The decline in trust in the scientific community in the United States among political conservatives has been well established. But this observation is complicated by remarkably positive and stable attitudes toward scientific research itself. What explains the persistence of positive belief in science in the midst of such dramatic change? By leveraging research on the performativity of conservative identity, we argue that conservative scientific institutions have manufactured a scientific cultural repertoire that enables participation in this highly valued epistemological space while undermining scientific authority perceived as politically biased. We test our hypothesized link between conservative identity and scientific perceptions using panel data from the General Social Survey. We find that those with stable conservative identities hold more positive attitudes toward scientific research while simultaneously holding more negative attitudes towards the scientific community compared to those who switch to and from conservative political identities. These findings support a theory of a conservative scientific repertoire that is learned over time and that helps orient political conservatives in scientific debates that have political repercussions. Implications of these findings are discussed for researchers interested in the cultural differentiation of scientific authority and for stakeholders in scientific communication and its public policy.

The positive relationship between family formation and regular weekly religious service attendance is well established, but cross-sectional data make it difficult to be confident that this relationship is causal. Moreover, if the relationship is causal, cross-sectional data make it difficult to disentangle the effects of three distinct family-formation events: marrying, having a child, and having a child who reaches school age. We use three waves of the new General Social Survey panel data to disentangle these separate potential effects. Using random-, fixed-, and hybrid-effect models, we show that, although in cross-section marriage and children predict attendance across individuals, neither leads to increased attendance when looking at individuals who change over time. Having a child who becomes school aged is the only family-formation event that remains associated with increased attendance among individuals who change over time. This suggests that the relationships between marriage and attending and between having a first child (or, for that matter, having several children) and attending are spurious, causal in the other direction, or indirect (since marrying and having a first child make it more likely that one will eventually have a school-age child). Adding a school-age child in the household is the only family-formation event that directly leads to increased attendance.

Dual-process models are increasingly popular in sociology as a framework for theorizing the role of automatic cognition in shaping social behavior. However, empirical studies using dual-process models often rely on ad hoc measures such as forced-choice surveys, observation, and interviews whose relationships to underlying cognitive processes are not fully established. In this article, we advance dual-process research in sociology by (1) proposing criteria for measuring automatic cognition, and (2) assessing the empirical performance of two popular measures of automatic cognition developed by psychologists. We compare the ability of the Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT), the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), and traditional forced-choice measures to predict process-pure estimates of automatic influences on individuals’ behavior during a survey task. Results from three studies focusing on politics, morality, and racial attitudes suggest the AMP provides the most valid and consistent measure of automatic cognitive processes. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for sociological practice.

As pornography use becomes more commonplace in the United States, and increasingly so among younger cohorts, a growing literature is considering its potential connection to key social and cultural institutions. The current study examined the relationship between pornography use and one such institution: marriage. We drew on three-wave longitudinal data from 2006 to 2014 General Social Survey panel studies to determine whether married Americans' pornography use predicted their likelihood of divorce over time and under what social conditions. We employed a doubly robust strategy that combines entropy balancing with logistic regression models. We found that the probability of divorce roughly doubled for married Americans who began pornography use between survey waves (N = 2,120; odds ratio = 2.19), and that this relationship held for both women and men. Conversely, discontinuing pornography use between survey waves was associated with a lower probability of divorce, but only for women. Additional analyses also showed that the association between beginning pornography use and the probability of divorce was particularly strong among younger Americans, those who were less religious, and those who reported greater initial marital happiness. We conclude by discussing data limitations, considering potential intervening mechanisms and the possibility of reverse causation, and outlining implications for future research.

Previous research shows that clergy make less money than others with similar levels of education. We use Current Population Survey data to offer five contributions to knowledge about clergy compensation. First, we document and take into account the shift in clergy compensation from the provision of free housing to the payment of housing allowances. Second, although the clergy earnings disadvantage appears to have increased over the last 40 years relative to their educational peers, the picture changes when we exclude the highest income occupations. Clergy have lost ground to doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers, but they have gained ground relative to everyone else. Third, these gains are largely because of decline in the number of hours clergy report working. Fourth, we show that clergy working in churches earn less than clergy working elsewhere. Fifth, we document immediate wage penalties for those who become clergy and, among clergy, for those who begin to work in congregations. Overall, although clergy still earn less than comparable workers, their position has improved in recent decades relative to all but the highest earning occupations.

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Research has found a meaningful income gap between males and females across several occupational settings, and this is also true within law enforcement. As more female workers enter the criminal justice system, it is important to revisit and update these patterns of gender inequality to account for the changing gender dynamics within this occupation. Using Current Population Survey data, we document the gender differences in pay among police over the past 28 years. Police officers experience income advantage compared with the general working population, but they also show a stable gender gap in pay. While this stable inequality is better than other public-sector jobs-which have experienced a growth in the gender pay gap-it represents a continued disadvantage for police women, despite the growing number of women working in law enforcement and the rules governing public-sector employment. We further decompose the gendered pattern in police pay by whether these individuals work for federal, state, or local agencies, and find that those working for state government show stark declines in the gender gap in pay while those working for local or federal agencies experience little to no change in this gender income inequality over time. We conclude with a discussion of the policy implications of our findings and directions for future research on gender inequality within law enforcement occupations.

Drawing upon work effort and gendered organizations perspectives and using data from the Current Population Survey, we examine how family structure types (i.e., combinations of marital and parental statuses) shape within- and between-gender variation in the earnings of high educated men and women working in STEM and non-STEM occupations. We find that STEM and non-STEM women earn premia for marriage and for motherhood if they are married, with higher family-related premia for STEM women. Analysis of married men and women by specific STEM category reveals the largest parenthood premium is for women in engineering. Yet, STEM men and non-STEM men generally earn more than their counterpart women, with the largest between-gender wage difference for married parents in non-STEM occupations. Taken together, these findings provide a mixed picture of movement towards gender equality in work organizations.