had a negative association with the proportion of population fully vaccinated. However, among the counties with income inequality above the median, a higher percentage of Black or Hispanic population was persistently associated with a lower proportion of fully vaccinated population over the two-month period from early February to early April of 2021.
Serious air pollution has caused widespread concern in Chinese society in recent years. China’s f... more Serious air pollution has caused widespread concern in Chinese society in recent years. China’s floating population plays an important role in China’s economic development, and the determinants of the floating population’s settlement intentions have attracted increasing attention. Using the 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey Data (CMDS) and the satellite grid data of global PM2.5 concentration as well as city-level data, this study investigated the influences of air quality on migrants’ settlement intention, in particular, individual heterogeneity and city characteristics. Using an instrumental variable to correct for endogeneity, we found that air pollution has a significant negative effect on the settlement intentions of China’s floating population. Migrants who were older, better educated and with poorer health are more sensitive to air pollution with regard to settlement intention. Meanwhile, settlement intentions are also influenced by individual adaptability: Respondents with ...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
This research analyzes the association between cumulative COVID-19 mortality and ethnic-racial co... more This research analyzes the association between cumulative COVID-19 mortality and ethnic-racial composition, income inequality, and political party inclination across counties in the United States. The study extends prior research by taking a long view—examining cumulative mortality burdens over the first 900 days of the COVID-19 pandemic at five time points (via negative binomial models) and as trajectories of cumulative mortality trends (via growth curve models). The analysis shows that counties with a higher Republican vote share display a higher cumulative mortality, especially over longer periods of the pandemic. It also demonstrates that counties with a higher composition of ethnic-racial minorities, especially Blacks, bear a much higher cumulative mortality burden, and such an elevated burden would be even higher when a county has a higher level of income inequality. For counties with a higher proportion of Hispanic population, while the burden is lower than that for counties ...
ABSTRACT Symbolism has long been established as a means for achieving social mobilisation. The pr... more ABSTRACT Symbolism has long been established as a means for achieving social mobilisation. The protesters at the London G20 protest on April 1, 2009 employed a wide range of symbolism to kindle people’s collective memory. This article studies visual protest symbolism through photographs taken at the protest and discusses six types of visual protest symbolism—costumes, effigies, flags, organisation banners, and slogans—that rely on people’s collective memory to mobilise. The article treats the six types of protest symbols as cultural objects and evaluates them in relation to the dimensions of institutional retention, retrievability, rhetorical power, and resonance.
Multidimensional scaling (MDS) refers to a family of models where the structure in a set of data ... more Multidimensional scaling (MDS) refers to a family of models where the structure in a set of data is represented graphically by the relationships between a set of points in a space. MDS can be used on a wide variety of data, using different models and allowing different assumptions about the level of measurement.
International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 2004
Social scientists often study the differential effects of explanatory variables among multiple so... more Social scientists often study the differential effects of explanatory variables among multiple social groups such as race, ethnic group, and nation.This paper examines the Wald test for testing equality of logit coefficients from models of multiple social groups. I propose a Wald statistic that can perform some joint tests of group comparisons that the usual likelihood ratio test cannot. Two examples apply the Wald statistic for testing various hypotheses, and show that the Wald test is flexible and straightforward for making comparisons across social groups, and that the proposed Wald test may find wide applications in the social sciences.
Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH) is a way with which a system of models self-organize themsel... more Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH) is a way with which a system of models self-organize themselves by forming higher-order polynomials and selecting the ones with best power of prediction by certain criterion. This method is helpful when we explore patterns of relationships in the data under investigation. In this paper the author presents a modified version of the GMDH algorithm emphasizing the parsimony of models and the behavior of individual parameter estimates as well as of the whole model, and utilizing the consistency and accuracy of bootstrap estimates. This approach is suitable for most research social scientists conduct. An example, the 1907 Romanian Peasant Rebellion, is used to illustrate how to employ the GMDH algorithm when the research topic has been theory-laden. The findings show that GMDH is an appropriate method that social scientists can utilize in their pursuit of a model that is most parsimonious and theoretically meaningful at the same time. Possible extensions of the modified approach, which in its present form works on linear regression type of models, to logit and probit models are also considered.
