Threat evasion—the need to escape imminent threats to safety and survival—is a major driver of international migration. Demographic research on threat‐evasive migration, however, remains scant, owing to a longstanding dearth of systematic data on migrants in need of international protection (MNP). To that end, we leveraged respondent‐driven sampling (RDS), a methodology designed to access “hidden” populations in the absence of a reliable sampling frame, to recruit and survey MNP in Costa Rica—one of the top receivers of MNP worldwide. Here, we illustrate the utility of telephonic RDS to yield systematically diverse samples of MNP that encompass a broad range of national origins, immigration statuses, premigration violence exposures, and socioeconomic conditions. We show that compared with convenience sampling, RDS yields a more diverse sample that better captures the characteristics of the underlying population and that neither past violence exposure nor current socioeconomic precarity impedes survey recruitment. Finally, we highlight the empirical and theoretical importance of sampling across legal categories and widening the demographic lens beyond asylum‐seekers alone.

Populations have demographic connections to the past: people who were exposed to the past may still be alive or may at least have living kin. Denton and Spencer and Alburez‐Gutierrez have recently articulated the concept of “demographic memory” to refer to the way in which the memory of single events lingers in populations through their age or kinship structure. This article works to clarify, expand, and further demonstrate the usefulness of this concept. Theoretically, it argues for demographic memory as an idea that unifies and makes rigorously quantifiable many of the scattered ideas of historical embodiment that exist across the social and biological sciences, including in sociology, economics, political science, epidemiology, and epigenetics. Methodologically, this article offers a flexible and widely applicable model of “survivorship memory” as the average remembered exposure to past conditions of interest. This model can estimate the memory of events, eras, and continuously varying exposures, and it allows for social stratification in both the exposures of interest and how they are forgotten. As a proof of concept, this new model is applied to the experience of climate change, the recent prime ministers of the United Kingdom, and the strength of liberal democracy across the world.

The symbolic interactionist (SI) tradition has been criticized for having an overly optimistic view of human development within democratic society. As we see an increasing trend toward authoritarian and fascist movements globally, it becomes especially important to foster a more critical theoretical framework for SI. Introducing Erich Fromm to SI allows for the exploration of new research questions that dig deeper into structural conditions and how they interact with unconscious emotional drives. We compare the social psychology of Fromm to the intellectual precursor of symbolic interactionism, G. H. Mead, and consider how to creatively combine their approaches. This “Frommeadian” synthesis is not without challenges, so we consider this combination in a way that is logically consistent while still being true to the source material. We present this integrated model with the hope it might inspire new research questions as we strive to understand the processes of ideological recruitment across social contexts.

In his sociology of the state, Bourdieu introduces the concept of “de-particularization” to spotlight processes through which those who dominate the state establish their particular lifestyle as a universal cultural norm. While Bourdieu did not elaborate on such processes, the article develops a specific mechanism of de-particularization in articulating his framework with postcolonial perspectives on analogies between race and class. Focusing on the German Empire and drawing on published and unpublished sources, it shows how the Verein für Sozialpolitik , a prominent social policy actor in the emerging welfare state, implicitly analogized the worker question and questions of racial degeneration in a study on European tropical settlement. As the principles of vision and division distinguishing workers from the educated bourgeoisie were transposed onto the difference of colonizers and natives, the ethos regarded as particularly bourgeois in previous investigations of the worker question came to be construed as universally German.

Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus explains class reproduction but undertheorizes social mobility. I address this by developing the conditions model of the habitus, which preserves the concept’s core features while challenging Bourdieu’s assumption that people in the same class share the same conditions and habitus. Using interviews from the National Study of Youth and Religion, I demonstrate that youth in the same class develop different habitus in different conditions. At the bottom of the class structure, youth raised in constraining conditions typically form a habitus oriented toward class reproduction, whereas those in less constraining conditions often form a habitus oriented toward upward mobility. At the top, youth raised in conditions free from constraint tend to develop a habitus geared toward class reproduction, and those in more constrained conditions develop a habitus oriented toward downward mobility. Thus, separating class from conditions illuminates how the habitus contributes to both reproduction and mobility.

