M Frye
Biographic Data
| ID | 1342 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Frye |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Frye |
| SIGNATURE | FRYE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3534-5733 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 322 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1966 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Leveraging reddit data for context-enhanced synthetic health data generation to identify low self esteem
Low self-esteem (LoST) is a latent yet critical psychosocial risk factor that predisposes individuals to depressive disorders. Although structured tools exist to assess self-esteem, their limited clinical adoption suggests that relevant indicators of LoST remain buried within unstructured clinical narratives. The scarcity of annotated clinical notes impedes the development of natural language processing (NLP) models for its detection. Manual char…
The Educational Differentiation of African Birth Timing
As educational access has expanded across Africa, birth timing has remained quite stable. Using data representing 51 birth years and 34 countries, we show that these modest aggregate changes mask more dramatic changes within educational groups. Over time, educational attainment has become an increasingly salient predictor of birth timing, as highly educated women have delayed first births and lengthened subsequent birth intervals more. The educat…
No End to Hypergamy when Considering the Full Married Population
The worldwide expansion of female educational opportunities in recent decades has prompted demographers to assess the frequency with which women marry up (hypergamy) or down (hypogamy) with regard to education. A series of articles documented dramatic and nearly universal declines in hypergamy over time and across female educational advantage. However, this previous work investigated hypergamy only in the context of unequal educational pairings, …
Attitudes Toward Intimate Partner Violence in Dyadic Perspective: Evidence From Sub-Saharan Africa
Although intimate partner violence (IPV) is inherently a relational event shaped by couple-level factors, most empirical examinations of IPV-related attitudes have used individuals as the unit of analysis. We apply a dyadic perspective to the study of attitudes about the acceptability of IPV, harnessing couple-level data from 33 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, a region characterized by particularly high levels of both the incidence and acceptanc…
Moralizing the Production and Sale of Student Papers in Uganda
Sociologists have shown that moral understandings of market exchanges can differ between historical periods and institutional settings, but they have paid less attention to how producers' moral frameworks vary depending on their unequal positions within both markets and institutions. We use interviews and ethnographic observations to examine the vibrant market of research shops selling academic work to students around two of Uganda's top universi…
Fearing Such a Lady: University Expansion, Underemployment, and the Hypergamy Ideal in Kampala, Uganda
In Uganda, the cultural norm of hypergamy, which dictates that husbands should have higher economic and social status than wives, is pervasive and influential. Yet hypergamy has recently been challenged by women's gains in education relative to men and by an unemployment crisis leaving educated young men unable to find steady work. Using interviews with recent university graduates in Kampala, we investigate how highly educated young adults naviga…
Intramarital Status Differences Across Africa's Educational Expansion
Objective:This article documents how intramarital differences in educational status vary across Africa's heterogeneous educational expansion, which has encompassed an enormous breadth of educational opportunities during the past 50 years.Background:Educational expansion influences intramarital status differences both by altering the educational composition of men and women and by reconfiguring the social conventions associated with a given educat…
The myth of agency and the misattribution of blame in collective imaginaries of the future
Like Bees to a Flower: Attractiveness, Risk, and Collective Sexual Life in an Aids Epidemic
We examine how men's shared understandings of women's physical attractiveness are influenced by concerns about risk in the context of a generalized AIDS epidemic. Using 180 conversational journals—descriptions of informal conversations about sex occurring in Malawi between 1999 and 2011—we show that men deploy discourses of risk to question and undermine the status advantages enjoyed by attractive women. Men simultaneously portray attractive wome…
From Privilege to Prevalence: Contextual Effects of Women’s Schooling on African Marital Timing
In Africa and elsewhere, educated women tend to marry later than their less-educated peers. Beyond being an attribute of individual women, education is also an aggregate phenomenon: the social meaning of a woman’s educational attainment depends on the educational attainments of her age-mates. Using data from 30 countries and 246 birth cohorts across sub-Saharan Africa, we investigate the impact of educational context (the percentage of women in a…
