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Not all political conservatives are Flat Earthers, of course. But there are proportionately more of them than there used to be, according to the Review article.For that piece, Gordon Gauchat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, analyzed information from the General Social Survey, conducted every year since 1972 by NORC at the University of Chicago.

That’s the provocative question being asked by researchers in a recent paper, which was flagged by Lauren Stiller Rikleen in a Harvard Business Review blog on Thursday. The researchers — Arthur Brief, Dolly Chugh and Sreedhari D. Desai — used national surveys like the General Social Survey from the National Opinion Research Center, as well as direct results from studies of married male managers and students with full-time jobs.

The administration announcement came as the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its first-ever National Former Prisoners Survey, which found that 9.6 percent of former inmates said they were sexually victimized in jails, prisons and halfway houses. A somewhat similar survey of still-imprisoned convicts done by the same agency in 2008-09 found that only 4.4 percent of state and federal inmates said they were sexually victimized.

Stepping off the traditional Ph.D. career path can make one hypersensitive. A recent dialogue in The University of Chicago Magazine about modifying graduate curriculum in Ph.D. departments in history to accommodate a nonacademic trajectory (or Plan B) led me think about how Ph.D.s  are actually trained, and how that training is used to build new knowledge. This dialogue was a reaction to a statement in the fall by the president of American Historical Association about removing the stigma of "Plan B" from a nonacademic career path.

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Lovenheim and Reynolds looked at how changes in short-run home prices affected families with college-age students. They found that for every $10,000 in additional assets a family gained in the four years leading up to a child's enrollment in college, the child was 2 percent likelier to attend a flagship public university rather than a regional public institution, and 1.6 percent less likely to enroll in a community college. The lower the family's overall income, the bigger the impact of the increase in housing values; those with annual incomes of under $75,000 were 8.3 percent likelier to attend a flagship university for every $10,000 gain in home value, while the impact was statistically insignificant for those with incomes above $125,000.

When a person is born even seems to make a difference. A study of 1,574 American centenarians and more than 10,000 of their shorter-lived siblings and spouses led by Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova of the University of Chicago found that babies with a fall birthday have a slightly higher chance of becoming centenarians than babies born in spring months.

The study, conducted by Harvard School of Public Health researchers, included data from the General Social Surveys from 1972 to 2006. The researchers found that the likelihood of Republicans reporting poor health was 26 percent lower than Democrats, while the likelihood of Republicans smoking was 15 percent lower than Democrats.

We can see this at work in survey data. I took the 2010 wave of the General Social Survey  and pulled all 395 Republicans and GOP-leaning independents (PARTYID==4/6). For these people I compared their attitudes on marijuana (GRASS) and government redistribution of wealth (EQWLTH, which I cut to a binary with responses 1/4). Among Republicans who oppose wealth distribution, 37% favor legalizing marijuana, as opposed to 38% among those who favor wealth redistribution. This difference of one percentage point is not even remotely statistically significant (chi2 0.08, 1 df).

Technology has exacerbated exasperation, as well: jarringly loud talking on cellphones (and unattended phones' ringtones), cheap earbuds bleeding sound into nearby cubicles, or Facebook "friend" requests from casual co-worker acquaintances. Oversharing, either via social media or office chit-chat, is rampant. And as more companies lump together vacation and sick days, anywhere from 40 to 55 percent of us sometimes come to work with a contagious disease, according to a 2010 study by NORC at the University of Chicago.

The link between earned success and life satisfaction is well established by researchers. The University of Chicago's General Social Survey, for example, reveals that people who say they feel "very successful" or "completely successful" in their work lives are twice as likely to say they are very happy than people who feel "somewhat successful." It doesn't matter if they earn more or less income; the differences persist.

NORC Senior Fellow Stephen W. Raudenbush, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Raudenbush, the Lewis-Sebring Distinguished Service Professor in Sociology and the Harris School of Public Policy Studies, develops and applies quantitative methods for studying child and youth development within social settings such as classrooms, schools and neighborhoods

Some 20% of men and 14% of women who have ever been married have had extramarital sex, according to federally sponsored research conducted since 1972 by the social-science research organization NORC at the University of Chicago. (Reliable statistics about infidelity are scarce, largely because many people won't own up to an affair.) Mr. Rothrock's affair took place by video chat and other electronic means, but it was no less sexual or emotional, he says.

A report recently released discusses the strength of people’s belief in God in 30 countries and how their beliefs changed during their lifetime. The report is called “Beliefs About God Across Time And Countries” and it was operated by NORC at the University of Chicago. The survey asked the questions below of those involved in order to figure out their belief or unbelief in God.

Prof. Mario L. Small has been appointed dean of the Social Sciences Division for a five-year term, President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Thomas F. Rosenbaum announced. Small’s appointment takes effect on July 1. Small has served as associate editor of the American Journal of Sociology and is currently editorial board member of Social Science Quarterly, City and Community, and Sociological Forum, a council member of the American Sociological Association, and a trustee of NORC at the University of Chicago.

"As committee chairmen, Cabinet secretaries, the head of Medicare and health officials see these really high costs, they are more interested in knowing, 'what policy knob can I turn to stop this hemorrhage?'" said Michael O’Grady of the National Opinion Research Center, co-author of a new report for the Campaign to End Obesity, which brings together representatives from business, academia and the public health community to work with policymakers on the issue.

The data for the new study came from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which included information about the moms’ jobs and incomes, as well as stats on their family life, including the decision to give their babies formula or to breast-feed for a short duration (less than six months) or a long duration (six months or more).

But leaving responsibility for financial education solely on parents creates an unequal playing field, Lusardi says. In a paper published in 2009 examining youth financial literacy using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the authors (Lusardi is one) found that "financial knowledge among the young is strongly influenced by family background."

Recent data from the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project (NSHAP) indicate that more than half of people aged 57-85 and about a third of those aged 75-85 are sexually active and that physical health is significantly correlated with sexual activity and many aspects of sexual function, independent of age.

It is not legal to market methamphetamine in America. There are no agencies regulating sales or setting standards. There are no records of transactions or trends. Product quality is uneven and the ways in which meth is delivered to users varies. So it is not surprising that in a recent study of methamphetamine markets across the country we found considerable variation both in the quality of local product and in the organization and operation of local markets.

"Looking at differences among age groups, the largest increases in belief in God most often occur among those 58 years of age and older. This suggests that belief in God is especially likely to increase among the oldest groups, perhaps in response to the increasing anticipation of mortality," researcher Tom Smith said in a statement.

“The Philippines is both developing and Catholic,” said Tom W. Smith, who directs the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. “Religion, which is mainly Catholic, is very emotionally strong there.” The report covered data from 30 countries that participated in at least two surveys in 1991, 1998 or 2008. In 29 of the 30 countries surveyed in 2008, belief increased with age: Belief in God was highest for those ages 68 or older (43 percent), compared to 23 percent of those younger than 28.

The authors recommend using a 25-year budget window instead to fully account for the value of disease prevention. The report was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. NewPublicHealth spoke with Michael O’Grady, PhD, a senior fellow at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, a lead author and a former Assistant Secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services, about the report.

