Thomas Rotolo
Biographic Data
| ID | 110412 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Rotolo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Rotolo |
| SIGNATURE | ROTOLO T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Washington State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5131-3678 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 395 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Teaching with Inclusivity: Examining Flexible Pedagogical Techniques That Amplify Accessibility While Retaining Engagement
Courses with enrollment of over 100 students pose particular accessibility and engagement challenges, especially for students struggling with health issues or work, family, and/or extracurricular obligations. When classes returned to campus after the pandemic, we adopted flexible pedagogical techniques in a Sociology of Sport class to alleviate some of these challenges. We retained online assignments, removed attendance requirements, and institut…
All sports carry risks: NFL, media, and the framing of the youth sports concussion crisis
Clearing the cobwebs: An analysis of the timing of youth concussion legislation in U.S. states
Informal lending networks in rural Ethiopia
Social Heterogeneity and Volunteering in U.S. Cities
In this research we explore the relationship between social heterogeneity and volunteering across U.S. metropolitan areas testing a theory that race heterogeneity, racial segregation, and income inequality are negatively associated with the rate of volunteering. Theorizing that social heterogeneity will have different effects for religious and secular volunteering rates, we analyze them separately. We use nonlinear multilevel models to analyze ne…
Homeownership and Volunteering: An Alternative Approach to Studying Social Inequality and Civic Engagement1
Previous research on volunteering finds significant differences by race and social class. We augment these findings by examining a largely ignored measure of social class: tenure status, the distinction between renters and homeowners. We test a theory that predicts people volunteer more if they have a “stake” in their community and we use the value of their home as a measure of the size of this stake, with renters having no stake at all, using da…
Revisiting the Impact of Prison Building on Job Growth: Education, Incarceration, and County-Level Employment, 1976â 2004
Objectives. It is widely believed that prison construction offers significant economic benefits to local areas. We review the popular and scholarly literature and provide a quantitative analysis of claims. Methods. We analyze data on all existing and new prisons in the United States since 1960 to assess the impact of these prisons on the pace of public, private, and total employment growth in U.S. counties from 1976 to 2004. Results. Our results …
Socio-demographic homogenizing trends within fixed-boundary spatial areas in the United States
Sex Segregation in Volunteer Work
Sex segregation in the workplace—the tendency for men and women to work in different occupations and jobs—remains widespread. Domestic chores are also sex-typed, but the extent to which sex segregation is found in other forms of nonwaged work, such as volunteering, is unknown. One theory about the work/nonwork interface predicts a positive relation between the two types of activity: sex segregation will be just as common in unpaid labor. Another …
Substitute or Complement? Spousal Influence on Volunteering
Social scientists have documented the influence of family statuses on volunteering, ignoring intrafamily effects. Using newly issued data from the Current Population Survey on the volunteer behavior of 19,626 American couples, we test two competing theories concerning spousal influences on volunteering. Substitution theory predicts that spouses will trade off volunteer work; complementarity theory predicts that spouses' volunteer work is positive…
Employment Sector and Volunteering: The Contribution of Nonprofit and Public Sector Workers to the Volunteer Labor Force
In capitalist societies, jobs are sorted not only by occupational status, but also by the employment sector in which they are situated. Research has demonstrated that public- and nonprofit-sector workers have more prosocial values than private-sector workers. We used recent data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) Special Supplement on Volunteering to examine sector differences in the likelihood of doing volunteer work and the number of hour…
The Prison Industry: Carceral Expansion and Employment in U.S. Counties, 1969–1994
Objectives. Despite the interest that social scientists have displayed in the rising rate of incarceration, little attention has been devoted to understanding its consequences for local areas. This is an important omission because prison construction has become a component of state and local economic development schemes. Indeed, there is a widespread belief that prison construction provides significant economic benefits to local areas. Methods. W…
What Happened to the "Long Civic Generation"? Explaining Cohort Differences in Volunteerism