Visualizing Africa's Educational Gender Gap
This figure depicts the gendered patterns of educational expansion across Africa. The horizontal axis displays educational access, and vertical lines represent educational gender gaps for 267 country-specific birth cohorts, representing adults born between 1941 and 1992 in 32 African countries. The gaps take on an almond shape. In early stages of educational expansion, boys enter school at higher rates than girls; female enrollment begins to catc…
The pleasure of pursuit: Recreational hunters in rural Southwest China exhibit low exit rates in response to declining catch
Hunting is one of the greatest threats to tropical vertebrates. Examining why people hunt is crucial to identifying policy levers to prevent excessive hunting. Overhunting is particularly relevant in Southeast Asia, where a high proportion of mammals and birds are globally threatened. We interviewed hunters in Southwest China to examine their social behavior, motivations, and responses to changes in wildlife abundance. Respondents viewed hunting …
Cultural Meanings and the Aggregation of Actions: The Case of Sex and Schooling in Malawi
How can cultural understandings simultaneously diverge from and contribute to aggregate patterns of action? On one hand, shared cognitive associations guide people's everyday actions, and these actions comprise the behavioral trends that sociologists seek to measure and understand. On the other hand, these shared understandings often contradict behavioral trends. I address this theoretical puzzle by considering the empirical case of sexual relati…
The demography of words: The global decline in non-numeric fertility preferences, 1993-2011
This paper examines the decline in non-numeric responses to questions about fertility preferences among women in the developing world. These types of response-such as 'don't know' or 'it's up to God'-have often been interpreted through the lens of fertility transition theory as an indication that reproduction has not yet entered women's 'calculus of conscious choice'. However, this has yet to be investigated cross-nationally and over time. Using …
A mixed-methods framework for analyzing text data: Integrating computational techniques with qualitative methods in demography
Automated text analysis is widely used across the social sciences, yet the application of these methods has largely proceeded independently of qualitative analysis
Physical attractiveness and women's HIV risk in rural Malawi
BACKGROUND: Qualitative evidence from sub-Saharan Africa, where a generalized AIDS epidemic exists, suggests that attractiveness may play a role in shaping individual-level HIV risk. Attractive women, who are often blamed for the epidemic and stigmatized, are believed to pose a higher HIV risk because they are viewed as having more and riskier partners. OBJECTIVE: We examine the association between perceived attractiveness and HIV infection and r…
Ideals as Anchors for Relationship Experiences
Research on young-adult sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa typically conceptualizes sex as an individual-level risk behavior. We introduce a new approach that connects the conditions surrounding the initiation of sex with subsequent relationship well-being, examines relationships as sequences of interdependent events, and indexes relationship experiences to individually held ideals. New card-sort data from southern Malawi capture young women's relat…
Popular Moralities and Institutional Rationalities in Malawi's Struggle Against Aids
The AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa is fertile ground for examining how moral evaluations evolve over time and across different settings. We compare the discourse on AIDS in Malawi as presented in the media with that of everyday conversations. Drawing on two sets of texts, newspaper articles and conversational journals, produced over a ten-year period from 1999 through 2008, we analyze their moral injunctions, or what individuals should or sh…
Bright Futures in Malawi's New Dawn: Educational Aspirations as Assertions of Identity
Imagined futures, once a vital topic of theoretical inquiry within the sociology of culture, have been sidelined in recent decades. Rational choice models cannot explain the seemingly irrational optimism of youth aspirations, pointing to the need to explore other alternatives. This article incorporates insights from pragmatist theory and cognitive sociology to examine the relationship between imagined futures and present actions and experiences i…
Improving Disclosure and Consent: “Is It Safe?”: New Ethics for Reporting Personal Exposures to Environmental Chemicals
The recent flood of research concerning pollutants in personal environmental and biological samples—blood, urine, breastmilk, household dust and air, umbilical cord blood, and other media—raises questions about whether and how to report results to individual study participants. Clinical medicine provides an expert-driven framework, whereas community-based participatory research emphasizes participants’ right to know and the potential to inform ac…
