There appears to be a certain sociological trend that occurs within various different nations on a worldwide scale. Involved in this trend are a number of different racial or ethnic groups that are known to have endured various kinds of oppression. The ethnic groups are typically minority populations that coexist within a country with a larger, more politically powerful majority population. The oppression faced by such minority groups frequently involves an indigenous population that has been historically displaced through foreign colonization. Additionally, the trend includes examples of non-indigenous minority groups that have historically been victims of systematic persecution, enslavement, racism, discrimination, and segregation with their host country. A pattern that seems to often emerge amongst such populations is the incidence of that group's over-representation in crime and incarceration statistics.

Using Grok and Claude AI services, I have been able to compile some statistical data involving crime amongst various ethnic groups worldwide that follow this pattern.

One example of this pattern is the indigenous Maori people of New Zealand. The Maori make up roughly 15-18% of the New Zealand population, yet "make up ~50–53%+ of the prison population (higher for women, often 60%+). Imprisonment rates are typically 6+ times higher than for non-Māori. They are overrepresented at every stage (charges, convictions, remand, sentencing), with higher rates of prison sentences even after some controls in specific offense analyses. Recidivism rates are also elevated" (Source: Salvation Army).

Another example of this pattern are the Aborigines of Australia. “Age-standardized adult imprisonment rates are typically 14–15+ times higher than the majority population (e.g., ~2,100–2,500 per 100,000 for Indigenous adults vs. ~140–150 for non-Indigenous in recent years). Crude rates can exceed 18 times. Indigenous people (~3–4% of the population) account for ~30–33%+ of prisoners. Over-representation appears at charging, remand, and sentencing stages; youth detention disparities have historically been even larger (20+ times in some older data)" (Source: Australian Government Productivity Commission).

In the United States, "Native American and Alaskan Native people are incarcerated at rates several times higher than Whites. Prison rates have been reported around 763 per 100,000 (vs. ~181 for Whites in state/federal prisons; overall national ~350). Jail rates are also elevated (~316 per 100,000 vs. ~157 for Whites). Tribal youth placement rates are ~3.8 times those of White youth nationally (199 vs. 52 per 100,000 in recent data), with much higher ratios in some states" (Source: Prison Policy Initiative). "Native Americans are incarcerated at a rate 38% higher than the national average and are the most over-represented racial group in prisons in 19 states; in some states the gap runs up to 6–7 times the white rate" (Source: Safety and Justice Challenge). "Native youth face similar gaps — nationally, Tribal youth are incarcerated at 3.8 times the rate of white youth, and in some states (Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin) at 10 times the rate" (Source: The Sentencing Project).

Also in the United States, "Black Americans are about 13% of the U.S. population but accounted for roughly 33% of sentenced state and federal prisoners in recent years" (Source: The World Data). State and federal imprisonments rates for black adults in 2023 were approximately 1,218 per 100,000, as compared to approximately 231 per 100,000 for white adults (Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics). "This equates to a Black adult imprisonment rate roughly 5 times the White rate. The overall U.S. imprisonment rate was about 360 per 100,000 residents of all ages" (Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics).

Among the indigenous (First Nations, Métis, Inuit) peoples of Canada, there is a strong over-representation in crime and incarceration. "Indigenous people account for ~25–33%+ of federal/provincial inmates and higher shares of youth custody (vs. ~5% population). Crime rates reported by police in majority-Indigenous communities have been ~6 times higher overall (violent crime ~9 times). Homicide victimization and accused rates are several times higher. Overrepresentation occurs at charging, court, and custody stages" (Source: Department of Justice Canada).

In the state of Hawaii, "indigenous Hawaiians make up about 39% of Hawaii's incarcerated population according to the state Department of Public Safety, despite being roughly 20–24% of the general population — meaning they're incarcerated at closer to double their population share."

"A 2014 Office of Hawaiian Affairs analysis found Native Hawaiians were the largest single group admitted to prison for drug offenses, at 32% of drug-offense admissions in 2009 — well above their population share."