The popular image of a traditional Chinese household is one of a large kin group composed of mult... more The popular image of a traditional Chinese household is one of a large kin group composed of multiple-family units. However, reports on family size in China's past suggest that the average household size was not large in ancient times. Using population registers for Dunhuang and Turfan from the Tang Dynasty (618–907 ad), this article is the first serious attempt to analyze household structures in ancient China. While a high proportion of simple-family households were recorded in the registers, a significant number of complex households suggests that the distribution of Chinese households was bimodal. This pattern fits neither the model considered as typical for Western families nor that for Eastern families. Other issues covered include the frequency of living alone, the presence of slaves, the distribution of household heads by age and sex, and women's marriage patterns.
Page 1. Spouses, Homogamy, and Social Networks91 TIM FUnNG LIAO, University of Illinois GILLIAN S... more Page 1. Spouses, Homogamy, and Social Networks91 TIM FUnNG LIAO, University of Illinois GILLIAN STEVENS, University of Illinois Abstract In Ms article, we investigate the factors predicting the inclusion and positioning of ...
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 2016
Income and wage inequality between gender and other social groups is commonly evaluated by the di... more Income and wage inequality between gender and other social groups is commonly evaluated by the difference in average income or the decomposition of the total amount of inequality into between-group and within-group components using an inequality measure such as the Theil index. Either approach ignores the dispersional difference between social groups, often manifested in glass-ceiling and glass-floor effects. The author introduces a refined Theil decomposition that offers two ways of capturing such between-group distributional differences. An analysis of income data from 10 European countries illustrates the usefulness of the proposed evaluation and decomposition methods.
Past research showed a century-long decline followed by a recent rise in extended households in t... more Past research showed a century-long decline followed by a recent rise in extended households in the US, and attributed the rise to immigration. However, no researchers of family structure have studied the changing trends as a process of immigrant assimilation. From the classical assimilation theory to the more recent segmented assimilation theory, we know that assimilation has different dimensions and directions, and affect groups of various backgrounds differently. Conceptualizing the change in household composition as a cultural assimilation, we study the process of acculturating one‘s family structure over immigration generations. We analyze data from the 1960 and 1970 US censuses as well as the 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009 March Current Population Surveys, via the hierarchical age-period-cohort model that properly estimates age, period, and cohort effects. We aim to answer three major research questions: (1) whether family structure as a cultural value is assimilated over three immigr...
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 2021
Using social comparison theory, I investigate the relation between experienced happiness and inco... more Using social comparison theory, I investigate the relation between experienced happiness and income inequality. In the analysis, I study happiness effects of the individual-level within-gender-ethnicity comparison-based Gini index conditional on a state’s overall inequality, using a linked set of the March 2013 Current Population Survey and the 2013 American Time Use Survey data while controlling major potential confounders. The findings suggest that individuals who are positioned to conduct both upward and downward comparison would feel happier in states where overall income inequality is high. In states where inequality is not high, however, such effects are not present because social comparison becomes less meaningful when one’s position is not as clearly definable. Therefore, social comparison matters where inequality persists: One’s comparison with all similar others’ in the income distribution in a social environment determines the effect of one’s income on happiness, with the...
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 2021
Using social comparison theory, I investigate the relation between experienced happiness and inco... more Using social comparison theory, I investigate the relation between experienced happiness and income inequality. In the analysis, I study happiness effects of the individual-level within-gender-ethnicity comparison-based Gini index conditional on a state’s overall inequality, using a linked set of the March 2013 Current Population Survey and the 2013 American Time Use Survey data while controlling major potential confounders. The findings suggest that individuals who are positioned to conduct both upward and downward comparison would feel happier in states where overall income inequality is high. In states where inequality is not high, however, such effects are not present because social comparison becomes less meaningful when one’s position is not as clearly definable. Therefore, social comparison matters where inequality persists: One’s comparison with all similar others’ in the income distribution in a social environment determines the effect of one’s income on happiness, with the...