Some are Laughing; Some are Not—Why
Three studies explored the relative importance of various manipulations of the social environment on appreciation of humor in college males. The experimental situations included hostility-arousal, individual versus group administration, and a laughing versus non-laughing confederate (CE). Overt laughter was more responsive to manipulation than was rating of jokes; however, both responses were clearly influenced. Group administration and laughter …
Bright Futures in Malawi's New Dawn: Educational Aspirations as Assertions of Identity
Imagined futures, once a vital topic of theoretical inquiry within the sociology of culture, have been sidelined in recent decades. Rational choice models cannot explain the seemingly irrational optimism of youth aspirations, pointing to the need to explore other alternatives. This article incorporates insights from pragmatist theory and cognitive sociology to examine the relationship between imagined futures and present actions and experiences i…
Cultural Meanings and the Aggregation of Actions: The Case of Sex and Schooling in Malawi
How can cultural understandings simultaneously diverge from and contribute to aggregate patterns of action? On one hand, shared cognitive associations guide people's everyday actions, and these actions comprise the behavioral trends that sociologists seek to measure and understand. On the other hand, these shared understandings often contradict behavioral trends. I address this theoretical puzzle by considering the empirical case of sexual relati…
Ideals as Anchors for Relationship Experiences
Research on young-adult sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa typically conceptualizes sex as an individual-level risk behavior. We introduce a new approach that connects the conditions surrounding the initiation of sex with subsequent relationship well-being, examines relationships as sequences of interdependent events, and indexes relationship experiences to individually held ideals. New card-sort data from southern Malawi capture young women's relat…
The demography of words: The global decline in non-numeric fertility preferences, 1993-2011
This paper examines the decline in non-numeric responses to questions about fertility preferences among women in the developing world. These types of response-such as 'don't know' or 'it's up to God'-have often been interpreted through the lens of fertility transition theory as an indication that reproduction has not yet entered women's 'calculus of conscious choice'. However, this has yet to be investigated cross-nationally and over time. Using …
From Privilege to Prevalence: Contextual Effects of Women’s Schooling on African Marital Timing
In Africa and elsewhere, educated women tend to marry later than their less-educated peers. Beyond being an attribute of individual women, education is also an aggregate phenomenon: the social meaning of a woman’s educational attainment depends on the educational attainments of her age-mates. Using data from 30 countries and 246 birth cohorts across sub-Saharan Africa, we investigate the impact of educational context (the percentage of women in a…
Moralizing the Production and Sale of Student Papers in Uganda
Sociologists have shown that moral understandings of market exchanges can differ between historical periods and institutional settings, but they have paid less attention to how producers' moral frameworks vary depending on their unequal positions within both markets and institutions. We use interviews and ethnographic observations to examine the vibrant market of research shops selling academic work to students around two of Uganda's top universi…
The myth of agency and the misattribution of blame in collective imaginaries of the future
Popular Moralities and Institutional Rationalities in Malawi's Struggle Against Aids
The AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa is fertile ground for examining how moral evaluations evolve over time and across different settings. We compare the discourse on AIDS in Malawi as presented in the media with that of everyday conversations. Drawing on two sets of texts, newspaper articles and conversational journals, produced over a ten-year period from 1999 through 2008, we analyze their moral injunctions, or what individuals should or sh…
Intramarital Status Differences Across Africa's Educational Expansion
Objective:This article documents how intramarital differences in educational status vary across Africa's heterogeneous educational expansion, which has encompassed an enormous breadth of educational opportunities during the past 50 years.Background:Educational expansion influences intramarital status differences both by altering the educational composition of men and women and by reconfiguring the social conventions associated with a given educat…
Fearing Such a Lady: University Expansion, Underemployment, and the Hypergamy Ideal in Kampala, Uganda