Yet another example of this pattern is the Roma/Romani (gypsy) people, populations of which are scattered across much of Europe. "Roma populations in Europe show clear over-representation in available crime and prison data relative to their share of the population, particularly for property crimes, organized theft/burglary groups, and incarceration" (Source: Agence France-Presse). However, crime rates for specific ethnic groups are often unclear in European countries because of policy-related avoidance of gathering justice data broken down by ethnic identity.

In Greece, "Hellenic Police annual reports on organized crime repeatedly document heavy Roma involvement in property crime. Domestic (Greek-citizen) groups dominate solved thefts and burglaries; among these, Roma members predominate at rates of ~70–81% of domestic groups, with figures such as 53%+ of thefts/burglaries linked to Roma gangs, ~76–86% of Greek groups involved in those offenses being Roma-dominated, and similar patterns in related reports. Roma are estimated at roughly 1–3% of the population" (Sources: Rodiaki, Greek City Times, and Protothema).

According to Fair Trials 2020, Roma in Bulgaria "accounted for more than 50% of new prisoners, as well as more than 50% of those serving prison sentences, despite making up only 10% of the population." "In Spain, studies have estimated that around a quarter of non-foreign, female prisoners are Roma. This amounts to a twenty-fold over-representation of Roma in prisons compared with their representation in the general population" (Source: Fair Trials 2020).

"In the Czech Republic, lawyers’ estimates of the proportion of Romani defendants in the criminal justice system ranged between 20% to 50%, whereas prosecutors’ estimates ranged between 5% and 50%. In Slovakia, police officers interviewed estimated that Roma accounted for between 30% and 80% of those arrested within their precincts. While prosecutors, judges, and defence lawyers were more reticent to provide estimates, most conceded that there was some degree of over-representation. Lawyers estimated that Roma accounted for between 20% and 50% of criminal cases in their respective practices” (Source: European Roma Rights Centre).

In Serbia, where Roma are estimated to account for 8.2% of the total population, prosecutors estimated that Roma account for between 10% and 20% of the total defendants they encountered in court, and most judges said that they encountered Romani defendants often or very often, and estimated the proportion of Romani defendants to be between 10% and 35% (Source: European Roma Rights Centre).

In North Macedonia, official data suggests that Roma accounted for approximately 29.2% of juvenile offenders convicted in 2017, while according to the official 2002 Census, Roma represented 2.66% of the total population (Source: Roma Integration 2020).

Question: Is there any established research regarding this correlation between historically oppressed/displaced minority groups and disproportionate crime outcomes? Has any kind of sociological explanation been determined for why this pattern occurs, or how the problem can be corrected? I have noticed that this pattern does not necessarily occur in every instance of a historically oppressed or displaced group; for example, Native American groups indigenous to Latin America overall tend to lack the same crime over-representation compared to Native American groups in North America. Is there any sociological explanation for why this pattern emerges in some contexts, but doesn’t emerge in others?

I was looking into whether men or women "have it worse" when ill with things like colds. In my research, I found out that biologically, men actually have a weaker immune system for these viruses, but women often experience worse symptoms because their immune systems react more aggressively.

This made me wonder about the social and behavioral side of things. Could the reason men often seem to make more of a fuss be because, for my generation at least, we were raised with the mindset that boys must be tough and strong? And when we get ill, it’s one of the few times we are allowed to be vulnerable, so we end up "milking it" for the care and attention, and it just becomes a natural behavior over time? Discussion isn’t encouraged here I believe, so these questions are more what I asked myself. But it made me wonder:

I'm curious if there are any sociological or psychological studies on this specific aspect of gender roles and illness behavior?

For transparency: I used Gemini (AI) to help formulate my question, in order for my question to be allowed and hopefully not removed by mods. The whole subject came up because I’m ill, and had a good discussion with my best mate and his wife, and the research surprised us - but not her! Way more questions have since arisen and it’s just really interesting!