This article marks the occasion of Social Science Research's 50th anniversary by reflecting on th... more This article marks the occasion of Social Science Research's 50th anniversary by reflecting on the progress of sequence analysis (SA) since its introduction into the social sciences four decades ago, with focuses on the developments of SA thus far in the social sciences and on its potential future directions. The application of SA in the social sciences, especially in life course research, has mushroomed in the last decade and a half. Using a life course analogy, we examined the birth of SA in the social sciences and its childhood (the first wave), its adolescence and young adulthood (the second wave), and its future mature adulthood in the paper. The paper provides a summary of (1) the important SA research and the historical contexts in which SA was developed by Andrew Abbott, (2) a thorough review of the many methodological developments in visualization, complexity measures, dissimilarity measures, group analysis of dissimilarities, cluster analysis of dissimilarities, multidomain/multichannel SA, dyadic/polyadic SA, Markov chain SA, sequence life course analysis, sequence network analysis, SA in other social science research, and software for SA, and (3) reflections on some future directions of SA including how SA can benefit and inform theory-making in the social sciences, the methods currently being developed, and some remaining challenges facing SA for which we do not yet have any solutions. It is our hope that the reader will take up the challenges and help us improve and grow SA into maturity.
This study aims to investigate public protest slogans in response to the Biden Administration'... more This study aims to investigate public protest slogans in response to the Biden Administration's announcement of two COVID-19 vaccination regulations on November 4, 2021. We identified three protest themes: (1) support for individual freedom/rights, (2) opposition to government's control, and (3) anti-science reasoning/misinformation/disinformation. Major policy recommendations include implementing efforts to dispel unscientific misinformation/disinformation and to emphasize individuals' civic responsibilities for vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially considering the current spreading of the Omicron variants and the relaxing of mask mandates across the US.
Dyadic or, more generally, polyadic life course sequences can be more associated within dyads or ... more Dyadic or, more generally, polyadic life course sequences can be more associated within dyads or polyads than between randomly assigned dyadic/polyadic member sequences, a phenomenon reflecting the life course principle of linked lives. In this article, I propose a method of U and V measures for quantifying and assessing linked life course trajectories in sequence data. Specifically, I compare the sequence distance between members of an observed dyad/polyad against a set of randomly generated dyads/polyads. The U measure quantifies how much greater, in terms of a given distance measure, the members in a dyad/polyad resemble one another than do members of randomly generated dyads/polyads, and the V measure quantifies the degree of linked lives in terms of how much observed dyads/polyads outperform randomized dyads/polyads. I present a simulation study, an empirical study analyzing dyadic family formation sequence data from the Longitudinal Study of Generations, and a random seed sensitivity analysis in the online supplement. Through these analyses, I demonstrate the versatility and usefulness of the proposed method for quantifying linked lives analysis with sequence data. The method has broad applicability to sequence data in life course, business and organizational, and social network research.
Prior research has well established the association of ethno-racial and economic inequality with ... more Prior research has well established the association of ethno-racial and economic inequality with COVID-19 incidence and mortality rates across counties in the US. In this ecological study, a similar association was found between ethno-racial and economic inequality and COVID-19 full vaccination rates across the 102 counties in the American state of Illinois in the early months of vaccination. Among the counties with income inequality below the median, a county’s poverty rate had a negative association with the proportion of population fully vaccinated. However, among the counties with income inequality above the median, a higher percentage of Black or Hispanic population was persistently associated with a lower proportion of fully vaccinated population over the two-month period from early February to early April of 2021.