In Bowling Alone Robert Putnam argues that the passing of the “long civic generation” whose values were molded by the Depression and the Second World War, has resulted in a decline in civic engagement. In this analysis we test the generation hypothesis by comparing the volunteer behavior of two successive generations of women at the same age. No support for Putnam's thesis is found. Once appropriate controls for sociodemographic trends are impose…
Work Histories and Voluntary Association Memberships
Living across Institutions: Exploring Sex-Based Homophily in Occupations and Voluntary Groups
Occupational sex segregation is well documented. Research on voluntary associations shows that these also are segregated by sex. However, little is known about the connections between these institutions. In this research, we explore the effects of occupational sex composition on the sex composition of respondents' voluntary memberships. We find a positive relationship between the sex composition of men's occupations and the sex composition of the…
Continuity or Change? The Impact of Parents' Divorce on Newly Married Couples
Socialization into marital identities is viewed as a learning process initiated in the family of origin and continued through interactions in the offspring's marriage. We test three hypotheses pertaining to the intergenerational continuity or discontinuity in this process. The hypotheses derive from the proposition that behaviors and expectations learned in childhood will continue into marriage unless they fail to be reinforced early in the marri…
The System of Occupations: Modeling Occupations in Sociodemographic Space
What accounts for changes in the social composition of occupations over time? We address this question by adapting an ecological theory of competition from McPherson (1983). This theory suggests that occupations compete for members in a niche space defined by the social composition of an occupations members. As one occupation successfully acquires and retains new people with different sociodemographic characteristics, other occupations experience…
A Time to Join, A Time to Quit: The Influence of Life Cycle Transitions on Voluntary Association Membership
Voluntary association researchers typically rely on cross-sectional data to demonstrate that individual membership varies across life cycle stages. The life cycle and membership, however, are more appropriately treated as dynamic processes. This research recognizes the dynamic nature of these processes by exploring the influence of transitions to marriage and parenthood on the joining and leaving rates of voluntary associations. Event history tec…
IQ and Stratification: An Empirical Evaluation of Herrnstein and Murray's Social Change Argument
A state-level index of the conditions that Herrnstein and Murray suggest tightened the relationship between IQ and status in the past century as well as a measure of “credentialing by examination” are used to try to explain interstate variation in the association between IQ and status attainment circa 1990. The results contradict Herrnstein and Murray's interpretation and provide support for an alternative credentialing argument. The more a state…
Town Heterogeneity and Affiliation: A Multilevel Analysis of Voluntary Association Membership
This article develops and tests a general hypothesis derived from a theoretical perspective that links the individual-level outcome of voluntary association membership to the aggregate-level feature of town heterogeneity. The hypothesis predicts that heterogeneity will be negatively related to membership because, ceteris paribus, the potential for homophilous social network ties decreases with heterogeneity. The research examines heterogeneity wi…
Competition and Commitment in Voluntary Memberships: The Paradox of Persistence and Participation
Much of the research on voluntary associations has argued that commitment to the group determines member participation and persistence. In this framework, highly committed members participate to a greater degree than less committed members, and maintain their connection with the group over longer periods of time. Less committed members, on the other hand, participate sporadically, and tend to drop their memberships easily. This commitment thesis …
Testing a Dynamic Model of Social Composition: Diversity and Change in Voluntary Groups
We test a dynamic model of the social composition of voluntary groups. The model is based on the idea that sociodemographic variables define social niches in which voluntary groups grow and decline, share and compete, and change or remain static. The flow of individuals through such groups depends on the competition of other groups for their time and other resources. We build a dynamic model of this process and show how this model can account for…
Sex and Race Homogeneity in Naturally Occurring Groups
Journal Article Sex and Race Homogeneity in Naturally Occurring Groups Get access Bruce H. Mayhew, Bruce H. Mayhew University of South Carolina Direct correspondence to J. Miller McPherson, Department of Sociology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar J. Miller McPherson, J. Miller McPherson University of Arizona Search for other …