The study is by Jesse D. Rude, a principal research analyst at NORC at the University of Chicago; Gregory C. Wolniak, a senior research scientist at NORC at the University of Chicago; and Ernest Pascarella, the Mary Louise Petersen Professor of Higher Education at the University of Iowa. They used survey data of students at 6 liberal arts colleges and 11 universities collected by the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education.

Winship points to data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, which show that the share of young people with annual incomes of $1 million in 2011 dollars—pocket change to some of these young entrepreneurs—barely changed from 1982 to 2006.

A UNIVERSITY education costs a fortune. Student loan debt in America has been rising rapidly in an effort to keep up with the expense. According to the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finance 8.9% of households had student debt in 1989, averaging $8,700. In 2007, by contrast, the share had risen to 16%, holding an average of $21,500 in debt. To make matters worse new graduates face a slack job market which could depress their earnings for decades. But what choice do they have? The cost of forgoing university may be even larger.

Let’s say a worker making $50,000 contributes 6 percent of her annual salary with a 3 percent employer match. By the time that person retires, she should have about $320,000 saved up, according to calculations by Munnell. But reality rarely plays out that way. People forget to enroll, or they don’t save enough, or they wind up withdrawing money to cover a financial emergency. The result: Individuals nearing retirement have closer to $78,000 saved, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. (And that number is rosy; the last regular survey was done in 2007, just before the financial crisis.)

This can be an unsettling to hear early in a research career. "Soft money" is a polite euphemism for funding that comes from a source outside a university or research institute and must be pursued regularly and with vigor. The "soft" part means the money can be both uncertain and impermanent, neither of which are adjectives one would like to attach to a job or career. Yet, a large fraction of the research faculty and staff members of American universities and research institutions live every day in this "soft money" world. Those in medical schools, engineering, and the basic sciences are all too familiar with how fleeting and fragile funding sources can be. Congressional budget battles become personal when a large fraction of your research portfolio is funded by federal sources. Foundation funding priorities are also seldom sustained for the long haul.

Added Norman Bradburn, a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago, “The decennial census is accompanied by lots of publicity and support from various groups which makes it more likely that people will feel it is their duty to respond. This is not the case with ACS which goes on under the radar of most people and media.”

Moderates are typically less educated than either liberals or conservatives, Gauchat said. "These folks are just generally alienated from science," he said, describing them as the "least engaged and least knowledgeable about basic scientific facts." The study was based on results from the General Social Survey, administered between 1974 and 2010 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

The findings were based on responses given to the General Social Survey, a long-running sociology project that has been interviewing Americans about their level of trust in public institutions (such as the scientific community, the Supreme Court, and television) since the 1970s.

One panel member, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), asked about NIH's controversial plan to modify the design of the National Children's Study (NCS), which plans to follow the health of 100,000 children from before birth to age 21. Brown said that Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine is running NCS pilot studies in two Ohio counties that are among seven "vanguard" centers that may not be part of the redesigned main study. The school's two NCS contracts employ 60 people, Brown noted.

So many nursing mothers work less or stop entirely. A recent study, based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, found that new mothers suffered a drop in earnings in the short term -- whether they breast-fed or formula-fed their infants. But women who breast-fed infants for six months or longer experienced a much starker drop in income over the first five years of their children's lives.

Why do I keep posting this stuff? Because facts matter. That’s my hope, my faith. Tell people facts, and they will open their eyes. Tell your friends, tell your family. Have whatever opinion you want to have, but start with the facts we know. Look up facts, calculate facts, analyze facts. They are there for us, we just need to go look. Google is your friend, Wikipedia is your friend. The General Social Survey is your friend.

For example, "a person with diabetes is not going to go on dialysis right away. They're going to go on dialysis 10 to 12 years after their diagnosis," said NORC Senior Fellow Michael O'Grady, co-author of the report, released Wednesday by the Campaign to End Obesity. A 25-year window for making policy decisions would be more appropriate when drafting policies aimed at curbing disease, he said at a Wednesday morning press conference.

NORC at the University of Chicago followed people born from 1957 to1964 as well as from 1980 to 1984. For both groups, debt -- credit card as well as other personal debt acquired early in life -- was likely to still remain and have grown by 10 percent five and 10 years later, says Rupa Datta, a NORC senior fellow.

No matter what happens, Social Security will not provide enough retirement income for most people. A 45-year old who earns $35,000 can only expect about $16,000 a year from Social Security when he retires. If he earns the median income, about $50,000, he’ll get about $20,000. According to the 2009 Survey of Consumer Finance the median financial (does not include housing) wealth for people approaching retirement is about $70,000. That will provide about $3,500 of inflation-protected income a year in retirement—not much to live on. People need to save more.

Her top concern is for seniors who are entering retirement without any or very little retirement savings. She notes that according to the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finance, home equity represents 80% of total wealth for one quarter of senior homeowners over the age of 62. They need to use that housing wealth wisely.

In February 2011, researchers led by David Rein, PhD, of the social science research organization NORC at the University of Chicago in Atlanta, reported that testing all adults born from 1945 to 1965 would be more cost-effective than the current risk-factor approach.

When that wealth is inherited, will it be retained or spent quickly? Results from the NLSY79, a longitudinal survey covering people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s suggest roughly half of all money inherited is saved and the other half spent or lost investing.

Currently, 19 percent of gay men and almost 50 percent of lesbians have a child, according to the the National Opinion Research Center's 2008 General Social Survey. As more states recognize same-sex marriage — Maryland became the eighth this month — while others have murky laws, the number of potential child-rearing headaches are bound to increase, experts say.

But a recent study that charted birth and death dates for 9 million people born between 1875 and 1895 shows the mortality curve was just as steep among the very old all the way up to age 106, when the sample got too small to reliably measure. The study, based on records from the Social Security Administration Death Master File, was published last month by University of Chicago longevity researchers Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova in the North American Actuarial Journal. The National Institute on Aging sponsored their work.

There is a continued, urgent need for effective tobacco-cessation interventions. Tobacco use remains the chief preventable cause of illness and death in our society. It is responsible for inestimable suffering, almost half a million deaths annually, and about $200 billion in added costs for health care and lost productivity each year. Tobacco-use rates in the United States have declined markedly over the past 60 years, yet they now appear frozen at about 20% of all adults, with rates sharply higher among the poor, the least educated, and people who have coexisting mental health conditions or who abuse alcohol or other substances.1 Moreover, although about 70% of smokers visit a primary care physician each year, only about 30% report that they leave these visits having received evidence-based counseling and medication for smoking cessation

Retirees are also tapping into home equity to generate spending money. As a result, debt is rising. According to the Federal Reserve's 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances, 40% of households headed by someone aged 75 or older had debt in 2004, up from 29% in 2001. Not only are many people still paying off the mortgages on their primary residences, but some of them have purchased vacation homes, taking on second mortgages. The U.S. Census Bureau cited 6.6 million vacation homes in the U.S. in 2003. The typical buyer, according to the National Association of Realtors, is aged 55 or older.

And this is precisely what we have. Studies using comparable data from recent cohorts of young people (for example, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and the National Study of Youth and Religion) have found virtually no overall differences on most measures of identity, practice, and belief between those who head off to college and those who do not. The one exception to this is the consistent finding that college graduates attend religious services more frequently than those who do not graduate from college.