In Uganda, the cultural norm of hypergamy, which dictates that husbands should have higher economic and social status than wives, is pervasive and influential. Yet hypergamy has recently been challenged by women's gains in education relative to men and by an unemployment crisis leaving educated young men unable to find steady work. Using interviews with recent university graduates in Kampala, we investigate how highly educated young adults naviga…
Improving Disclosure and Consent: “Is It Safe?”: New Ethics for Reporting Personal Exposures to Environmental Chemicals
The recent flood of research concerning pollutants in personal environmental and biological samples—blood, urine, breastmilk, household dust and air, umbilical cord blood, and other media—raises questions about whether and how to report results to individual study participants. Clinical medicine provides an expert-driven framework, whereas community-based participatory research emphasizes participants’ right to know and the potential to inform ac…
Attitudes Toward Intimate Partner Violence in Dyadic Perspective: Evidence From Sub-Saharan Africa
Although intimate partner violence (IPV) is inherently a relational event shaped by couple-level factors, most empirical examinations of IPV-related attitudes have used individuals as the unit of analysis. We apply a dyadic perspective to the study of attitudes about the acceptability of IPV, harnessing couple-level data from 33 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, a region characterized by particularly high levels of both the incidence and acceptanc…
A mixed-methods framework for analyzing text data: Integrating computational techniques with qualitative methods in demography
Automated text analysis is widely used across the social sciences, yet the application of these methods has largely proceeded independently of qualitative analysis
Visualizing Africa's Educational Gender Gap
This figure depicts the gendered patterns of educational expansion across Africa. The horizontal axis displays educational access, and vertical lines represent educational gender gaps for 267 country-specific birth cohorts, representing adults born between 1941 and 1992 in 32 African countries. The gaps take on an almond shape. In early stages of educational expansion, boys enter school at higher rates than girls; female enrollment begins to catc…
No End to Hypergamy when Considering the Full Married Population
The worldwide expansion of female educational opportunities in recent decades has prompted demographers to assess the frequency with which women marry up (hypergamy) or down (hypogamy) with regard to education. A series of articles documented dramatic and nearly universal declines in hypergamy over time and across female educational advantage. However, this previous work investigated hypergamy only in the context of unequal educational pairings, …
Like Bees to a Flower: Attractiveness, Risk, and Collective Sexual Life in an Aids Epidemic
We examine how men's shared understandings of women's physical attractiveness are influenced by concerns about risk in the context of a generalized AIDS epidemic. Using 180 conversational journals—descriptions of informal conversations about sex occurring in Malawi between 1999 and 2011—we show that men deploy discourses of risk to question and undermine the status advantages enjoyed by attractive women. Men simultaneously portray attractive wome…
The Educational Differentiation of African Birth Timing
As educational access has expanded across Africa, birth timing has remained quite stable. Using data representing 51 birth years and 34 countries, we show that these modest aggregate changes mask more dramatic changes within educational groups. Over time, educational attainment has become an increasingly salient predictor of birth timing, as highly educated women have delayed first births and lengthened subsequent birth intervals more. The educat…
The pleasure of pursuit: Recreational hunters in rural Southwest China exhibit low exit rates in response to declining catch
Hunting is one of the greatest threats to tropical vertebrates. Examining why people hunt is crucial to identifying policy levers to prevent excessive hunting. Overhunting is particularly relevant in Southeast Asia, where a high proportion of mammals and birds are globally threatened. We interviewed hunters in Southwest China to examine their social behavior, motivations, and responses to changes in wildlife abundance. Respondents viewed hunting …
Physical attractiveness and women's HIV risk in rural Malawi
BACKGROUND: Qualitative evidence from sub-Saharan Africa, where a generalized AIDS epidemic exists, suggests that attractiveness may play a role in shaping individual-level HIV risk. Attractive women, who are often blamed for the epidemic and stigmatized, are believed to pose a higher HIV risk because they are viewed as having more and riskier partners. OBJECTIVE: We examine the association between perceived attractiveness and HIV infection and r…
Some are Laughing; Some are Not—Why
Three studies explored the relative importance of various manipulations of the social environment on appreciation of humor in college males. The experimental situations included hostility-arousal, individual versus group administration, and a laughing versus non-laughing confederate (CE). Overt laughter was more responsive to manipulation than was rating of jokes; however, both responses were clearly influenced. Group administration and laughter …
