This brief report investigates the association between family structure and the cognitive effort of fifth-grade students in Madrid and Berlin. Although existing studies often link single parenthood to poorer academic outcomes, scant research has investigated its impact on children's effort. This study utilizes a novel behavioral measure of cognitive effort-rather than survey-based proxies-to fill this knowledge gap. We collected data from 1359 students across 62 classes. Effort was measured via performance on three incentivized real-effort tasks (AX continuous performance, Simon, and slider tasks). Using two-level random-intercept linear regression models and multiple imputation, we analyzed children's effortful behavior while adjusting for cognitive ability. Our findings consistently show that children from single-parent households exhibit lower cognitive effort. This negative association remained significant across all incentive conditions and even after controlling for socioeconomic factors and environmental variables. Moreover, the effort gap between single and dual-parent households was qualitatively similar in both cities. However, the estimated magnitude of this effect is rather small. In conclusion, children growing up with a single parent exhibit lower cognitive effort than children in dual-parent families. This finding may provide a pathway to better understanding of the educational disadvantage typically observed among single-parent children.

This study investigates regional differences in pay fairness perceptions among employees in eastern and western Germany from 2009 to 2023. Using longitudinal data from the Socio-Economic Panel study, the analysis reveals substantial initial disparities: Employees in eastern Germany perceive their gross earnings as more unfair than employees in western Germany do. Over time, however, these regional differences diminish. Analyses stratified by wage deciles show that this convergence in pay fairness is primarily driven by a decrease in unfairness perceptions among low-wage employees in eastern Germany. This development, in turn, is driven by a narrowing East-West gap in actual earnings among low-wage employees. The finding of converging pay fairness perceptions in eastern and western Germany remains robust after adjusting for individual differences (gender, age, education, labor market experience, immigration background) and structural factors (economic area, public sector, organizational size), underscoring that there has been a true convergence of perceptions over time. While this development is cause for optimism, the overall convergence is driven not solely by employees in eastern Germany improving in terms of pay fairness but also by employees in western Germany showing an overall increase in perceived unfairness.

This article assesses the popular thesis of growing regional inequality and urban-rural divides for Germany, focusing on the quality of employment opportunities. Drawing on a 2% sample of individuals registered in the German social security system over the period 1993-2019, we examine the level and evolution of employment opportunities along three established geographic divides-urban-rural, east-west, and north-south-at the small-scale level of districts (330 Kreisregionen). Occupation groups were ranked by median wage and assigned to quintiles to trace whether different districts experience diverging changes in their occupation structures. Our findings confirm significant urban-rural divides in the quality of employment opportunities, as upgrading has been much stronger in urban districts. Yet the differences we observe on an aggregated German level are also influenced by north-south and east-west divides, as these divides partially align. While some smaller cities and urban districts, mostly in southern Germany, have seen an above-average increase in high-wage jobs, most eastern German districts and many northwestern districts are still struggling to catch up with national upgrading trends. Our study thus shows that geographic polarization in Germany goes beyond simple urban-rural divides. Moreover, it demonstrates how examining the quality of employment opportunities provides long-term and spatially detailed indicators for studying geographic divides that capture a tangible aspect of regionally diverging life chances.

Although research including biological concepts and variables has gained more prominence in sociology, progress assimilating the organ of experience, the brain, has been theoretically and technically challenging. Formal uptake and assimilation have thus been slow. Within psychology and neuroscience, the traditional brain, which has made brief appearances in sociological research, is a "bottom-up" processor in which sensory signals are passed up the neural hierarchy where they are eventually cognitively and emotionally processed, after which actions and responses are generated. In this paper, we introduce the Active Inference Framework (AIF), which casts the brain as a Bayesian "inference engine" that tests its "top-down" predictive models against "bottom-up" sensory error streams in its attempts to resolve uncertainty and make the world more predictable. After assembling and presenting key concepts in the AIF, we describe an integrated neuro-bio-social model that prioritizes the microsociological assertion that the scene of action is the situation, wherein brains enculturate. Through such social dynamics, enculturated brains share models of the world with one another, enabling collective realities that disclose the actions afforded in those times and places. We conclude by discussing this neuro-bio-social model within the context of exemplar sociological research areas, including the sociology of stress and health, the sociology of emotions, and cognitive cultural sociology, all areas where the brain has received some degree of recognition and incorporation. In each case, sociological insights that do not fit naturally with the traditional brain model emerge intuitively from the predictive AIF model, further underscoring the interconnections and interdependencies between these areas, while also providing a foundation for a probabilistic sociology.