But lopsided polarisation is not limited to the make-up of Congress. There's a similar pattern among the population at large. Six years ago, I did an analysis based on data from the General Social Survey (GSS) - the most-used US data source after the US Census. Comparing three time periods - 1972-1984, 1985-1993 and 1994-2004 - I found that conservatives were far more concentrated within the GOP than liberals were within the Democratic Party, and that that concentration increased more rapidly within the GOP. Conservatives made up 49 per cent of the GOP in the period 1972-1984, and increased to 61 per cent from 1994 to 2004. Liberals comprised 32 per cent of the Democratic Party in the first period and ended at 39 per cent.

The result came as a surprise to the study's authors, Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova, a husband-and-wife team at the Center on Aging, part of the research center NORC at the University of Chicago. They married in 1975 after he proposed—with a promise he would discover how to halt aging if she would accept.

The average couple in the United States reported that they had sex 66 times annually, according to a study by the National Opinion Research Center. But that number falls to 52 times for couples in their 50s. It's not as bleak as it may appear, however.

I am only in my early 50s, yet I have lost count of the number of grant and contract review committees on which I have served. I wish I could say it is because I am some sort of academic superstar. In fact, it is just the combination of an odd specialization that crosses technical boundaries and a substantially cooperative nature. I always agree when asked by panel officers from the National Institutes of Health for two reasons: I have been on the government side of the aisle, and I desperately need people to review my stuff.

Most college students didn't lose their religion, the authors said, but many reported a drop in outward displays of religiosity. "The religious belief systems of most students go largely untouched for the duration of their education," the authors wrote. "Religious faith lies dormant in students' lives, waiting to be awakened at some point after college, but it is rarely seen as something that could either influence or be influenced by the educational process." A study published last year in The Review of Religious Research and based on 1998 data from the General Social Survey said, among other findings, that education was "unrelated to religious disaffiliation

The study used data from a random sample of 12,686 young adults who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth beginning between ages 14 and 22 and who were between 43 and 51 in 2008. Those who scored the highest on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, a series of 10 tests related to intelligence, were the most likely to own a Roth IRA. Some 14.3 percent of people in the highest IQ quintile owned a Roth IRA by 2008, compared with 3.8 percent of all the study participants and just 0.9 percent of people with the lowest IQs.

A study published last year in The Review of Religious Research and based on 1998 data from the General Social Survey said, among other findings, that education was “unrelated to religious disaffiliation.”

Most, however, who receive sudden wealth will do so through more-conventional means. More than nine million households in the U.S. reported getting an inheritance of at least $100,000, according to the latest available data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances. Baby boomers—those 78 million people born from 1946 through 1964—are expected to inherit some $8.4 trillion during their lifetimes, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

In any case, going over what I’m going to talk about I was double-checking political breakdowns by atheist & agnostic proportions and ideology in the General Social Survey for after the year 2000. I used the “GOD” variable, which asks people about their belief in God. Those who did not believe, or said there was no way to find out, I classed as “atheists & agnostics.” This means that the total percentages in the population are higher than self-reports; that’s because the word atheism in particular has a negative connotation.

For example, the 2010 General Social Survey found that less than 3% of employees of companies with employee stock ownership, which include the ESOP model and other forms of employee stock ownership, were laid off in 2009-2010 compared to a 12% rate for employees without employee stock ownership. Our national leaders of both parties, need to understand that national policies to encourage employee stock ownership, and new policies to increase ownership among more working Americans, need to be considered as an effective way to ensure our national employment rate is where we all want it to be," stated Keeling.

Mr. Wodtke analyzes the relationship between educational attainment and racial attitudes, using data from Emory University's Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality and the University of Chicago's General Social Survey to determine various groups' attitudes about stereotypes, discrimination, and policies. He places his findings in the context of a literature that indicates that education generally has a liberalizing effect, but has not often addressed the attitudes of groups other than whites.

Researchers hope to learn more about these and other factors, including genetics, child rearing and exposure to chemicals, through the National Children's Study, an ambitious undertaking in which researchers are examining the lives of more than 100,000 children from before birth to age 21. The Southern California coordinating center is at UCLA in collaboration with Cedars-Sinai, The Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, the University of Southern California, the Los Angeles Department of Public Health, the Research Triangle Institute, the Rand Corporation and several Ventura County organizations.

To test this hypothesis, we use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and panel data techniques and find that obesity is negatively related to arrest. In one specification, for example, we found that the odds of an obese man being arrested are 64 percent of those of a healthy weight man. The social costs of obesity may be overstated if obesity reduces the likelihood of arrest because the obese are less criminally active.

La General Social Survey de la Universidad de Chicago ha elaborado una lista con los diez trabajos más felices del momento. Este ranking destaca porque incluye profesiones que generalmente no están bien pagadas y que responderían a la perfección con aquello de que 'el dinero no da la felicidad'.

One possible step forward would be a change in screening policy for hepatitis C, according to David Rein, PhD, of the social science research organization NORC at the University of Chicago in Atlanta, and colleagues. Currently, the CDC recommends antibody screening for people with such risk factors or indicators as a history of injection-drug use or elevated alanine aminotransferase levels.

And the older you are, the more money you most likely have invested in it. That means that many of the 40 million senior citizens in the USA own a great deal of it. According to the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances, the average net worth of families headed by an individual ages 65-74 is more than $1 million.

That's why the Bureau of Labor Statistic's National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in 1997 is so fascinating. Findings from the study -- called longitudinal because it follows the same group of people over time -- were just released on the education and employment experiences of America at age 24. The study follows a nationally representative sample of approximately 9,000 men and women who were born during the years 1980 and 1984, were ages 12 to 17 when first interviewed in 1997, and were ages 24 to 30 when interviewed for the 13th time in 2009-2010.

Since the early 1970s, white America has become more secular overall, but the drop has been much greater in the working classes.As of the 2000s, the General Social Survey indicates, nearly 32 percent of upper-middle-class whites ages 30 to 49 attended church regularly, compared with 17 percent of the white working class in the same age group.

Shega and Dale would like to continue their study of chronic pain’s ties to social engagement by working with longitudinal data from the National Social Life Health and Aging Project (NSHAP), a study by investigators from NORC and the University of Chicago that contains multiple waves of data over five to 10 years and rich social network data. Using this long-term data will allow them to assess whether pain leads to more social isolation, and how the structure of the relationship changes over time.

A new paper, though, finds that mortality deceleration for human beings is a myth. The husband-and-wife team of Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova, part of NORC's at the University of Chicago’s Center on Aging, have re-crunched the numbers, examined the assumptions, and found that it’s not the case. The mistake was likely to have been caused by mixing sets of disparate data (combining, say, groups of people with different mortality rates) along with the tendency to exaggerate the ages of really old people.

Specifically, the 2010 GSS, funded primarily by the National Science Foundation and conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, found that 3% of employees with employee stock ownership, which include the ESOP model and other forms of employee ownership, were laid off in 2009-2010 compared to a 12% rate for employees without employee stock ownership

Due to an error in computation, the odds of living to a ripe old age in the United States are much lower than previously thought, researchers said. Leonid A. Gavrilov and Natalia S. Gavrilova of NORC at the University of Chicago, formerly known as the National Opinion Research Center, said the findings contradict a long-held belief that the mortality rate of Americans flattens out after age 80. The researchers' work explains why the U.S. Census Bureau was wrong when it predicted six years ago that there would be 114,000 centenarians in the country by 2010 when the actual number turned out to be half that at 53,364.

