While a much larger percentage of American families are located in the top income bracket in 1990 compared to fifty years ago, there were still slightly over 1/4 of American families with income of $25K or less in 1990.

This module explores the effects of nativity, race, and ethnicity on educational attainment in the U.S.

Students will trace changes in family behavior from 1950 to 1990 and assess their magnitude, considering the pace and timing of these changes. Marital status, number of children and household type will be examined by both race/ethnicity and class. Additional team questions will be introduced that focus on marriage and intimate relationships; fertility and childrearing; divorce; and families and poverty. Students will present answers and supporting data to these questions via class presentations.

Students will gain an understanding of the change in fertility patterns in the U.S. through an examination of the change of marital status among females, childbearing trends, and how such variables are affected by race/ethnicity.

This activity is a classroom and field study activity where students learn how to record focused observation.

Overall, we see that even when controlling for occupation, gender continues to affect earnings: women make less than men. Regardless of occupation, we find that a higher proportion of women than men fall into the low-income categories. Likewise, a higher proportion of men than women fall into the high-income categories. Students will explore these ideas by analyzing the effects of gender, occupation and education on earnings.

Students will empirically examine the issues underlying school performance using data that captures some of their own experiences.

In this moduel, students will explore urban residential choice across different populations in New York.

With this assignment, students will experience the thrill of "doing" sociology rather than just reading sociological findings.

A data set is then compiled by the instructor. Students then take on the role as researchers and use their own class data for hypothesis formulation and testing. Student devise original hypotheses using their choice of variables from the data set. The instructor then runs the appropriate test for their hypothesis, and provides students with results (most often crosstabulation tables or reports of means) for final analysis.

Does income differ for men and women, and for whites and people of color? In this exercise, we will examine earnings data for all full-time workers in the US. Students will be able to examine data for the nation as a whole, for Kentucky, and for a state of their choosing.

The end of World War II created a dramatic increase in births. Known as the "Baby Boom", this trend continued into the early 1960's. During this period, five out of six women in peak childbearing years gave birth to at least two children. Americans were also marrying and staying married. As baby boomers have matured, they have not followed their parent's marriage and childbearing patterns.

We have spent the last few weeks discussing race, class, and gender inequalities and how sociologists conceptualize these inequalities on the structural, rather than the individual, level. In this second research report, you will have the opportunity to apply this structural perspective. You will use U.S. Census data from 1950 to 1990 to analyze shifts in occupational structures in your home state and how these shifts vary by race, sex, or education.

Current and projected data will be used to examine cohort differences among members of various race/ethnic groups as they grow older in order to identify possible political and policy implications for the future. Data from various states and metropolitan cities will be compared.

In the first part of this exercise, students will learn (1) how to do preliminary data analysis using the General Social Survey (GSS); and (2) how to examine relationships between social constructs empirically. To carry out this study, whey will follow the basic procedures in social research and apply the concepts and techniques that have been discussed in class.