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Twenty percent of American adults claimed no religious preference in 2012, compared to 7 percent twenty-five years earlier. Previous research identified a political backlash against the religious right and generational change as major factors in explaining the trend. That research found that religious beliefs had not changed, ruling out secularization as a cause. In this paper we employ new data and more powerful analytical tools to: (1) update the time series, (2) present further evidence of correlations between political backlash, generational succession, and religious identification, (3) show how valuing personal autonomy generally and autonomy in the sphere of sex and drugs specifically explain generational differences, and (4) use GSS panel data to show that the causal direction in the rise of the "Nones" likely runs from political identity as a liberal or conservative to religious identity, reversing a long-standing convention in social science research. Our new analysis joins the threads of earlier explanations into a general account of how political conflict over cultural issues spurred an increase in non-affiliation.

In this article, we assess trends in residential segregation in the United States from 1960 to 2000 along several dimensions of race and ethnicity, class, and life cycle and present a method for attributing segregation to nested geographic levels. We measured segregation for metropolitan America using the Theil index, which is additively decomposed into contributions of regional, metropolitan, center city-suburban, place, and tract segregation. This procedure distinguishes whether groups live apart because members cluster in different neighborhoods, communities, metropolitan areas, or regions. Substantively, we found that the segregation of blacks decreased considerably after 1960 largely because neighborhoods became more integrated, but the foreign born became more segregated largely because they concentrated in particular metropolitan areas. Class segregation increased between 1970 and 1990 mainly because the affluent increasingly clustered in specific metropolitan areas and in specific municipalities within metropolitan areas. The unmarried increasingly congregated in center cities. The main purpose of this article is to describe and illustrate this multilevel approach to studying segregation.

The application of network analysis to certain issues in sociology requires measurement of individuals' personal networks. These issues generally involve the impact of structural locations on persons' social lives. One such case is the Northern California Community Study of the personal consequences of residential environments. This article describes and illustrates the methodology we have developed for studying personal networks by mass survey. It reviews the conceptual problems in network definition and measurement, assesses earlier efforts, presents our technique, and illustrates its applications.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Forces.Studies increasingly suggest that the personal relations of men and women differ. In this note we present data which show that differences between the friendships of men and of women are conditional upon stage in the life cycle, and we argue that this interaction effect is evidence for both a structural and dispositional explanation of behavioral differences between the sexes. Explaining Gender and Social RelationsThere are essentially two approaches to the study of how men's and women's social relations differ: dispositional and structural. Dispositional approaches explain gender differences in social relations by ongoing inclinations which originate in biology, culture, or early or adult socialization. Structural approaches explain gender differences by the different positions women and men typically occupy in the social system, and their differing access to economic, political, and ideological resources of power and privilege. Purely structural explanations explain behavioral differences by the direct, uninternalized effects of social structure. Dispositional explanations have been the most frequent approach to gender contrasts in social relations.We propose that gender differences in friendships emerge most sharply in particular periods of the life course, periods which offer very *This paper is a report of the Northern California Community Study, sponsored by the Center for Studies of Metropolitan Problems, N.I.M.H.Friendship, Gende; Life Cycle / 133 1,921 nonkin friends in the analysis, all men's friends were more likely to come from work than all women's, 25 and 14 percent, respectively, and far less likely to have been met through the spouse, 3 in contrast to 20 percent.) These differences narrow in the later stages, but in those stages relatively few wives worked. 9. The dependent variable here is a composite "affect" scale which includes items measuring anger, being upset, being pleased with oneself, and being happy. In both Stages 3 and 4 (children at home), mothers with less than ten nonkin in their networks scored significantly lower than did: mothers with ten or more nonkin; fathers with either few or many nonkin associates; and wives of the same age without children at home. Put another way, the presence of children at home especially depressed the feelings of women with small networks, indicating that children were no substitute for friends; and more, that friends were an important balm for mothers. 10. The means differ at p<.001. The units here are, again, the subsample of names-one hundred fifty-nine nonkin friends for ninety-one elderly women, and sevent...