Compared with their married counterparts, single people are more likely to spend time with friends and neighbors, go to restaurants and attend art classes and lectures. There is much research suggesting that single people get out more — and not only the younger ones. Erin Cornwell, a sociologist at Cornell, analyzed results from the General Social Survey (which draws on a nationally representative sample of the United States population) from 2000 to 2008 and found that single people 35 and older were more likely than those who lived with a spouse or a romantic partner to spend a social evening with neighbors or friends.

But gun safety advocates such as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence counter with a regular survey on gun ownership conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, which has been conducted 28 times since 1972, most recently in 2010. It has shown gun ownership declining steadily for years.

THE REPORT presents results from a new, nationally representative survey of 1,630 young married couples: "The Survey of Marital Generosity," conducted by Knowledge Networks in December of 2010 and January of 2011 and funded by the Science of Generosity initiative at the University of Notre Dame. The report also relies on new analyses of nationally representative data from the General Social Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

Musick and her colleagues used data from a sample of 3,200 Americans from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a group that was followed from adolescence into adulthood. They estimated the propensity of men's and women's college attendance based on family income, parental education and other indicators of social background and early academic achievement. They then grouped their subjects into social strata based on these propensity scores and compared marriage chances of college- and non-college-goers within each stratum.

In fact, he doesn’t need to worry much about being controversial. Not when his in-your-face denunciation of the $2.6 trillion health care industry is resonating so well with an increasingly frustrated segment of the population. With health costs zooming and no convincing plan in place to curb them, “there is public dislike of Big Pharma and many managed care and health insurance companies,” says Tom Smith, director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

More than 70% of small businesses were launched using personal savings or assets, according to Elizabeth A. Duke, a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, who, last April, disclosed preliminary data from the Federal Reserve's upcoming Survey of Consumer Finances.

The practice of teachers in classrooms is what matters most when it comes to students learning in school. The principle strategies of school reform -- 'higher' standards, school and teacher 'accountability', intensified testing, and 'choice' -- may affect teacher practice indirectly, but the the relatively poor record of school reform over the last three decades, especially in schools serving low-income students, suggests that those strategies are of no great consequence to the quality of teaching.

"Siblings of centenarians born in September to November have 30 to 50% higher chances to live to 100 years compared to those born in March," says Leonid Gavrilov of the Center on the Demography and Economics of Aging at the University of Chicago, who coauthored the study with his wife, Natalia. He points to a variety of possible causes: maternal nutrition during the last months of pregnancy, seasonal infections, temperature during birth or conception and levels of vitamin D. All may influence the likelihood of health problems later in life.

In light of my previous posts on GRE scores and educational interests (by the way, Education Realist points out that the low GRE verbal scores are only marginally affected by international students) I was amused to see this write-up at LiveScience, Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice. Naturally over at Jezebel there is a respectful treatment of this research. This is rather like the fact that people who would otherwise be skeptical of the predictive power of I.Q. tests become convinced of their precision of measurement when it comes to assessing whether a criminal facing the death penalty is mentally retarded or not.

For the study, Musick and sociologists at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) estimated the propensity of men's and women's college attendance based on family income, parental education and other indicators of social background and early academic achievement. They then grouped their subjects into social strata based on these propensity scores and compared marriage chances of college- and non-college-goers within each stratum. Estimates were based on a sample of about 3,200 Americans from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, followed from adolescence into adulthood.

A 2010 study by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that nearly 40 percent of workers whose companies gave them paid sick days still reported going to work with a contagious illness such as the flu.

Tom Smith, a researcher with NORC, a social science research center at the U. of C., said that when the center conducts its survey asking Americans what the country's spending priorities should be, "welfare" often lands near the bottom of the list while "helping the poor" ranks much higher.

Americans also account for much more nonreligious social capital than their secular neighbors. In that context, it is worrisome for the culture that the U.S. as a whole has become markedly more secular since 1960, and especially worrisome that Fishtown has become much more secular than Belmont. It runs against the prevailing narrative of secular elites versus a working class still clinging to religion, but the evidence from the General Social Survey, the most widely used database on American attitudes and values, does not leave much room for argument.

Politically, Gallup polls find that the 1% are more likely than the 99% to identify themselves as Republicans (33% to 28%) and less likely to be Democrats (26% to 33%). A survey of 104 wealthy families in the Chicago area, led by Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, found the budget deficit was their leading worry, followed by unemployment; for the broader population, the reverse is true. Still the rich, like most voters, have eclectic views, often supporting liberal and conservative positions simultaneously. For example, Keith Whitaker, who advises wealthy families on behalf of Wells Fargo, says many of them sympathise with the Occupy Wall Street movement. A lot of them became rich by building businesses and consider Wall Street “the place where businesses are taken apart and run by someone else”.

Married people are happier (but, we have to take this with a grain of salt because 1) the stats do not include people who were married and got divorced because they were unhappy, 2) as the study does reference, happy people are more likely to marry.) "...over the 1970's and 1980's, 24% of never-married adults, but 39% of married adults, told NORC at the University of Chicago that they were very happy"

One of the mixed blessings of living through your 50s and 60s is having "senior citizen" status bestowed upon you, whether you want it or not. And the best part of that is observing how some people react to the experience. A Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances that compared family net worth in 2009 with that in 2007 found that net worth had dropped across the board, but had dropped least for those heads of households ages 65 to 74.

Michael Sherraden, the founder of the Center for Social Development, worked with Min Zhan to compile information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, an ongoing survey that takes information from adults born between 1957 and 1964. The two professors studied the links between household assets, debts and success in college for 1,162 students whose parents took part in the survey.

The study analyzed data collected as part of the federal government's National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The 7,335 participants were nationally representative and ranged in age from 12 to 16 when they were enrolled in the survey in 1996. The first interviews were conducted in 1997. Follow-up interviews have been carried out annually since then. The researchers found that the probability of a first arrest accelerated in late adolescence and early adulthood — at 18, 15.9 percent of the participants reported having been arrested — and then began to flatten out as the youths entered their 20s.

The cutoff for the 1 percent varies depending on how income is calculated. On the low end, an analysis of census data puts the cutoff at $380,000 for a household and provides a wealth of demographic characteristics that were used in this article. On the high end, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, which uses a broader measure of income that includes capital gains, yielded a cutoff of $690,000 in 2007, the most recent year of data available. The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan group, makes projections based on Internal Revenue Service data and adjusts for people who do not file taxes. It puts the cutoff at $530,000 per tax return in 2011. Even by that gauge, though, $380,000 would still put a family well above the 95th percentile. There is little current data that would allow a measurement of the 1 percent by wealth.

Studies funded by the National Institutes of Health find married couples are more financially secure, which leads to less stress and better recovery from stress when it occurs. Sociologist and NORC Expert Dr. Linda J. Waite calls marriage a “wealth-producing institution” and says spouses benefit from “economies of scale” and shared risks, which lead to better financial and health outcomes.

“Americans have always acknowledged that there are Rockefellers and the lunch-bucket guy,” said Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey of NORC at the University of Chicago. “But they believe it is not a permanent caste, but a transitory condition. The real game-changer would be if they give up on that.”