Measuring the Composition of Voluntary Groups: A Multitrait-Multimethod Analysis
Data on a sample of 128 face-to-face voluntary groups are analyzed with the multitrait-multimethod approach. The traits measured include four characteristics: size, sex composition, age composition, and educational composition. These four traits are measured with three different methods: reports from a respondent chosen through a probability sample from the community, reports from an official of the group, and estimates from direct measurement of…
Research in the Sociology of Organization
Testing a Dynamic Model of Social Composition: Diversity and Change in Voluntary Groups
We test a dynamic model of the social composition of voluntary groups. The model is based on the idea that sociodemographic variables define social niches in which voluntary groups grow and decline, share and compete, and change or remain static. The flow of individuals through such groups depends on the competition of other groups for their time and other resources. We build a dynamic model of this process and show how this model can account for…
Sex and Race Homogeneity in Naturally Occurring Groups
Journal Article Sex and Race Homogeneity in Naturally Occurring Groups Get access Bruce H. Mayhew, Bruce H. Mayhew University of South Carolina Direct correspondence to J. Miller McPherson, Department of Sociology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar J. Miller McPherson, J. Miller McPherson University of Arizona Search for other …
Homeownership and Volunteering: An Alternative Approach to Studying Social Inequality and Civic Engagement1
Previous research on volunteering finds significant differences by race and social class. We augment these findings by examining a largely ignored measure of social class: tenure status, the distinction between renters and homeowners. We test a theory that predicts people volunteer more if they have a “stake” in their community and we use the value of their home as a measure of the size of this stake, with renters having no stake at all, using da…
What Happened to the "Long Civic Generation"? Explaining Cohort Differences in Volunteerism
In Bowling Alone Robert Putnam argues that the passing of the “long civic generation” whose values were molded by the Depression and the Second World War, has resulted in a decline in civic engagement. In this analysis we test the generation hypothesis by comparing the volunteer behavior of two successive generations of women at the same age. No support for Putnam's thesis is found. Once appropriate controls for sociodemographic trends are impose…
Substitute or Complement? Spousal Influence on Volunteering
Social scientists have documented the influence of family statuses on volunteering, ignoring intrafamily effects. Using newly issued data from the Current Population Survey on the volunteer behavior of 19,626 American couples, we test two competing theories concerning spousal influences on volunteering. Substitution theory predicts that spouses will trade off volunteer work; complementarity theory predicts that spouses' volunteer work is positive…
The Prison Industry: Carceral Expansion and Employment in U.S. Counties, 1969–1994
Objectives. Despite the interest that social scientists have displayed in the rising rate of incarceration, little attention has been devoted to understanding its consequences for local areas. This is an important omission because prison construction has become a component of state and local economic development schemes. Indeed, there is a widespread belief that prison construction provides significant economic benefits to local areas. Methods. W…
Social Heterogeneity and Volunteering in U.S. Cities
In this research we explore the relationship between social heterogeneity and volunteering across U.S. metropolitan areas testing a theory that race heterogeneity, racial segregation, and income inequality are negatively associated with the rate of volunteering. Theorizing that social heterogeneity will have different effects for religious and secular volunteering rates, we analyze them separately. We use nonlinear multilevel models to analyze ne…
Sex Segregation in Volunteer Work
Sex segregation in the workplace—the tendency for men and women to work in different occupations and jobs—remains widespread. Domestic chores are also sex-typed, but the extent to which sex segregation is found in other forms of nonwaged work, such as volunteering, is unknown. One theory about the work/nonwork interface predicts a positive relation between the two types of activity: sex segregation will be just as common in unpaid labor. Another …
Competition and Commitment in Voluntary Memberships: The Paradox of Persistence and Participation
Much of the research on voluntary associations has argued that commitment to the group determines member participation and persistence. In this framework, highly committed members participate to a greater degree than less committed members, and maintain their connection with the group over longer periods of time. Less committed members, on the other hand, participate sporadically, and tend to drop their memberships easily. This commitment thesis …