Sociological theory and empirical research have found that parents' socioeconomic status and related resources affect their children's educational outcomes. Findings from behavior genetics reveal genetic underpinnings of the intergenerational transmission of education, thus altering previous conclusions about purely environmental transmission mechanisms. In recent years, studies in molecular genetics have led to new insights. Genomic data, polygenic scores, and other facets of sociogenomics are increasingly used to advance research in social stratification. Notably, the 2018 discovery of "genetic nurture" suggested that parents' genes influence children above and beyond the genes they directly transmitted to their children. Such indirect genetic effects can be interpreted as consequences of parental behavior, which is itself influenced by the parents' genetics and is essential for their children's environment. Indirect genetic effects fit hand in glove with the sociological literature because they represent environmental transmission mechanisms. For instance, parenting behaviors, which are partly influenced by parents' genes, shape children's home environments and possibly their later educational outcomes. However, current findings based on more sophisticated research designs demonstrate that "genetic nurture" effects are actually much smaller than initially assumed and hence call for a reevaluation of common narratives found in the social stratification literature. In this paper, we review recent developments and ongoing research integrating molecular genetics to study educational outcomes, and we discuss their implications for sociological stratification research.

We draw on cleavage theory to assess the emergence of a social conflict concerning globalisation-related issues among the German population between 1989 and 2019. We argue that issue salience and opinion polarisation are key conditions for a successful and sustainable political mobilisation of citizens and thus for the emergence of a social conflict. In line with globalisation cleavage theory, we hypothesised that issue salience as well as overall and between-group opinion polarisation on globalisation-related issues have increased over time. Our study considers four globalisation-related issues: immigration, the European Union (EU), economic liberalism, and the environment. While the salience of the EU and economic liberalism issues remained low during the observed period, we found a recent increase in salience for the issues of immigration (since 2015) and the environment (since 2018). Furthermore, our results point to rather stable attitudes on globalisation-related issues among the German population: We did not find any consistent evidence of an increase in overall or between-group polarisation over time. In conclusion, the idea of an emerging conflict around globalisation-related issues among the German population finds very little empirical support.

In Europe, individualist societies, in which people more highly value independence, have fewer people who are lonely. Yet these societies also have more people who live alone, a strong determinant of loneliness. Evidence suggests that some unrecognized societal-level resources or characteristics can explain this. We uncover multiple pathways toward a lower degree of loneliness among European societies using an ideal method for this purpose, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. Using data from the 2014 wave of the European Social Survey and other sources, we analyzed loneliness outcomes among 26 European societies. Our findings suggest two necessary conditions for a low degree of loneliness: high internet access and high association participation. Further, three pathways are sufficient for achieving less loneliness at the societal level. Most societies that have less loneliness follow both the welfare support and cultural support pathways. The third path, commercial provision, is mutually exclusive with welfare support because the former requires a weak welfare state. The surest policy for building societies that have lower rates of loneliness includes the expansion of internet accessibility, the fostering of civil society through association participation and volunteering, and a welfare state that protects potentially vulnerable populations while funding opportunities for social interaction. This article further contributes methodologically by demonstrating "configurational robustness testing," a more comprehensive means to implement current best practices for fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis robustness testing.