There are many factors that determine an individual's appeal on the mating market, and not surprisingly some of these are sex-specific. In a paper recently published in Hormones and Behavior, Thomas V. Pollet, Leander van der Meij, Kelly D. Cobey, and Abraham P. Buunk explored the relationship between individuals' levels of circulating testosterone and the self-reported number of lifetime sexual partners. They utilized a very large data set (the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project), which consists of individuals whose ages vary between 57 and 85.

One obstacle was the lack of cheap health insurance for Medicare does not kick in until age 65. And many were still paying off school loans for the kids or their mortgage and the biggest reason was they simply had not saved enough to last them possibly another 35 or 40 years. According to the  Survey of Consumer Finances, 37% of 65-year-olds are still carrying credit card debt.

The Survey of Consumer Finances shows that up until the 90th percentile of the distribution, as of 2007, made up around 65 percent of people’s net worth. If you see a massive decline in the value of your home, it is kind of mechanical that if you are thinking about savings and retirement you’ll think, “I was planning on having enough equity in my home when I retire that I could just borrow against it for the rest of my life. Now I don’t, so I have to adjust my consumption path immediately.”

The quest for a state that “looks like America” is understandable, but the reality of lived life is more complex. And not just in racial terms (e.g., the division in politics between the white suburbs of Maryland vs. Virginia on either side of D.C.). But keeping race in mind, one consistent finding in social science is that Americans actually tend to overestimate the number of minorities. Iowa is actually more typical than we think, despite the fact that it is not typical. In the year 2000 the General Social Survey asked respondents to estimate the number of various groups in the USA.

University of Missouri professor Rui Yao analyzed data from the 1989-2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, which is a survey supported by the Federal Reserve Board in cooperation with the Internal Revenue Service. Yao found that risk tolerance also was influenced by the economic climate of the time period. As the economic outlook increased, so did risk tolerance. However, she found that risk tolerance also decreased as the economy slowed. Yao says this is a concerning trend.

Who are Chicago’s super-rich, and what are their spending habits and views on government? A new study from a team of Northwestern University researchers with data from NORC at the Univeristy of Chicago focusing on Chicago’s wealthiest 1 percent set out to answer those questions, and its authors say it’s the first of its kind. Most other surveys have studied on the wealthiest 20 to 30 percent, but never focused on the 1 percent that has drawn the Occupy movement’s ire.

But working out exactly what factors affect happiness is not easy. The data is difficult to gather and the statistics are hard to manage. One of the best sources of data is the General Social Survey, a set of questions about attitudes in the US which has been carried out since 1972. Consequently, it now provides a substantial database for sociologists, demographers and economists studying changes in the way people think and feel in the US.

Researchers at the National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR) analyzed 13 years of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to understand how and when people in early adulthood have families. The survey began in 1997 and included 8,984 respondents.

But Americans making that amount of money aren't the prime targets of the Occupy protesters and other critics, whose rhetoric is more often directed at the superwealthy, whom they accuse of hiding massive assets in stocks and other investments to avoid paying taxes. (If you're using total household wealth to measure the top 1 percent, membership would begin at about $8.7 million, according to the researchers' analysis of the best available data from the Survey of Consumer Finance.)

A lot of people are furious with a study that shows obese women earn less money than their peers who are normal weight. I know first hand how a lighter body can carry a heavier wallet stuffed with a bigger paycheck. According to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, in 2008 women who were obese made an average of $5,826 or 15 percent less than normal-weight females. Critics claim the study shows how obese women carry a stigma and are punished for not upholding the standard for beauty.

Recently, in the New York Times, Mitt Romney warns darkly against a government that “provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk.” Polls conducted since 1972 by the General Social Survey show that by margins of two to one, voters consistently say too little is spent on the poor, on education, on health care, on drug treatment.

License plate readers pick up more stolen cars than cops alone, but police units specializing in aut0-theft. How well do they work on the street? In a recent study in the Criminal Justice Review, a team led by Bruce Taylor of the NORC at the University of Chicago center in Bethesda, Md., set up an experiment to see how well license plate readers did in helping police in Mesa, Ariz., catch car thieves. "We did find some increasing effectiveness in stolen plates being picked up," Taylor says. "The surprise in the study was the effectiveness of specialized auto theft units."

Mitt Romney wants to stigmatize most “safety net” spending – the array of social insurance programs from Medicare to food stamps to unemployment compensation to free school lunches — as a form of welfare that is “cultivating government dependence.” The 2-to-1 level of support found for spending on the poor for health care and other social services disappears when voters are asked specifically about welfare, according to the General Social Survey; when that word is used, voters by a better than 2-to-1 margin, 49.3 percent to 21 percent, say that “too much” is spent.

A new academic study finds that, literally, smarter investors prefer Roth IRAs to traditional individual retirement accounts. Contributions to Roth IRAs are not tax-deductible, but withdrawals in retirement generally are tax-free – and there are no withdrawal requirements, as there are with traditional IRAs. A doctoral candidate and two associate professors of personal financial planning at Texas Tech University analyzed data from the 2004 and 2008 “National Longitudinal Survey of Youth” (looking at people who were 14-22 years old in 1979).

This time of year, many people try to reflect on what brings real value into their lives and what their deepest hopes for the coming year might be.  Such thoughts will lead at least some to sobering conclusions about the value of their jobs and career choices.  If recent findings are any indicator, the starkest judgments may well come from the corporate ranks. Among the happiest ten were jobs held by clergy, authors, teachers, and operating engineers (who play with big toys), according to the General Social Survey conducted by the NORC at the University of Chicago.  The ten most hated jobs were populated almost entirely by managers (of sales, marketing, products, and so on), and technical people.

Referrals might be for substance abuse services or mental health counseling, Braverman said. With child abuse or neglect, "we report to the appropriate authorities," she said, but the doctor's responsibility doesn't end there. "We would facilitate referrals for appropriate treatment and support children through that." The new study appears online Dec. 12 and in the January 2012 print issue of Pediatrics. The researchers used National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data from 1997 to 2008 for 7,335 young people aged 8 to 23.

The study analyzed data collected as part of the federal government’s National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The 7,335 participants were nationally representative and ranged in age from 12 to 16 when they were enrolled in the survey in 1996. The first interviews were conducted in 1997. Follow-up interviews have been carried out annually since then.

Obese Americans have smaller paychecks than those who aren't overweight, and this difference is especially strong among women, a new study finds. The analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth revealed that in 2004, overall average annual incomes were $8,666 less for obese women and $4,772 less for obese men compared with normal weight workers.

What do American voters really think about sex and politics? While attitudes toward sexual harassment are still in flux, Americans are strongly against extramarital sex. Indeed, they are more strongly against it now than in the recent past. In the General Social Survey, a national poll of adults conducted biennially by NORC at the University of Chicago, the percentage of Americans who responded that it is “always wrong” for a married person to have sex with someone other than his or her spouse rose from 73 percent in 1991 to 81 percent in 2008.