A Time to Join, A Time to Quit: The Influence of Life Cycle Transitions on Voluntary Association Membership
Voluntary association researchers typically rely on cross-sectional data to demonstrate that individual membership varies across life cycle stages. The life cycle and membership, however, are more appropriately treated as dynamic processes. This research recognizes the dynamic nature of these processes by exploring the influence of transitions to marriage and parenthood on the joining and leaving rates of voluntary associations. Event history tec…
Revisiting the Impact of Prison Building on Job Growth: Education, Incarceration, and County-Level Employment, 1976â 2004
Objectives. It is widely believed that prison construction offers significant economic benefits to local areas. We review the popular and scholarly literature and provide a quantitative analysis of claims. Methods. We analyze data on all existing and new prisons in the United States since 1960 to assess the impact of these prisons on the pace of public, private, and total employment growth in U.S. counties from 1976 to 2004. Results. Our results …
Employment Sector and Volunteering: The Contribution of Nonprofit and Public Sector Workers to the Volunteer Labor Force
In capitalist societies, jobs are sorted not only by occupational status, but also by the employment sector in which they are situated. Research has demonstrated that public- and nonprofit-sector workers have more prosocial values than private-sector workers. We used recent data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) Special Supplement on Volunteering to examine sector differences in the likelihood of doing volunteer work and the number of hour…
The System of Occupations: Modeling Occupations in Sociodemographic Space
What accounts for changes in the social composition of occupations over time? We address this question by adapting an ecological theory of competition from McPherson (1983). This theory suggests that occupations compete for members in a niche space defined by the social composition of an occupations members. As one occupation successfully acquires and retains new people with different sociodemographic characteristics, other occupations experience…
Town Heterogeneity and Affiliation: A Multilevel Analysis of Voluntary Association Membership
This article develops and tests a general hypothesis derived from a theoretical perspective that links the individual-level outcome of voluntary association membership to the aggregate-level feature of town heterogeneity. The hypothesis predicts that heterogeneity will be negatively related to membership because, ceteris paribus, the potential for homophilous social network ties decreases with heterogeneity. The research examines heterogeneity wi…
Work Histories and Voluntary Association Memberships
Measuring the Composition of Voluntary Groups: A Multitrait-Multimethod Analysis
Data on a sample of 128 face-to-face voluntary groups are analyzed with the multitrait-multimethod approach. The traits measured include four characteristics: size, sex composition, age composition, and educational composition. These four traits are measured with three different methods: reports from a respondent chosen through a probability sample from the community, reports from an official of the group, and estimates from direct measurement of…
Clearing the cobwebs: An analysis of the timing of youth concussion legislation in U.S. states
Socio-demographic homogenizing trends within fixed-boundary spatial areas in the United States
Living across Institutions: Exploring Sex-Based Homophily in Occupations and Voluntary Groups
Occupational sex segregation is well documented. Research on voluntary associations shows that these also are segregated by sex. However, little is known about the connections between these institutions. In this research, we explore the effects of occupational sex composition on the sex composition of respondents' voluntary memberships. We find a positive relationship between the sex composition of men's occupations and the sex composition of the…
Continuity or Change? The Impact of Parents' Divorce on Newly Married Couples
Socialization into marital identities is viewed as a learning process initiated in the family of origin and continued through interactions in the offspring's marriage. We test three hypotheses pertaining to the intergenerational continuity or discontinuity in this process. The hypotheses derive from the proposition that behaviors and expectations learned in childhood will continue into marriage unless they fail to be reinforced early in the marri…
Research in the Sociology of Organization
Sex and Race Homogeneity in Naturally Occurring Groups
Journal Article Sex and Race Homogeneity in Naturally Occurring Groups Get access Bruce H. Mayhew, Bruce H. Mayhew University of South Carolina Direct correspondence to J. Miller McPherson, Department of Sociology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar J. Miller McPherson, J. Miller McPherson University of Arizona Search for other …
Measuring the Composition of Voluntary Groups: A Multitrait-Multimethod Analysis
