RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Building an Open Qualitative Social Science
Russell Sage Foundation, 2024
Paper: 978-0-87154-830-6
See other books on: American Studies | Edin, Kathryn | Poverty & Homelessness | RSF | Russell Sage Foundation Journal
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Paper: 978-0-87154-830-6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Note catalog copy relates to both issues of this double issue of the journal.
In recent decades, the social sciences have struggled to predict, monitor, and understand ongoing social crises. This is due in part to a lack of infrastructure to adequately do so. The American Voices Project (AVP), an experimental public-use platform for collecting qualitative data, was designed to expand the capacity of social science research by complementing existing research methods examining the everyday lives of Americans. The AVP was fielded in 2019-2022 as the country’s first nationally-representative, large-scale, multiple-domain qualitative data collection effort. In this double issue of RSF, sociologists Kathryn J. Edin, Corey D. Fields, David B. Grusky, Marybeth J. Mattingly, Kristen Olson, and Charles Varner, computer scientist Jure Leskovec, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors utilize data from the AVP to determine whether the platform can provide insight into the lives of Americans and address social science’s current shortcomings.
Issue 1 examines Americans’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, identifies and explores emerging crises in the U.S., and includes the first set of classical interpretive studies based on a public-use dataset. Kyle Fee and colleagues find that job loss during the pandemic was associated with declines in financial and mental wellbeing, that expanded safety net programs did not disincentivize work, and that existing survey-based monitoring is missing important pockets of deprivation. Katherine Cramer and colleagues discover a more thoroughgoing “disaffection crisis” than has been appreciated to date, a crisis in which low- and middle-income earners often feel profoundly disconnected from politics and have little confidence in their ability to meaningfully effect change. Josephina Flores Morales shows that healthcare costs – even after recent and ongoing reforms in healthcare – remain insurmountable for many Latinx Americans, who must then rely on family for unexpected medical costs. Brandon A. Jackson finds that higher income gig workers hold surprisingly positive views of platform work as a way to explore their community, while lower income gig workers are less keen and focus on the financial benefits of gig work.
Issue 2 illustrates how the AVP can be used to uncover hidden populations and to explore how some types of crises, mindsets, or sensibilities can have cascading effects that impact multiple areas of people’s lives. Corey M. Abramson and colleagues use the AVP to uncover the population of Americans experiencing physical pain, showing that while pain is very prevalent, it has larger negative effects on the life trajectories of women and those without a college degree than on other groups. James Hiebert and colleagues uncover the large population of individuals who left the labor market due to a health condition and describe their strategies for reducing stigma when explaining why they are no longer working. Shira Zilberstein and colleagues discover that when individuals discuss their lives they feature “agentic moments” in which they can claim agency despite facing constraints that could be seen as limiting choice and agency.
This volume of RSF provides compelling insights into the lives of Americans and convincingly makes the case for building a permanent public-use platform for qualitative research.
In recent decades, the social sciences have struggled to predict, monitor, and understand ongoing social crises. This is due in part to a lack of infrastructure to adequately do so. The American Voices Project (AVP), an experimental public-use platform for collecting qualitative data, was designed to expand the capacity of social science research by complementing existing research methods examining the everyday lives of Americans. The AVP was fielded in 2019-2022 as the country’s first nationally-representative, large-scale, multiple-domain qualitative data collection effort. In this double issue of RSF, sociologists Kathryn J. Edin, Corey D. Fields, David B. Grusky, Marybeth J. Mattingly, Kristen Olson, and Charles Varner, computer scientist Jure Leskovec, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors utilize data from the AVP to determine whether the platform can provide insight into the lives of Americans and address social science’s current shortcomings.
Issue 1 examines Americans’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, identifies and explores emerging crises in the U.S., and includes the first set of classical interpretive studies based on a public-use dataset. Kyle Fee and colleagues find that job loss during the pandemic was associated with declines in financial and mental wellbeing, that expanded safety net programs did not disincentivize work, and that existing survey-based monitoring is missing important pockets of deprivation. Katherine Cramer and colleagues discover a more thoroughgoing “disaffection crisis” than has been appreciated to date, a crisis in which low- and middle-income earners often feel profoundly disconnected from politics and have little confidence in their ability to meaningfully effect change. Josephina Flores Morales shows that healthcare costs – even after recent and ongoing reforms in healthcare – remain insurmountable for many Latinx Americans, who must then rely on family for unexpected medical costs. Brandon A. Jackson finds that higher income gig workers hold surprisingly positive views of platform work as a way to explore their community, while lower income gig workers are less keen and focus on the financial benefits of gig work.
Issue 2 illustrates how the AVP can be used to uncover hidden populations and to explore how some types of crises, mindsets, or sensibilities can have cascading effects that impact multiple areas of people’s lives. Corey M. Abramson and colleagues use the AVP to uncover the population of Americans experiencing physical pain, showing that while pain is very prevalent, it has larger negative effects on the life trajectories of women and those without a college degree than on other groups. James Hiebert and colleagues uncover the large population of individuals who left the labor market due to a health condition and describe their strategies for reducing stigma when explaining why they are no longer working. Shira Zilberstein and colleagues discover that when individuals discuss their lives they feature “agentic moments” in which they can claim agency despite facing constraints that could be seen as limiting choice and agency.
This volume of RSF provides compelling insights into the lives of Americans and convincingly makes the case for building a permanent public-use platform for qualitative research.
See other books on: American Studies | Edin, Kathryn | Poverty & Homelessness | RSF | Russell Sage Foundation Journal
See other titles from Russell Sage Foundation