How often do you hear phrases with the following general undertones: “architecture isn’t a profession it is a calling,” “architecture isn’t a career it is a way of life,” or “architecture doesn’t make life possible it makes it worth living”? Perhaps not that often, but enough that many architects see themselves as uniquely sacrificing aspects of their life for a higher cause. Some claim that architects have high divorce rates, suffer from depression, and endure a special degree of stress that causes early mortality from cancer and heart disease.

Social class also involves self-identification. According to the General Social Survey through NORC at the University of Chicago, which has been asking people what social class they belong to since 1972, more than 90 percent of Americans put themselves squarely in the middle – belonging either to the working class or the middle class.

When the National Opinion Research Center asked people whether they believed the government has a responsibility “to reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes,” in 2008, only 37 percent agreed. Forty-three percent disagreed, and 20 percent had no opinion. When pollsters ask people to name the top issue facing the country, almost nobody volunteers inequality.

The report, which came out in early December, compiles data from two big well-known surveys, the General Social Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and another smaller survey including 1,630 married couples called The Survey of Marital Generosity, funded by the University of Notre Dame. The authors found that yes, compared with childless married couples, those with kids have lower "marital satisfaction," a measure sociologists use to determine couples' happiness.

While the skeptics don’t dispute that the raw number of guns, including pistols, has grown, they point to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, which indicates more guns are being concentrated in fewer hands. That poll last year found a third of households claimed to have at least one gun, far fewer than those answering the same question in Gallup’s October poll.

The University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center has partnered with the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) to present a series of workshops on city cultural planning. The conversations, which began this fall and continue through spring 2012, provide valuable context and foster dialogue as DCASE leads the effort to create a new cultural plan for Chicago.

Fortunately, the Russell Sage Foundation hooked up with NORC and three Northwesterners, led by Benjamin I. Page (Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making) on the working paper "Wealthy Americans, Philanthropy, and the Common Good," a survey whose 104 Chicago-area respondents—a small sample size, granted, but the one percent is by definition small—fall mostly in the famous, mysterious not-99 percent, with an average wealth of $14 million and a median of $7.5 million.

Three-fifths of young U.S. adults who cohabit eventually get married, researchers say. Dr. Susan Brown, co-director of Bowling Green State University's National Center for Family and Marriage Research, said 63 percent of women cohabited versus 57 percent of men. "Today, most marriages are preceded by cohabitation," Brown said in a statement. "It's really become a stage in the courtship process. It's unusual for couples to marry without first cohabiting." Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, the study found 61 percent of U.S. adults have formed a family by age 25.

For married couples to stay happy as they grow old together, a healthy and robust sex life is essential, a new study concludes -- and the more sex, the better. In examining the responses of some 238 couples aged 65 or older to the 2004 iteration of the General Social Survey, a national data-collection program focused on U.S. societal structure and development, the researchers found that the frequency of sexual activity often predicted general well-being. That remained true even after accounting for such factors as age, health and financial satisfaction.

Compared to the general public, members of the moneyed minority are much more likely to volunteer their time and money in charitable causes and participate in politics, according to the “Survey of Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good.” Researchers and professors from the university and the NORC at the University of Chicago compiled a random sample of 104 individuals from Chicago-area households with a median worth of $7.5 million.

Shared in the Harvard Education Letter, a separate study has shown that building-wide posters, student-drawn maps of campus sexual harassment “danger zones,” and student-created “personal boundary agreements” can go a long way to reducing peer-to-peer sexual harassment and dating violence—at little expense. Reduction in sexual harassment was greatest when students received both classroom-based and building-wide interventions, according to Bruce Taylor, senior scientist from NORC at the University of Chicago, who coauthored the study with Nan Stein, senior research scientist at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women.

A new study in the December issue of the American Sociological Review comes up with some findings that lots of women may feel they already know too much about: Working mothers spend significantly more time multitasking at home than working dads. And those mothers aren't happy about it. Researchers from Bar-Ilan University in Israel and Michigan State University looked at 368 working mothers and 241 fathers who worked outside the home. Turns out, the women were on overdrive, with some even describing the hours between 5 and 8 p.m. as the "arsenic hours." "The first thing they had to start worrying about is getting dinner, interfacing with their kids, getting done all the housework chores," says sociologist Barbara Schneider with Michigan State University, who co-authored the study. "You could see from the data all the stresses and strains they felt as they walked in the door, and all the tasks" they felt they had to accomplish during those early-evening hours.

The FBI reported being flooded with background check requests for prospective buyers on Nov. 25, topping the previous single-day high by 32%.The Black Friday sales figures "might say something about marketing" but don't reflect actual gun ownership trends in the U.S., Caroline Brewer, a spokeswoman for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, told ABC News, citing a University of Chicago General Social Survey that showed 32% of Americans owned guns in 2010, down from 54% in 1977.

While religious service attendance has decreased for all white Americans since the early 1970s, the rate of decline has been more than twice as high for less educated, lower and lower-middle class whites compared to more educated and presumably more affluent whites. The figures represented those aged 25-44 and were gathered from two national surveys, the General Social Survey from NORC at the University of Chicago, and the National Survey of Family Growth, which is conducted by the U.S. government's National Center for Health Statistics. The new study focused on white Americans because black and Latino religious worship is less divided by education and income, the researchers said.

The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans will conduct the 11th State of Our Nation's Youth survey in the spring of 2012 with two research partners and a new poll design. The goal of the research project is to increase public understanding of the current educational, economic, social and political contexts for high school and college students. The survey and subsequent report will be the first joint State of our Nation's Youth effort between two nationally renowned research firms. Peter D. Hart Research Associates, Inc., of Washington, D.C., a longtime partner of the Horatio Alger Association in conducting the youth report, is joining forces with NORC at the University of Chicago.

A new analysis of data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances estimates that 25% of U.S. households use a financial planner, up from 21% in the late 1990s. The study, by economist Sherman Hanna of Ohio State University, found that willingness to take investment risk is one of the key factors in determining who seeks out financial-planning advice.  For instance, 28% of families willing to take “average” levels of investing risk—and 33% of those who say they are comfortable with “above average” risk—use a financial planner. Among households who said they were unwilling to take any risks with their investments, however, only 11% use a financial planner,

Resarch presented at the Gerontological Society of America's annual meeting in Boston used data from the General Social Survey to conclude that older married couples who still engage in sexual activity are more likely to report happiness in their relationship and with their lives overall than those who have sex infrequently.

Uptown Magazine asks, 'how many African Americans are a part of the top 1 percent?' It turns out: not many. Blacks comprise 13.6 percent of the U.S. population according to the 2010 Census, but account for only 1.4 percent of the top 1 percent of households by income. Whites are the overwhelming majority of the top 1 percent of households by income, comprising 96.2 percent. (Results were calculated from 2007 data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances and the Tax Policy Center’s tax table, The income cutoff to be a part of the top 1 percent was $646,195.

The Institutional Investor looks at racial divides in pensioons. In a new study of seven large clients by Vanguard Group, those that automatically put new hires into a 401(k) plan increased the participation rate by more than 60 percent among black employees — to 94 percent from 57 percent — and by more than 40 percent among Latino employees, to 95 percent from 67 percent. As a result, the two groups statistically caught up with the rates of white and Asian employees.When Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research analyzed the Federal Reserve’s triennial Survey of Consumer Finances, which polled 4,500 U.S. households for 2001, 2004 and 2007, it found that factors like a college degree, home ownership and nonpension wealth were the most important determinants of 401(k) savings.