Data on a sample of 128 face-to-face voluntary groups are analyzed with the multitrait-multimethod approach. The traits measured include four characteristics: size, sex composition, age composition, and educational composition. These four traits are measured with three different methods: reports from a respondent chosen through a probability sample from the community, reports from an official of the group, and estimates from direct measurement of…
Testing a Dynamic Model of Social Composition: Diversity and Change in Voluntary Groups
We test a dynamic model of the social composition of voluntary groups. The model is based on the idea that sociodemographic variables define social niches in which voluntary groups grow and decline, share and compete, and change or remain static. The flow of individuals through such groups depends on the competition of other groups for their time and other resources. We build a dynamic model of this process and show how this model can account for…
Competition and Commitment in Voluntary Memberships: The Paradox of Persistence and Participation
Much of the research on voluntary associations has argued that commitment to the group determines member participation and persistence. In this framework, highly committed members participate to a greater degree than less committed members, and maintain their connection with the group over longer periods of time. Less committed members, on the other hand, participate sporadically, and tend to drop their memberships easily. This commitment thesis …
A Time to Join, A Time to Quit: The Influence of Life Cycle Transitions on Voluntary Association Membership
Voluntary association researchers typically rely on cross-sectional data to demonstrate that individual membership varies across life cycle stages. The life cycle and membership, however, are more appropriately treated as dynamic processes. This research recognizes the dynamic nature of these processes by exploring the influence of transitions to marriage and parenthood on the joining and leaving rates of voluntary associations. Event history tec…
IQ and Stratification: An Empirical Evaluation of Herrnstein and Murray's Social Change Argument
A state-level index of the conditions that Herrnstein and Murray suggest tightened the relationship between IQ and status in the past century as well as a measure of “credentialing by examination” are used to try to explain interstate variation in the association between IQ and status attainment circa 1990. The results contradict Herrnstein and Murray's interpretation and provide support for an alternative credentialing argument. The more a state…
Town Heterogeneity and Affiliation: A Multilevel Analysis of Voluntary Association Membership
This article develops and tests a general hypothesis derived from a theoretical perspective that links the individual-level outcome of voluntary association membership to the aggregate-level feature of town heterogeneity. The hypothesis predicts that heterogeneity will be negatively related to membership because, ceteris paribus, the potential for homophilous social network ties decreases with heterogeneity. The research examines heterogeneity wi…
Continuity or Change? The Impact of Parents' Divorce on Newly Married Couples
Socialization into marital identities is viewed as a learning process initiated in the family of origin and continued through interactions in the offspring's marriage. We test three hypotheses pertaining to the intergenerational continuity or discontinuity in this process. The hypotheses derive from the proposition that behaviors and expectations learned in childhood will continue into marriage unless they fail to be reinforced early in the marri…
The System of Occupations: Modeling Occupations in Sociodemographic Space
What accounts for changes in the social composition of occupations over time? We address this question by adapting an ecological theory of competition from McPherson (1983). This theory suggests that occupations compete for members in a niche space defined by the social composition of an occupations members. As one occupation successfully acquires and retains new people with different sociodemographic characteristics, other occupations experience…
Work Histories and Voluntary Association Memberships
Living across Institutions: Exploring Sex-Based Homophily in Occupations and Voluntary Groups
Occupational sex segregation is well documented. Research on voluntary associations shows that these also are segregated by sex. However, little is known about the connections between these institutions. In this research, we explore the effects of occupational sex composition on the sex composition of respondents' voluntary memberships. We find a positive relationship between the sex composition of men's occupations and the sex composition of the…
The Prison Industry: Carceral Expansion and Employment in U.S. Counties, 1969–1994
Objectives. Despite the interest that social scientists have displayed in the rising rate of incarceration, little attention has been devoted to understanding its consequences for local areas. This is an important omission because prison construction has become a component of state and local economic development schemes. Indeed, there is a widespread belief that prison construction provides significant economic benefits to local areas. Methods. W…