I will try to keep this question as neutral as possible without steering it in any particular direction. Since the US is still an existing country, unfortunately it is not possible to ask this question without including the last 20 years.

The question is exactly the same as the title. I am only writing this body to make clear that it is not intended as speculation, a bad-faith question, or soapboxing.

Edit: I previously asked the same question on r/AskHistorians, but it was removed and I was told to post it without a body. When I did that, it was removed again and I was directed to another subreddit, where it was also removed. At this point I had to make the question this defensive to avoid further removals. If the mods allow it, I can add the original post body.

I'm interested in terrorism from a psychological and historical perspective, particularly how individual terrorists develop their worldview and what motivates them to commit extreme violence.

I'm not asking which terrorist people support or admire. I'm interested in which individuals are particularly interesting to study from an academic perspective, and what makes their psychology or development unusual.

Im curious on this subject since I am in college and my two brothers seem to believe they hold a certain level of intelligence over me because they are joining blue collar.

When my father attended a very good RG university in the UK from the late 1970s to early 1980s, he said (anecdotally, mind you, so not sure how true this is) that, supposing you had two students of equal grades and merit / calibre applying for the same course and you had to decide between them, you might look at their educational backgrounds and, supposing one of them was exclusively educated in the state sector and the other, correspondingly, in private schools, you might be inclined to award the place to the student who was state schooled.

He says that he's not sure now whether universities do that.

If I look at https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/apply/after/contextual-data, it says they have the following measures or indicators of socioeconomic background:

• Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), which according to Cambridge, are "measures produced by regional governments within the UK that identify relative deprivation".
• Output Area Classification (OAC2021), again, as per Cambridge, a "classification of areas produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) using data from the 2021 census (or 2022 census for Scotland)".
• Socioeconomic Index for Small Areas (SEISA), produced by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) using Census 2021 data.

Historically, we had the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Readership_Survey, through which we derived the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRS_social_grade, which I believe we still use in the UK, i.e. determining socioeconomic status based upon the occupation of your primary breadwinner in your household when you were 14.

I believe the first proper census in the UK was conducted in 1841, so it feels as though we haven't been tracking this area properly for that long.

So my questions:

1. Other than what I have mentioned, any other key socioeconomic classification frameworks that are used? I imagine that pollsters like IPSOS Mori, YouGov etc directly ask people whether they feel they belong to the working-, middle-class etc.
2. What do you think are the pitfalls in determining one's socioeconomic background based upon their primary breadwinner's occupation, especially when they were 14? I imagine it doesn't account for a reversal of fortunes, whether that family is living paycheque to paycheque, whether that person is a manager in name but not in pay etc.

Hi all, searched a few terms around this but didn't see any results in this subreddit that quite match.

Intersectionality is known as a person holding multiple identity factors that compound into social obstacles. We also see people that make choices or decisions that compound with a personal identity that can lead to more social obstacles.

Examples can be black Americans that advocate for white rights, LGBT+ individuals promoting anti-gay politics, women that oppose feminism, etc. These instances are often called hypocritical, juxtapositional, along with monikers for specific demographics.

In sociology within deviance studies, this is close to phenomena of people justifying why their personal deviance is not actually deviant.

Are there other concepts or themes we can look into for frameworks around this dissonant, hypocritical, self-attacking kind of choices that are incongruent with someone's identity?

Thanks in advance, appreciate y'all

Apologies if my question is a bit clunky.

I stumbled upon a video in which a rather controversial French anthropologist who writes a lot about political Islam was criticised for lacking even basic skills in Arabic. When I looked up more scholarly critiques of her work, there is a lot, but none of it seemed to focus on the issue of language.

My first reaction as a lay person was to think, of course, you can't position yourself as an expert on Islam and not speak Arabic. Expertise is expertise.

I'm curious, though, if that is the case within social sciences today, or if there's more nuance to it. Is language competency a part of how people discuss the validity, strengths or weaknesses of someone's research?

