Anomie, Mistrust, and the Impact of Race, SES, and Gender

"It's Hardly Fair to Bring a Child Into the World With the Way Things Look.": Anomie, Mistrust, and the Impact of Race, SES, and Gender. Melvin Thomas. Sociological Inquiry, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soin.12191/abstract

Abstract: This article examines the impact of race, socioeconomic status (SES), and gender on subjective outlook using anomie and general mistrust as indicators. Specifically, this study addresses the following questions: (1) How do African Americans and whites compare with respect to anomie and mistrust? (2) Do racial differences in anomie and mistrust vary by SES? (3) Do African American women have higher levels of anomie and mistrust than whites and African American men? and (4) Are African Americans becoming more or less trusting and anomic over time? Using data from the General Social Survey (GSS) (1972-2014), the analysis reveals significant racial differences in social outlook as measured by anomie and mistrust. African Americans indicate higher levels of both anomie and mistrust than whites even after controls for SES and the other variables. The racial gap in anomie and mistrust increases with increases in SES. Being African American and female is associated with higher levels of anomie but not mistrust. African American mistrust decreases relative to whites over time. More affluent African Americans' anomie levels slightly increase relative to similar whites over time. Explanations using the "rage of a privileged class" and "intersectionality" ideas are evaluated.


My comments:

1  the result of this research is unfavourable to the group studied, so the author use a justification in the title. The truth could be this: if one is poor, one is more ethical and respects rules and laws (at least those of your own group, we don't know), and is more trustful of others (we don't know who are the others, see below comment #2 on mistrust). When people in this group increases their socioeconomic status (SES), they find reasons to throw that love of law and ethical behavior overboard (which we assume have a negative impact on community life, cooperation and solidarity), and rationalize it _afterwards_ with how harsh and unjust is the real world. Same with mistrust, which also increases with SES. Of course, other groups with a long history of discrimination, including obstacles to access higher education today, are not in anomie or mistrust levels as we see here. This makes the group studied look bad, and they compensate with a poor-me-how-harsh-is-life title.

There is no mention of other groups: "asia" (Asian, Asiatic), "hispan" (Hispanic, Hispanos, Hispanas), "latin" (Latino, Latina). So, of course, we cannot know if the community is that of your ethnic background, or one including the whites, or only that of whites, or maybe whites + other minorities.

This not knowing which laws/customs/mores do they respect makes useless this half of the study, IMHO.

BTW, the explanation for their abandoning love of law is that the guys increasing their SES are more conscious of the discrimination they suffer. Which, again, other groups do not do to the same extent.Of course, it can be a catch-22 situation... More criminality in this group makes the others fearful of young members of the group and those who are not criminal (the overwhelming majority) get offended for the assessment.


2  about the mistrust part... we do not know what the subjects mean when they answer to "most of the time people" or "most people" questions, and the authors recognize it, although they bury the problem in the text:

One problem interpreting these findings is that it is hard to know who “most people” are imagined to be in the trust items. [...] Unfortunately, not knowing exactly whom the respondents have in mind is a limitation of this study.

They are good scholars because they say this? Are you serious? Right in front of my salad? Wrong. This limitation makes this half of the study useless.

To me it is clear that there is a mix here of effects. Some subjects (most likely men) are talking about whites, and some about whites + hispanics + asiatics + others, but don't know the proportions. But some women probably are complaining about black men (husbands, sex partners). As a consequence of the defects in the questionnaire, we don't know the proportions or men and women who equate "most people" with blacks, or whites, or whites + others.