For many couples, the transition to parenthood also marks a transition to gender-specific employment arrangements. However, decisions about employment arrangements after the birth of the first child can be critical for future employment patterns and old-age provision. This article focuses on two questions: first, whether after the transition to parenthood there is a convergence in the employment patterns of younger parental couples born in the 1980s compared with birth cohorts born in the 1970s, and second, whether a division of labour before the transition to parenthood plays an increasing role in employment arrangements afterwards. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we analysed the employment patterns of 900 couples over 36 months after the transition to parenthood using sequence, cluster, and regression analysis methods. It was shown that even though traditional employment arrangements have declined in importance, they continue to dominate. Furthermore, the convergence observed is due more to the increasing discontinuities in men's employment trajectories than to the birth of the child. Moreover, the prebirth division of labour has a rather minor influence on the postbirth employment arrangements of younger parental couples. The findings suggest that greater efforts should be made to reduce gender inequalities in the labour market in order to create further incentives for a more equal division of labour in the couple context.

A large body of research exists investigating the link between environmental attitudes and behavior. Many empirical studies have found modest positive effects, suggesting that attitudes toward the environment might indeed influence environmental behavior. However, most of the previous empirical work is cross-sectional and correlational in nature. This means that the issue of the causal effect of environmental attitudes on behavior is far from settled, and that the relationships observed in the past may be due to unobserved confounders. In a panel study using six waves of the GESIS Panel Survey, we examine the individual-level effect of changes in one's attitudes on changes in different forms of environmental behavior. We use fixed effects panel regression within the structural equation modeling framework to control for unobserved time-invariant confounders, while also tackling other methodological challenges. We find that environmental attitudes have no effect on behavior after controlling for unobserved confounders. However, there is a robust effect of attitudes on willingness to sacrifice. This suggests that creating more positive attitudes might make individuals more willing to accept sacrifices for environmental protection.

This paper examines cultural innovations in German public theaters, using North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) as the most populated region as an example. While existing analyses, including social structure-centered audience research, have focused on the demand side, diagnosing in particular the steady decline and aging of the cultural audience, our analysis addresses the supply side, especially the number of premieres and new productions as well as their adoption into the repertoire. The paper shows that recent efforts by public theaters on the municipal or regional level to increase both the number of venues and the number of plays have not been sufficient to stabilize the declining audience. Too few new plays are scheduled, of which even fewer make it into the long-term repertoire. Our results suggest that theaters can retain their capability for renewal only by staging significantly more new plays, thus attracting new audiences. With regard to such renewal, decentralized competition as a characteristic of the NRW theater landscape seems a favorable institutional context.

The employment rate of women has increased markedly over the past decades, both internationally and in Germany, whereas the classic male breadwinner model is eroding. Against this background, using current survey data, the aim of this study is to examine the social prestige of the shrinking group of housewives whose main activity is domestic and family work. The analyses address, on the one hand, the question of how high their reputation is generally rated by the population in Germany and, on the other hand, whether the perceptions differ systematically by raters' sociodemographic characteristics. The empirical findings show that the reputation of housewives in Germany is generally rated higher than that of the unemployed and of those in helper jobs but lower than for those in professional jobs at the skilled level. Moreover, the assessments of housewives' prestige vary significantly according to the social group (birth cohort, level of education, labor force participation, gender) to which the respondents belong. Further analyses of interaction effects also reveal a differentiated interaction of the gender variable with the other structural group characteristics. The paper concludes with a detailed discussion of the results and an outlook on future research.