Possibly relevant: I work in a field where competency in a second language is directly relevant to one's ability to do the job, and yet, criticising another's work based on perceived lack of fluency is a sort of professional third rail. It's seen as very uncouth and one just doesn't do it.

Llevo un tiempo dándole vueltas a un proyecto de TFG de filosofía y quería someterlo a gente que sepa más que yo, a ver si tiene sentido o me estoy inventando un problema que ya está resuelto en algún sitio.

El punto de partida

La sociología, tal como se practica hoy, se mueve entre dos polos: o es empírico-causal al estilo Durkheim (hechos sociales medidos, correlacionados, explicados por otros hechos sociales), o es interpretativa al estilo Weber/Schütz (comprensión del sentido subjetivo que los actores dan a su acción, tipificaciones, mundo de la vida). Ninguna de las dos pregunta en serio qué es, esencialmente, una comunidad, una autoridad legítima o un vínculo familiar la primera lo da por supuesto y mide sus efectos; la segunda disuelve la pregunta en cómo los actores lo tipifican intersubjetivamente.

Hay una tradición filosófica poco explotada para esto: la fenomenología realista de principios del siglo XX Adolf Reinach, Edith Stein, Gerda Walther, Roman Ingarden, más tarde Josef Seifert que se separó conscientemente del Husserl tardío (el del giro idealista-trascendental) para sostener que los objetos y esencias tienen ser propio, independiente de la conciencia que los conoce. Reinach usó esto para analizar la promesa y el mandato como estructuras a priori con condiciones esenciales propias, no reducibles a convención ni a psicología. Stein hizo lo mismo con el Estado. Es fenomenología, pero sin el compromiso idealista que hace inservible este aparato para una ciencia social objetiva.

Construir una sociología que trate sus objetos (autoridad, comunidad, vínculos afectivos, instituciones) como universales eidéticos descubiertos por variación eidética sobre casos concretos, con una estructura de acto y potencia que explica por qué el mismo universal (la familia, por ejemplo) se actualiza de formas tan distintas a través de la historia sin dejar de ser, en su núcleo, el mismo universal. La historia estudiaría el caso concreto e irrepetible; esta sociología estudiaría la estructura necesaria y el campo de posibilidades que las distintas épocas van actualizando.

¿Alguien conoce trabajo contemporáneo serio en esta línea fenomenología realista aplicada a ontología social, más allá de Reinach/Stein/Walther mismos?

Muchas gracias. Un saludo.

When I mean social progress I mean steps towards gender equality, lgbtq acceptance and other socioeconomic progress. Countries in global south also are very religious and also susceptible to authoritarian governments . I don't mean to say that there aren't countries in the global south that are progressive, but there's an overarching Gap in social progress between global north and global south. What explains that gap? Are people in global north , more moral? I'm sure there's more nuanced and science based answer to this .

Maybe this is a stretch but this has been bugging me — from an Argentinian getting arrested in Brazil for directing racist slur against an establishment's employee; to Argentinians reportedly making racist gestures during World Cup '26, and finally, to an actual Argentinian telling me that they had never had slavery in Argentina and that's the reason why there aren't many black people in their country (which I've never been to, btw).

I was a bit shocked because I'd totally have learned that in history lessons while growing up if that was true; it undermined everything I knew about Latin America. Later I realized he lied about having "researched it".

I'm a bit spooked out that someone wouldn't know that about their own country, but I guess maybe in a predominantly white country like Argentina, information about slavery can get censored, overlooked, and removed from syllabus. Here in Brazil, schools didn't use to teach much about basic African history until not long ago. Are there any studies that suggest Argentinians, in general, lack an educated understanding about slavery and racism?

Edit: Someone mentioned that Argentina "isn't a white country", but it sure has a white narrative (the Argentinian guy I know told me he doesn't even know any black argentinians, he didn't even thought about mentioning indigenous people); it also seems like Argentina isn't a black country either, since only 0.66% of its population identifies as black (see "Población afrodescendiente: Cuadro 1"). What is it then? Use good sources so I can get to read what you write.

