Category: Series: Social Indicators
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American Social Indicators, 2006: Getting Better but Feeling Worse
Over the past month, I have done twelve posts on American cultural indicators. Here is an index to those posts: Infant Mortality and Life Expectancy Suicide Crime (Part 1) Crime (Part 2) Substance Abuse Family Formation and Sexuality (Part 1) Family Formation and Sexuality (Part 2) Education Economic Status (Part 1) Economic Status (Part 2)…
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Environment
SOCIAL INDICATORS 2006 Environment There is a long history of environmentalism in American life. Yellowstone National Park was created in 1872. The Audubon Society, formed in 1905, was one of the earliest environmental groups. President Teddy Roosevelt (1901-1909) was probably the first "environmental president" with his conservationist policies. More modern environmental groups can be traced…
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Ethnicity
SOCIAL INDICATORS 2006 Ethnicity I have avoided giving an extensive analysis of subgroups within American culture during this series on social indicators. I have been focused on trends at the most aggregate level. However, one measure of quality of life for the whole society is the degree to which each person has an opportunity for…
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Economic Status (Part 2)
SOCIAL INDICATORS 2006 Economic Status (Part 2) The Gini Index is a measure of income inequality. The index ranks income distributions from 0 to 1, where 0 equals equality, and 1 equals inequality. Gini indexes had been calculated for families from 1947 to the present in the US. However, household income is now the preferred…
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Economic Status (Part 1)
SOCIAL INDICATORS 2006 Economic Status (Part 1) Economic status is usually cast in terms of income and wealth. When discussing economic justice, we typically have one of two things in mind. First, we ask if each person has sufficient resources to live on. Second, we are asking how income and wealth are distributed throughout society.…
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Education
SOCIAL INDICATORS 2006 Education Education is critical for societies with complex modern economic systems. However, measuring the quality of education over time is difficult. As the economy and society become more complex, so do the educational needs. As the rate of technology change increases, some jobs disappear, and others are created. Workers have to be…
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Family Formation and Sexuality (Part 2)
SOCIAL INDICATORS 2006 Family Formation and Sexuality (Part 2) Despite the decrease in teenage sexual behavior and less unprotected sexual behavior, there is a rapid increase in the rate of sexually transmitted diseases: After declining somewhat erratically from 1975 to 1997, the rate of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) rose by 28% between 1997 and 2004.…
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Family Formation and Sexuality (Part 1)
SOCIAL INDICATORS 2006 Family Formation and Sexuality (Part 1) The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act was passed by Congress in 1996. Two of the Act’s goals were to reduce out-of-wedlock births and to encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families. Scholars and politicians generally agree that the most desirable form of the family…
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Substance Abuse
SOCIAL INDICATORS 2006 Substance Abuse Until recently, drug abuse was primarily confined to the poor and certain subcultures. Drug abuse escalated and entered mainstream culture during the 1960s and 1970s. Few reliable time-series statistics exist that measure levels of drug abuse over an extended period. The most widely used statistics come from the National Household…
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Crime (Part 2)
SOCIAL INDICATORS 2006 Crime (Part 2) The Columbine High School tragedy in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999 has come to symbolize a culture of pervasive youth violence. There is no question that the Columbine episode was well beyond the ordinary expression of youth violence, but was it truly symbolic of trends in youth culture? Historical statistics…