Serious air pollution has caused widespread concern in Chinese society in recent years. China’s f... more Serious air pollution has caused widespread concern in Chinese society in recent years. China’s floating population plays an important role in China’s economic development, and the determinants of the floating population’s settlement intentions have attracted increasing attention. Using the 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey Data (CMDS) and the satellite grid data of global PM2.5 concentration as well as city-level data, this study investigated the influences of air quality on migrants’ settlement intention, in particular, individual heterogeneity and city characteristics. Using an instrumental variable to correct for endogeneity, we found that air pollution has a significant negative effect on the settlement intentions of China’s floating population. Migrants who were older, better educated and with poorer health are more sensitive to air pollution with regard to settlement intention. Meanwhile, settlement intentions are also influenced by individual adaptability: Respondents with ...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
This research analyzes the association between cumulative COVID-19 mortality and ethnic-racial co... more This research analyzes the association between cumulative COVID-19 mortality and ethnic-racial composition, income inequality, and political party inclination across counties in the United States. The study extends prior research by taking a long view—examining cumulative mortality burdens over the first 900 days of the COVID-19 pandemic at five time points (via negative binomial models) and as trajectories of cumulative mortality trends (via growth curve models). The analysis shows that counties with a higher Republican vote share display a higher cumulative mortality, especially over longer periods of the pandemic. It also demonstrates that counties with a higher composition of ethnic-racial minorities, especially Blacks, bear a much higher cumulative mortality burden, and such an elevated burden would be even higher when a county has a higher level of income inequality. For counties with a higher proportion of Hispanic population, while the burden is lower than that for counties ...
ABSTRACT Symbolism has long been established as a means for achieving social mobilisation. The pr... more ABSTRACT Symbolism has long been established as a means for achieving social mobilisation. The protesters at the London G20 protest on April 1, 2009 employed a wide range of symbolism to kindle people’s collective memory. This article studies visual protest symbolism through photographs taken at the protest and discusses six types of visual protest symbolism—costumes, effigies, flags, organisation banners, and slogans—that rely on people’s collective memory to mobilise. The article treats the six types of protest symbols as cultural objects and evaluates them in relation to the dimensions of institutional retention, retrievability, rhetorical power, and resonance.
Multidimensional scaling (MDS) refers to a family of models where the structure in a set of data ... more Multidimensional scaling (MDS) refers to a family of models where the structure in a set of data is represented graphically by the relationships between a set of points in a space. MDS can be used on a wide variety of data, using different models and allowing different assumptions about the level of measurement.
International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 2004
Social scientists often study the differential effects of explanatory variables among multiple so... more Social scientists often study the differential effects of explanatory variables among multiple social groups such as race, ethnic group, and nation.This paper examines the Wald test for testing equality of logit coefficients from models of multiple social groups. I propose a Wald statistic that can perform some joint tests of group comparisons that the usual likelihood ratio test cannot. Two examples apply the Wald statistic for testing various hypotheses, and show that the Wald test is flexible and straightforward for making comparisons across social groups, and that the proposed Wald test may find wide applications in the social sciences.
Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH) is a way with which a system of models self-organize themsel... more Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH) is a way with which a system of models self-organize themselves by forming higher-order polynomials and selecting the ones with best power of prediction by certain criterion. This method is helpful when we explore patterns of relationships in the data under investigation. In this paper the author presents a modified version of the GMDH algorithm emphasizing the parsimony of models and the behavior of individual parameter estimates as well as of the whole model, and utilizing the consistency and accuracy of bootstrap estimates. This approach is suitable for most research social scientists conduct. An example, the 1907 Romanian Peasant Rebellion, is used to illustrate how to employ the GMDH algorithm when the research topic has been theory-laden. The findings show that GMDH is an appropriate method that social scientists can utilize in their pursuit of a model that is most parsimonious and theoretically meaningful at the same time. Possible extensions of the modified approach, which in its present form works on linear regression type of models, to logit and probit models are also considered.