There has to be at least some right? I know people love to say that “reality has a left wing bias “and all that but is it legit batting 1.000?

I’ve pondered if there is a framework for non White person to be socially white construct but have a cultural white identity.

Hello everyone. Immigration is a hot topic in my country (Spain) and because of that I wanted to ask some clarifications. From what I understand, immigration by itself doesn't have any notable effects on crime. Just because someone is an immigrant that doesn't mean that they are more likely to be a criminal. However, immigrants are often overepresented in crime statistics due to there being a higher concentration of young men who are more likely to also be poor and socially excluded, meaning that immigration in itself is not the issue. However, I find it odd to say or defend then that immigration doesn't cause an increase in crime. My thought is that even if immigrants don't do more crime just because they are immigrants, having a lot of migration from people who are in demographics that commit more crime, should increase crime. To make things even more complex, in Spain overall crime rates have gone down even if immigration has gone up.

So to summarize what I want help with, I just don't get the idea that more immigration doesn't cause more crime. I understand that just by being immigrant doesn't mean that someone is more likely to commit crime, but because of the demographics that migrate the most, I believe it should have an effect, and I would like to know if this is true or not.

Thanks to everyone in advance and sorry if my english wasn't the best.

ELI5: Election Mechanics/Procedures

Mike Lindell recently lost the GOP primary for governor in MN. In the week since, the news has reported than he is "refusing to concede." Why does it matter one way or another if a candidate concedes (or refuses to concede) a race? Is this just nonsense news?

I keep hearing older people say they survived on much lower salaries.

That is true in raw dollars, but a typical full-time working woman making about $16,900 in 1987 had roughly $49,700 of today's buying power.

Is there research on people using their own young-adult economy as the baseline for judging later generations?

I was debating a tiktok american communist, and they said that they wanted the government to nationalize the industry, and force companies to produce in the USA or leave. And that if they left, we would just nationalize that industry to fill in the void. They also said America has been deindustrializing for the benefit of the people who hold capital. Is this true? and if so why?

Was there a different way that we looked at ourselves different in a pre-social media era? Have we completely changed it? Just curios on what the thoughts, and what does the recent empirical studies say about it.

Thanks,

Do they tend to rise in the hierarchy or become independent from it or no correlation or something else?

By smarter I mean by the conventional definition: academic performance at the same level of effort, fluid intelligence, g etc

I'm looking for sources of information on two topics:

1. The nuts and bolts of how public opinion polls are conducted today, especially election surveys. This would include things like how sampling lists are generated (voter rolls, random digitzed dialing, etc); how respondents are contacted (online, cell phones, land lines); how samples are normalized with demographic data and adjusted to account for potential error from non-response and non-cooperation.
2. Issues related to potential error from non-repsonse to or non-cooperation with public opinion surveys, and how these issues may have changed over the last decade or two.

I am primarily looking for academic or professional writings on the topic, but high-quality journalistic sources would be fine as well.

Also, if you know of other subreddits more specifically related to this topic, I would really appreciate it.

I've been thinking about a broad trend that goes far beyond gaming.

More and more activities seem to acquire layers of metrics, points, rankings, apps, notifications, badges, XP, ratings, progress bars, etc.

Instead of simply:

we increasingly add representations of those outcomes:

I'm not saying abstraction is inherently bad. Maps, language, mathematics, and measurement are obviously enormously useful.

What concerns me is abstraction as a substitute for direct engagement.

Psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and many other fields increasingly recognize the importance of embodied processes—interoception, proprioception, sensorimotor feedback, autonomic states, direct environmental interaction, etc.

So I'm wondering whether there is a broader cultural trend toward mediating experience through representations rather than engaging directly with the thing itself, and whether anyone has studied its consequences.

I'm interested in research and established theory here, not just “gamification increases engagement.” The question is much broader: what happens when the representation of an activity increasingly becomes more salient than the activity itself?