For four decades now, social trust has declined. This may seem like a minor matter, but a modern economy requires ever-greater levels of trust to function well. Both OWS and the Tea Party are evidence that such trust is lacking. A leading cause of declining trust is income inequality. And despite the problem worsening, no one in business or politics appears willing to touch it. Too bad for us all. The General Social Survey has been conducted in the US since 1972 by NORC at the Univeristy of Chicago. It has always contained questions about the inclination to attribute good intentions to strangers; in short, the propensity to trust.

From PBS News Hour, studies by the Pew Research Center and the General Social Survey, among others, have shown that on average conservatives say they are happier than liberals. Social psychologist Jaime Napier, who did a fascinating study on why that might be. Her work suggests that liberals have a harder time rationalizing economic inequality than conservatives.

​Well, about 58 members of Congress are part of that elite group. Roughly 11% of Congress have net worth of more than $9 million, according to a USA TODAY analysis of 2010 financial disclosures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. That's enough to put them in the top 1% of wealth.

In the wake of the sexual abuse scandal that is roiling Penn State’s football program, some are wondering whether there could be long-term effects on recruiting, donations and the long-term reputation of the university. Another precedent for how people might react is the aftermath of the sexual abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church in the last decade. Using data from multiple research databases, including the GSS, The New York Times has been found similarities in weakened institutional affiliation in the face of scandal.

​The Occupy Wall Street movement has focused the national discourse on wealth inequality and, specifically, the split between the richest 1 percent and the 99 percent that's left. While most Californians, by definition, are not members of the wealthiest 1 percent, it turns out that many of us are represented in Congress by those who have attained that elite status. The cutoff for the top 1 percent of American households, in terms of net worth, is about $9 million, according to New York University economics professor Edward Wolff. His estimate is based on the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances, which put the figure at $8.2 million in 2007, he said.

U.S. income inequality has exploded to levels not seen since the 1920s or perhaps even the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. Yet, there might not be the wealth gap the public sees as suggested by this handy analysis from the Cato Institute, which shows various estimates of wealth inequality utilizing information from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the Economic Policy Institute, and Kopczuk/Saez.

​Millions of Americans are infected with hepatitis C, but it’s estimated that no more than half are aware of their infection. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that those with risk factors such as a history of intravenous drug use or a blood transfusion before 1992 get screened. Researchers at the NORC at University of Chicago and elsewhere found that it may be cost-effective to screen everyone born between 1945 and 1965, the group with the highest infection rates, as reported in The Boston Globe.

As students navigate changing sexual and social norms in middle and high school, many of them confuse the line between joking and sexual harassment, according to a new report.​"It's kind of hard to educate kids who are experiencing this harassment and violence and expect them to show the same performance they would regularly," said Bruce G. Taylor, who studies sexual harassment as a principal research scientist for NORC, a research organization formerly known as the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

It’s no secret that the wealthy have better access to politicians. Just how much access they get, however, might surprise you. According to a new study of people with a median wealth of $7.5 million, nearly half of the respondents had contacted a member of Congress during  the previous six months. Fully 40% had contacted their senator. More than a quarter of them had contacted a congressperson from another district or state.

If you are a C-SPAN junkie, you probably recognize Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office. He’s become something of a star witness this fall, testifying at two of the four hearings held by the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. In public, Elmendorf responds to members’ questions in a chipper tone: upbeat, friendly--a demeanor that Capitol Hill colleagues and friends say does not change behind closed doors. His appearance is equally low-key; he is the anti-Peter Orszag, deflecting the spotlight as much as possible and preferring instead to speak through CBO’s published reports.

​In an article the The Atlantic, apparently American public school teachers are paid far more than their smarts are worth. That's the provocative conclusion of a new study from two high-profile conservative think tanks. Researchers from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute found that public school teachers take home total compensation that's 52% higher than "fair market levels" for professionals with similar cognitive abilities. The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to analyze the effects of both education and IQ. When education is taken into account, teachers salaries are more than 12% lower than their peers.

​According to the Christian Science Monitor, a wide majority of Americans support 'a good, hard spanking' as discipline, one study says. But the video of a Texas judge lashing his daughter with a belt is a rare, raw view of what corporal punishment really looks like – and could affect already-changing attitudes. From 1986 to 2008, it has declined from 83 percent to 70 percent, according to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

​In WIRED, using the General Social Survey data from 1972 to 2008, we found that Americans were on average happier in the years with less income inequality than in the years with more income inequality. We further demonstrated that the inverse relation between income inequality and happiness was explained by perceived fairness and general trust. That is, Americans trusted others less and perceived others to be less fair in the years with more income inequality than in the years with less income inequality. Americans are happier when national wealth is distributed more evenly than when it is distributed unevenly.

​Statistics support Price's contention that older adults have not given up on sex. A comprehensive national survey of senior sexual attitudes, behaviors and problems was conducted in 2005 and 2006 by the National Opinion Research Center along with principal investigators at the University of Chicago. More than 3,000 interviews of adults age 57 to 85 showed seniors believe sexuality is an important part of life. Results from the university's National Social Life, Health and Aging Project, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed older adults participated well into their 70s and 80s.

​The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 interviewed people between the ages of 13 and 17 in 1997 and continues to interview the same people each year since then. The idea that college freshmen gain an average of 15 pounds in their first year of school is a myth -- the average is really between 2.4 pounds for women and 3.4 pounds for men, the co-author of a new study said Tuesday.

Findings from a National Institute of Justice evaluation of Shifting Boundaries: Lessons on Relationships for Students in Middle School, a youth dating violence prevention program in New York City middle schools, indicate that increasing awareness and monitoring of school environments can be effective strategies for reducing dating violence/ harassment (DV/H) among adolescents. This study was the first to use a rigorous scientific methodology with a young population of sixth and seventh graders; most teen dating violence projects look at older students.

​Using the General Social Survey, the variable BIBLE asks if people think that the Bible is the actually word of god, the inspired word of god, or a book of fables, etc.

​ Fully 52 percent of Americans agreed that medications for children with behavior problems will “turn kids into zombies,” according to the 2002 wave of the General Social Survey – one of the most highly respected surveys in social science research. While the question was certainly not meant to be interpreted literally, it can’t hurt to be prepared. Thankfully, the Centers for Disease Control issued emergency guidelines to follow in the event of a zombie apocalypse.

Occupy Wall Street protesters have touched a nerve with their slogan, “We are the 99 percent.” It has focused attention on the ground gained by the rich even as a brutal economy has pushed the typical American family backward. A look at the finances of those vying for the presidency shows that almost all of them rank at the very top of the country’s earners. Membership in the 1 percent can be measured by wealth or by income. By household wealth, the cutoff point would be a projected $9 million in 2010, according to an analysis of the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances by Edward Wolff, an economist at New York University.

You can switch into a new Medicare Part D plan for 2012 during the open enrollment period from October 15 to December 7. Premium prices, deductibles, and covered medications can change each year, so it's a good idea to reevaluate whether your current plan will still be a good fit for you in the coming year. U.S. News and World Report examines Medicare with some help from NORC's Elizabeth Hargrave.