According to a recent social science debate, citizens tend to perceive income inequality rather inaccurately, which also influences their acceptance of redistributive policy programmes. The study reported in this article examines whether this can be confirmed using the example of the wealth tax. The wealth tax was suspended in Germany in 1996, but politicians have been debating its reintroduction for several years. Against the background of the debate on biased perceptions in the formation of distributional policy preferences, the article asks, first, how accurately the existing tax burden on wealthy households through the top income tax rate is assessed and whether a bias has consequences for the support of a wealth tax. Second, based on approaches that attribute an important role to mass media in the formation of distributional policy preferences, the influence of media framing on the acceptance of this controversial instrument is examined. According to data from an online survey, the burden of the top income tax tends to be overestimated. The more the tax is overestimated, the lower the political support for a wealth tax. Framing experiments with randomized control and treatment groups have mapped current discourses around the wealth tax and reconstructed positive frames-wealth taxes as an investment promoting tax reform, as a contribution to the reduction of national debt caused by the coronavirus pandemic-as well as negative frames-restriction of investments and loss of jobs if companies are burdened. Exposing potential job losses significantly lowers the support for a wealth tax. Strong support drops to the middle category of "partly/partly," a signal of indecision. The struggle for naming power is thus open. Support for a property tax becomes uncertain the more that political communication activates the framework of threatened jobs.

This paper focuses on disability, an under-researched area of inequality, and subjective well-being. According to social production function theory, people with a disability do not have the same opportunities as people without disabilities to obtain resources, instrumental goals, and ultimately subjective well-being. Social participation and employment seem to be crucial mechanisms behind such disparities. The social system of a country (macro level) also shapes the gap in subjective well-being between both groups. The main objective of this paper is to analyse the gap in subjective well-being between people with and without disabilities. How is this gap linked to social participation and labour market integration, and how does the welfare-state regime shape the gap in subjective well-being between people with and without disabilities? The core of this research are multilevel analyses of cumulative European Social Survey data from 31 European countries. The results reveal that people with disabilities show significantly lower subjective well-being than people without disabilities. Welfare-state regimes have an effect on this gap, with social-democratic (and family-oriented) Nordic countries performing best in providing equal living conditions for people with and without disabilities.

This article deals with the question of which unemployment benefit durations are considered fair for which groups. In addition, it examines the extent to which individuals consider longer unemployment insurance benefit durations to be appropriate in times of economic crisis, such as the current situation during the Covid-19 pandemic. Longer reference periods can stabilize the income situation of benefit recipients and can provide time to search for an adequate job and thus increase matching quality. However, they also initially reduce the pressure to look for a job, and they lengthen the period of unemployment in the longer term. Using survey data from two online surveys done in November 2019 and during the crisis in May 2020, we examine which unemployment benefit durations employees consider appropriate. For this purpose, we presented vignettes to the survey participants describing hypothetical unemployed people whose characteristics varied randomly. The results show that the same respondents considered similar reference periods to be appropriate at both dates. In addition, the respondents took into account criteria of contribution as well as neediness when assessing the appropriate duration of benefits for the unemployed. Characteristics such as the age of the unemployed and any existing culpability, life benefits, or contribution periods influenced the duration of the benefit receipt that respondents judged to be appropriate.

The concept of social exclusion has had an astonishing career in the social sciences. The focus of this paper is an empirical investigation of the use of this concept to analyze current societal trends. From this theoretical perspective we derive four theses, which are empirically tested in this paper with a focus on the perception of exclusion: First, that because of the processes of economic structural change, larger population groups are affected by social exclusion in several dimensions (unemployment, poverty, social isolation), culminating in a subjective sense of exclusion among them. Thus, it is assumed that social exclusion has become the main social cleavage in contemporary society. Second, it is assumed that social exclusion cannot be clearly located in classical sociostructural categories but has diffused into broad segments of society. Third, socioeconomic precariousness and social isolation are thought to play a central role in the emergence of a subjective sense of exclusion. Here, and fourth, it is assumed, however, that this impacts on the sense of exclusion via the subjective perception of the objective life conditions. We test these theses derived from this theoretical perspective on the basis of survey data, using the sense of exclusion as a dependent variable. It becomes clear that, first, social exclusion has not diffused into large parts of society and thus can by no means be regarded as the main social cleavage in society; and second, an increased sense of exclusion can be found in different but clearly identifiable social groups. Moreover, our analyses show that the subjective sense of exclusion is rooted in both social isolation and socioeconomic precariousness, albeit clearly mediated by their subjective perception.