What Happened to the "Long Civic Generation"? Explaining Cohort Differences in Volunteerism
In Bowling Alone Robert Putnam argues that the passing of the “long civic generation” whose values were molded by the Depression and the Second World War, has resulted in a decline in civic engagement. In this analysis we test the generation hypothesis by comparing the volunteer behavior of two successive generations of women at the same age. No support for Putnam's thesis is found. Once appropriate controls for sociodemographic trends are impose…
Substitute or Complement? Spousal Influence on Volunteering
Social scientists have documented the influence of family statuses on volunteering, ignoring intrafamily effects. Using newly issued data from the Current Population Survey on the volunteer behavior of 19,626 American couples, we test two competing theories concerning spousal influences on volunteering. Substitution theory predicts that spouses will trade off volunteer work; complementarity theory predicts that spouses' volunteer work is positive…
Employment Sector and Volunteering: The Contribution of Nonprofit and Public Sector Workers to the Volunteer Labor Force
In capitalist societies, jobs are sorted not only by occupational status, but also by the employment sector in which they are situated. Research has demonstrated that public- and nonprofit-sector workers have more prosocial values than private-sector workers. We used recent data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) Special Supplement on Volunteering to examine sector differences in the likelihood of doing volunteer work and the number of hour…
Sex Segregation in Volunteer Work
Sex segregation in the workplace—the tendency for men and women to work in different occupations and jobs—remains widespread. Domestic chores are also sex-typed, but the extent to which sex segregation is found in other forms of nonwaged work, such as volunteering, is unknown. One theory about the work/nonwork interface predicts a positive relation between the two types of activity: sex segregation will be just as common in unpaid labor. Another …
Homeownership and Volunteering: An Alternative Approach to Studying Social Inequality and Civic Engagement1
Previous research on volunteering finds significant differences by race and social class. We augment these findings by examining a largely ignored measure of social class: tenure status, the distinction between renters and homeowners. We test a theory that predicts people volunteer more if they have a “stake” in their community and we use the value of their home as a measure of the size of this stake, with renters having no stake at all, using da…
Revisiting the Impact of Prison Building on Job Growth: Education, Incarceration, and County-Level Employment, 1976â 2004
Objectives. It is widely believed that prison construction offers significant economic benefits to local areas. We review the popular and scholarly literature and provide a quantitative analysis of claims. Methods. We analyze data on all existing and new prisons in the United States since 1960 to assess the impact of these prisons on the pace of public, private, and total employment growth in U.S. counties from 1976 to 2004. Results. Our results …
Socio-demographic homogenizing trends within fixed-boundary spatial areas in the United States
Informal lending networks in rural Ethiopia
Social Heterogeneity and Volunteering in U.S. Cities
In this research we explore the relationship between social heterogeneity and volunteering across U.S. metropolitan areas testing a theory that race heterogeneity, racial segregation, and income inequality are negatively associated with the rate of volunteering. Theorizing that social heterogeneity will have different effects for religious and secular volunteering rates, we analyze them separately. We use nonlinear multilevel models to analyze ne…
Clearing the cobwebs: An analysis of the timing of youth concussion legislation in U.S. states
All sports carry risks: NFL, media, and the framing of the youth sports concussion crisis
Teaching with Inclusivity: Examining Flexible Pedagogical Techniques That Amplify Accessibility While Retaining Engagement
Courses with enrollment of over 100 students pose particular accessibility and engagement challenges, especially for students struggling with health issues or work, family, and/or extracurricular obligations. When classes returned to campus after the pandemic, we adopted flexible pedagogical techniques in a Sociology of Sport class to alleviate some of these challenges. We retained online assignments, removed attendance requirements, and institut…
Sociology (20 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Economics (17 works) · Demographic economics (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Nonprofit Sector and Volunteering (13 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Demography (11 works) · Social Capital and Networks (11 works) · Population (8 works)