The popular image of a traditional Chinese household is one of a large kin group composed of mult... more The popular image of a traditional Chinese household is one of a large kin group composed of multiple-family units. However, reports on family size in China's past suggest that the average household size was not large in ancient times. Using population registers for Dunhuang and Turfan from the Tang Dynasty (618–907 ad), this article is the first serious attempt to analyze household structures in ancient China. While a high proportion of simple-family households were recorded in the registers, a significant number of complex households suggests that the distribution of Chinese households was bimodal. This pattern fits neither the model considered as typical for Western families nor that for Eastern families. Other issues covered include the frequency of living alone, the presence of slaves, the distribution of household heads by age and sex, and women's marriage patterns.
Page 1. Spouses, Homogamy, and Social Networks91 TIM FUnNG LIAO, University of Illinois GILLIAN S... more Page 1. Spouses, Homogamy, and Social Networks91 TIM FUnNG LIAO, University of Illinois GILLIAN STEVENS, University of Illinois Abstract In Ms article, we investigate the factors predicting the inclusion and positioning of ...
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 2016
Income and wage inequality between gender and other social groups is commonly evaluated by the di... more Income and wage inequality between gender and other social groups is commonly evaluated by the difference in average income or the decomposition of the total amount of inequality into between-group and within-group components using an inequality measure such as the Theil index. Either approach ignores the dispersional difference between social groups, often manifested in glass-ceiling and glass-floor effects. The author introduces a refined Theil decomposition that offers two ways of capturing such between-group distributional differences. An analysis of income data from 10 European countries illustrates the usefulness of the proposed evaluation and decomposition methods.
Past research showed a century-long decline followed by a recent rise in extended households in t... more Past research showed a century-long decline followed by a recent rise in extended households in the US, and attributed the rise to immigration. However, no researchers of family structure have studied the changing trends as a process of immigrant assimilation. From the classical assimilation theory to the more recent segmented assimilation theory, we know that assimilation has different dimensions and directions, and affect groups of various backgrounds differently. Conceptualizing the change in household composition as a cultural assimilation, we study the process of acculturating one‘s family structure over immigration generations. We analyze data from the 1960 and 1970 US censuses as well as the 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009 March Current Population Surveys, via the hierarchical age-period-cohort model that properly estimates age, period, and cohort effects. We aim to answer three major research questions: (1) whether family structure as a cultural value is assimilated over three immigr...
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 2021
Using social comparison theory, I investigate the relation between experienced happiness and inco... more Using social comparison theory, I investigate the relation between experienced happiness and income inequality. In the analysis, I study happiness effects of the individual-level within-gender-ethnicity comparison-based Gini index conditional on a state’s overall inequality, using a linked set of the March 2013 Current Population Survey and the 2013 American Time Use Survey data while controlling major potential confounders. The findings suggest that individuals who are positioned to conduct both upward and downward comparison would feel happier in states where overall income inequality is high. In states where inequality is not high, however, such effects are not present because social comparison becomes less meaningful when one’s position is not as clearly definable. Therefore, social comparison matters where inequality persists: One’s comparison with all similar others’ in the income distribution in a social environment determines the effect of one’s income on happiness, with the...
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 2021
Using social comparison theory, I investigate the relation between experienced happiness and inco... more Using social comparison theory, I investigate the relation between experienced happiness and income inequality. In the analysis, I study happiness effects of the individual-level within-gender-ethnicity comparison-based Gini index conditional on a state’s overall inequality, using a linked set of the March 2013 Current Population Survey and the 2013 American Time Use Survey data while controlling major potential confounders. The findings suggest that individuals who are positioned to conduct both upward and downward comparison would feel happier in states where overall income inequality is high. In states where inequality is not high, however, such effects are not present because social comparison becomes less meaningful when one’s position is not as clearly definable. Therefore, social comparison matters where inequality persists: One’s comparison with all similar others’ in the income distribution in a social environment determines the effect of one’s income on happiness, with the...
Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this volume offers a rare forum for a serious analysis of the t... more Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this volume offers a rare forum for a serious analysis of the territorial dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands between China and Japan. To understand the complexity of the dispute and to find peaceful solutions, it is necessary to reach beyond the confines of a single discipline and perspective. The volume deconstructs conflicting perspectives on both sides of the dispute.
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