We checked 6 sociology journals on Friday, September 12, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period September 05 to September 11, we retrieved 5 new paper(s) in 3 journal(s).

European Societies

Working on an algorithm-controlled platform as a content creator: What explains unequal earnings on YouTube?
Roland Verwiebe, Chiara Osorio-Krauter, Nina-Sophie Fritsch, Sarah WeiĂźmann, Aaron Philipp, Claudia Buder
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The rise of digital platforms like YouTube has transformed content creation into a lucrative yet precarious industry. This study explores the inequality in earnings among content creators (CCs) by conducting a large-scale quantitative analysis of YouTube channels from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Our findings in this paper reveal a highly skewed earning distribution, with a Gini coefficient of 0.89, indicating extreme inequality. Detailed exploratory data analyses (EDA) show to what extent socio-structural factors, including gender and age, as well as platform-specific variables like the number of subscribers and channel topic influence earnings inequality among CCs. These findings underscore the presence of winner-take-all dynamics in the YouTube ecosystem. Despite the platform's potential for niche market success, the economic outcomes for CCs are highly polarized, reflecting broader inequalities present in the digital economy. This paper contributes to the understanding of social stratification in the creator economy, highlighting the need for further investigation into the mechanisms driving these inequalities.

Social Forces

Less than citizens: varieties of workplace marginalization of immigrants to the United States
Qian He
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Existing studies highlight numerous barriers immigrants encounter upon arrival and the economic benefits of citizenship acquisition in reducing these barriers to integration at their destinations. While researchers have extensively studied native-immigrant economic disparities and the lower monetary returns to immigrants’ education, limited knowledge exists about the distinct roles natives and immigrants play in nationwide labor markets and the principles underlying these roles. I investigate how immigrants may experience marginalization in contemporary US labor markets despite their employment participation. I propose that this marginalization may be reflected in occupational trait differentials across moral, mechanistic, and animalistic dimensions within citizenship hierarchies. Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of three recent nationally representative US samples provide consistent evidence that citizenship ladders contribute to stratification in workers’ occupational traits across each marginalization dimension, leading to diverging trajectories. Beyond the prominent non-monetary trait gaps between citizens and non-citizens, the results reveal persistent disparities tied to birthright and naturalized citizenship statuses, particularly for Asian and Hispanic immigrants. These trait differentials help to segment occupational roles based on citizenship hierarchies, potentially limiting immigrants’ decision-making freedom and workplace influence, and reducing access to positions emphasizing moral judgment or expressive communication skills. The conclusion discusses broader theoretical, empirical, and policy implications.
Rental housing discrimination against Chinese minorities in Spain: a new instant messaging correspondence test
Javier San Millán, Javier Polavieja, Toni Gamundí
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Research on rental housing discrimination (RHD) against migrant minorities has overwhelmingly focused on the first generation, paying special attention to the most sizeable immigrant groups. As a result, we still know little about the housing-market experiences of immigrants’ children and the less sizeable—but often fast-growing—ethnic minorities. RHD research has also lagged behind the spectacular growth of online apps for conducting private rental transactions. We present a novel instant messaging correspondence test to study (real) private landlords’ responses to (fictitious) flat seekers of native and Chinese background in Madrid, Spain. Drawing on instant messaging allows us to introduce innovative treatments for phenotype and cultural assimilation. We find moderate levels of RHD against visibly Chinese-background applicants with a fully Chinese name and who use full Chinese characters in their WhatsApp status profile (low assimilation condition) but very low levels of discrimination against visibly identical applicants who combine a Spanish first name with a Chinese last name (typical of the second generation) and who use the word “Madrid” in Latin alphabet in their app status profile (high assimilation condition). Finally, we find adding signals of flat-seekers’ income reliability (diagnostic treatment) does not reduce discrimination propensity. Results are robust to stringent controls for ethnic composition and COVID-19 incidence rate at the district level. These findings highlight the primacy of perceived cultural assimilation over racial appearance and information deficits in shaping RHD against Chinese minorities in Spain and illustrate the analytical pay-offs of using instant messaging correspondence tests in discrimination research.

Sociological Methods & Research

Is it Time to Put a Moratorium on List Experiments for Domestic Violence Elicitation?
Andreas Kotsadam, Mette Løvgren
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Using data from over 24,000 respondents in the Norwegian Crime Victimization Survey, we conducted a double list experiment to measure domestic violence (DV). Both list experiments revealed a statistically significant decrease in reporting when including a sensitive DV item. This clear violation of the “no design effects” assumption is not only explained by floor effects. One possibility is that the results indicate a “fleeing” behavior whereby respondents try to avoid association with DV. Combined with the inherent power limitations of list experiments in many contexts, these results underscore the need for caution in employing list experiments to measure DV, even in large samples.
What Types of Survey Questions are Prone to Interviewer Effects? Evidence Based on 29,000 Intra-Interviewer Correlations From 28 Countries of the European Social Survey
Adam Stefkovics, Kinga Batiz, Blanka Zsófia Grubits, Anna Sára Ligeti
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Interviewer effects are a common challenge in face-to-face surveys. Understanding the conditions that make interviewer variance more likely to occur is essential in tackling sources of bias. Earlier evidence suggests that certain features of the survey instrument provide more ground for interviewer influence. For instance, attitudinal, sensitive, complex or open-ended questions invite more interviewer variance. In this article, we aim to validate earlier results, previously derived from single-country studies, by using the large cross-national sample of the European Social Survey (ESS). We compare 29,330 intra-interviewer correlations derived from 984 survey questions from 28 countries using data from 10 waves of the ESS. The questions were manually coded based on several characteristics. These features of survey questions were then used as predictors of intraclass correlations (ICCs) in multilevel models. The results show that question characteristics account for a significant portion of the variation in ICCs, with certain types, such as attitude and non-factual questions, items appearing later in the survey, and those using showcards, being especially susceptible to interviewer effects. Our findings have important implications for both interviewer training and questionnaire design.