Are differences in educational performance between pupils at the start of schooling—and their underlying genetic and environmental sources—reproduced, accumulated, or compensated over the primary school career? I investigate this using reading comprehension and mathematics test scores of over 4,000 same-sex and opposite-sex twin pairs, identified in the Netherlands Cohort Study on Education (Grades 1–5). Biometric latent growth models show, first, that most of the achievement inequality is already present at the start of education and is related to genetic variance. Second, these initial achievement differences are somewhat compensated over time, more strongly for mathematics than for reading. This leveling is related to decreasing genetic and environmental differences. Third, at the same time, new sources of achievement differences emerge during primary education that are unrelated to initial achievement. These new sources of differences are captured by variance in growth rates and are mostly genetic. As a result, although inequality linked to initial achievement decreases, the total systematic inequality in achievement increases over time because these new sources of differences outweigh the compensation of initial differences. In other words, over the course of primary education, inequality based on where children start remains prominent yet gradually decreases, while “new” inequality based on how fast children learn is simultaneously opens up.

Scholars have identified women’s simultaneous labor force and domestic responsibilities as a “double burden” but have not fully explored how these demands intersect with pursuing higher education. Research consistently shows women’s increasing participation in higher education, with women—especially from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds—outpacing men in bachelor’s degree attainment. Using nationally representative longitudinal surveys and matched educational outcome data, we examine students’ educational trajectories from their early teens through late twenties. Our findings reveal that despite gains in college enrollment and completion, low-SES women experience significantly more interruptions in their educational pursuits after enrolling in college than both low-SES men and high-SES women. Using longitudinal interviews with a matched subsample of 132 participants, we identify the presence of a “triple burden”: the simultaneous expectations of caretaking, work, and college for low-SES women. This concept contributes to the sociologies of gender, social class, domestic labor, and higher education, emphasizing the need for an intersectional understanding of the life course.

Labor market discrimination against ethnic minority applicants remains persistent despite extensive research and policy interventions. While social scientists have thoroughly examined statistical discrimination—wherein employers rely on group-level information to infer candidates’ future productivity due to limited individual information in resumes—fundamental questions remain unanswered regarding the relative impact of different information types. Specifically, it remains unclear whether employers are more responsive to group-level or individual–level information updates in their hiring decisions. Through a two–stage survey experiment with hiring human resources (HR) professionals at Japanese companies, this study examines how updating different types of information affects hiring discrimination. The experiment randomly updated group-level information about ethnic minority workers’ productivity (specifically, that ethnic majority and minority workers are equally productive) and provided additional individual–level applicant information. Results demonstrate that while additional individual-level information completely eliminates ethnic discrimination, updating group-level information fails to reduce discriminatory practices. Moreover, group-level information updates actually nullify the positive effects of individual-level information. These findings suggest that HR professionals’ initially low expectations of minority applicants can be easily overcome through additional individual information. However, group-level information updates raise baseline expectations and the same individual-level information becomes insufficient to exceed these elevated thresholds.

Sociodemographic groups with higher average wages also exhibit higher internal wage dispersion, partly explaining the overrepresentation of older, educated men in top wage percentiles. Despite being widely documented, the origins of this relationship remain poorly understood. This article proposes an explanation rooted in sorting—the tendency for workers who already command higher wages to end up in the organizations and occupations that pay the most. I argue that sorting is not merely positive but also nonlinear: its strength intensifies at higher wage levels. Because higher-wage groups experience stronger sorting, their internal wage dispersion is inflated, which contributes to the relationship between group mean wages and internal dispersion. Using French administrative data, I employ variance decompositions and simulations to quantify these effects. I find that nonlinear sorting accounts for 13% of the covariance between micro-group mean wages and internal dispersion, and for 25% of the variance in wage dispersion across groups. Simulations combined with variance function regression identify education and age as the primary dimensions along which nonlinear sorting operates. In addition, the study confirms and extends prior findings on positive sorting, showing that it accounts for 38% of between-group inequality.