As reported by The Huffington Post, according to the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances, the median amount saved in account and rollover balance for those age 55 to 64 was around a measly $86,600 in 2009 when the median wage for that age group is about $65,000. But even before the market slump in 2007 when the median balance was $103,600, that low six-figure number is less than twice the median Boomer salary when it needs to be 10-13 times that amount.

The opportunity to move from a neighborhood with a high level of poverty to one with a lower level of poverty was associated with modest but potentially important reductions in the prevalence of extreme obesity and diabetes. The mechanisms underlying these associations remain unclear but warrant further investigation, given their potential to guide the design of community-level interventions intended to improve health

​President Barack Obama has tapped NORC Senior Expert and Northwestern University faculty member Larry Hedges to become a key member of his educational advisory team. Larry Hedges, Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and Social Policy, has been nominated to the National Board for Education Sciences.

​One of the toughest days in many people's lives is the day they realize that their parents need financial help. According to the Federal Reserve's 2009 Survey of Consumer Finances, 35 percent of households headed by those 75 and older carry debt, as do 62.1 percent of households headed by those between 65 and 74, as reported by MSNBC.com.

​Data analyzed from the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project (NSHAP) — a 2005 survey of 3,005 Americans ages 57 to 85, has shed light on the importance of men having their own close personal friends. According to the study, about a quarter of men experience “partner betweenness” and that these men are 92 percent more likely to report erectile dysfunction.

Ron Paul, along with his fellow Republican presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, want to end capital gains and dividends taxes. Considering about half of American households, more than 50 million households, own stock, according to Federal Reserve Bank's Survey of Consumer Finance, the plan could help a lot of people.

Hausner & Macsai, the architectural firm, chronicled by Chicago Magazine. The firm also did a lot of work on the University of Chicago campus, translating their concrete to a more severe architectural atmosphere with buildings for the NORC at the University of Chicago.

Support for Wall Street income redistribution, surprisingly enough, has plummeted during the recession. For years, the General Social Survey has asked individuals whether “government should reduce income differences between the rich and the poor.” Agreement with this statement dropped dramatically between 2008 and 2010.

People who have more personal wealth — in the form of a car, say, or a small nest egg — are more likely to get married than those who have less, according to a new analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY).

Wal-Mart is launchin a layaway program this year, and it rasises questions over credit. In this New York Times op-ed piece, non-predatory credit is hard to come by these days, even for middle-class shoppers, and, according to NORC's 2007 Survey of Consumer Finance, even before the crisis 25 percent of lower-income Americans had no bank account at all.

Research and Markets  has announced the addition of the "Who We Are: Hispanics - 2nd Edition" report.  It has detailed spending data for hispanic households and the latest update on hispanic household wealth including the impact of the Great Recession on hispanic net worth, assets, and debt. Attitudinal data from the General Social Survey compare and contrast hispanic attitudes with those of Asians, Hispanics, and whites on a whole range of issues.

Researchers studied the data of baby boomers who became part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) when they left high school. They found that couples who shacked up early in their relationship were twice as wealthy as those who didn’t – despite starting with less.

The General Social Survey has asked Americans about their confidence in banks and financial institutions since 1973. Between March of 2006 and March of 2010, the percent of Americans with a great deal of confidence in banks and financial institutions plummeted 19 percentage points, from 30 percent to an all-time low of 11 percent.

Economists analyzed “wealth transfers”  found in the Federal Reserves Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances between 1989 and 2007, contributing to the study of inheritance in America and it's "debunking" as covered by Barron's.

NORC Senior Fellow Henry Brownstein was interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor for a profiling of a recent Boeing drug bust.

See how NORC was was featured in USA TODAY as part of their Snapshots section, where The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research is cited in how willing people are to help.

​As the debate over how best to reform our wasteful health-care system continues, there is one measure we can implement immediately to improve quality and rein in runaway costs—the public release of data from the Medicare program, as required by a provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, with aid from the NORC.

USC professor Tatiana M​elguizo, and NORC's own Gregory Wolniak, examined the economic benefits among low-income and high-achieving minority students who major in a STEM field in college and how these students fare once in the labor market.

Observed by The New York Times, this is an analysis of data from the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project, a survey of older Americans by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, looked at the relationship between sexual dysfunction among men and the relationships between their friends and partners.

The Wall Street Journal reports that more than 360 performing-arts centers were constructed in the U.S. alone from 1994 to 2008, according to a coming study by the Cultural Policy Center at NORC.

​Ten years after the attacks of 9/11, a new report from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research explores how Americans prioritize security and liberty. One of the authors, Dan Gaylin, joined Eight Forty-Eight from Washington to discuss the findings.

​A new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in Chicago finds that more Americans now say Sept. 11 had an impact on their lives than said so five years ago — 57 percent today compared with 50 percent in 2006.

​Ten years after the 9/11 attacks led to amped-up government surveillance efforts, two-thirds of Americans say it's fitting to sacrifice some privacy and freedoms in the fight against terrorism, according to a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

​Since experts say that social interaction drives job satisfaction, it makes sense that clergy are happiest of all, according to the General Social Survey.

​New survey results show that the University of California at Berkeley is the most prolific undergraduate institution for producing students who go onto Ph.D. programs. Between 2005-09, over 2,200 Golden Bear grads earned doctorates. BYU finished fifth nationally, with 1,336 former Cougars obtaining a Ph.D. during the same timeframe.

CHICAGO, Aug. 25 (UPI) -- U.S. residents are more willing to allow people with unorthodox views to speak publicly, teach and publish than they were 40 years ago, a survey finds.

​New research finds that working mothers who believe that home and office can be seamlessly juggled are at greater risk for depression than their more realistic maternal colleagues who accept they can't do it all.

​In "American Religion: Contemporary Trends," author Mark Chaves argues that over the last generation or so, religious belief in the U.S. has experienced a "softening" that effects everything from whether people go to worship services regularly to whom they marry. Far more people are willing to say they don't belong to any religious tradition today than in the past, and signs of religious vitality may be camouflaging stagnation or decline.

​While the accepted retirement age shifted downward between the 1950s and the mid-1980s, baby boomers are expecting to work longer, reversing the trend, according to the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study.

​Estimates that "between 20 and 25 percent of all Americans will have sex with someone other than their spouse while they are married" are conservative, the authors wrote. In 2010, NORC, a research center at the University of Chicago, found that, among those who had ever been married, 14 percent of women and 20 percent of men admitted to affairs."

(Reuters Life!) - As the rich get richer and the poor fall further behind, levels of happiness and satisfaction drop, but only among people with modest and lower incomes, a new study shows.

​In 1988, the NORC at the University of Chicago added a new question to its General Social Survey: "Same-sex couples should be allowed to get married. Do you agree or disagree?"

Coverage of Future of the City: The Arts Symposium organized by the Cultural Policy Center

​Nick Rabkin, a senior research scientist at the NORC at the University of Chicago, whose research was cited in PCAH's report, is cautiously optimistic that President Obama's interest in the arts may translate into support for arts education.

Amid battles over teacher quality and school restructuring, there’s one thing everyone seems to want in the next version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: an accountability system that measures student growth.

Listen to Nick Rabkin, NORC Senior Research Scientist, on Eight Forty Eight

​Listen to NORC Senior Fellow Mike O'Grady on the Patt Morrison Show