Improving Disclosure and Consent: “Is It Safe?”: New Ethics for Reporting Personal Exposures to Environmental Chemicals
The recent flood of research concerning pollutants in personal environmental and biological samples—blood, urine, breastmilk, household dust and air, umbilical cord blood, and other media—raises questions about whether and how to report results to individual study participants. Clinical medicine provides an expert-driven framework, whereas community-based participatory research emphasizes participants’ right to know and the potential to inform ac…
Bright Futures in Malawi's New Dawn: Educational Aspirations as Assertions of Identity
Imagined futures, once a vital topic of theoretical inquiry within the sociology of culture, have been sidelined in recent decades. Rational choice models cannot explain the seemingly irrational optimism of youth aspirations, pointing to the need to explore other alternatives. This article incorporates insights from pragmatist theory and cognitive sociology to examine the relationship between imagined futures and present actions and experiences i…
Popular Moralities and Institutional Rationalities in Malawi's Struggle Against Aids
The AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa is fertile ground for examining how moral evaluations evolve over time and across different settings. We compare the discourse on AIDS in Malawi as presented in the media with that of everyday conversations. Drawing on two sets of texts, newspaper articles and conversational journals, produced over a ten-year period from 1999 through 2008, we analyze their moral injunctions, or what individuals should or sh…
Ideals as Anchors for Relationship Experiences
Research on young-adult sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa typically conceptualizes sex as an individual-level risk behavior. We introduce a new approach that connects the conditions surrounding the initiation of sex with subsequent relationship well-being, examines relationships as sequences of interdependent events, and indexes relationship experiences to individually held ideals. New card-sort data from southern Malawi capture young women's relat…
The pleasure of pursuit: Recreational hunters in rural Southwest China exhibit low exit rates in response to declining catch
Hunting is one of the greatest threats to tropical vertebrates. Examining why people hunt is crucial to identifying policy levers to prevent excessive hunting. Overhunting is particularly relevant in Southeast Asia, where a high proportion of mammals and birds are globally threatened. We interviewed hunters in Southwest China to examine their social behavior, motivations, and responses to changes in wildlife abundance. Respondents viewed hunting …
Cultural Meanings and the Aggregation of Actions: The Case of Sex and Schooling in Malawi
How can cultural understandings simultaneously diverge from and contribute to aggregate patterns of action? On one hand, shared cognitive associations guide people's everyday actions, and these actions comprise the behavioral trends that sociologists seek to measure and understand. On the other hand, these shared understandings often contradict behavioral trends. I address this theoretical puzzle by considering the empirical case of sexual relati…
The demography of words: The global decline in non-numeric fertility preferences, 1993-2011
This paper examines the decline in non-numeric responses to questions about fertility preferences among women in the developing world. These types of response-such as 'don't know' or 'it's up to God'-have often been interpreted through the lens of fertility transition theory as an indication that reproduction has not yet entered women's 'calculus of conscious choice'. However, this has yet to be investigated cross-nationally and over time. Using …
A mixed-methods framework for analyzing text data: Integrating computational techniques with qualitative methods in demography
Automated text analysis is widely used across the social sciences, yet the application of these methods has largely proceeded independently of qualitative analysis
Physical attractiveness and women's HIV risk in rural Malawi
BACKGROUND: Qualitative evidence from sub-Saharan Africa, where a generalized AIDS epidemic exists, suggests that attractiveness may play a role in shaping individual-level HIV risk. Attractive women, who are often blamed for the epidemic and stigmatized, are believed to pose a higher HIV risk because they are viewed as having more and riskier partners. OBJECTIVE: We examine the association between perceived attractiveness and HIV infection and r…
Like Bees to a Flower: Attractiveness, Risk, and Collective Sexual Life in an Aids Epidemic
We examine how men's shared understandings of women's physical attractiveness are influenced by concerns about risk in the context of a generalized AIDS epidemic. Using 180 conversational journals—descriptions of informal conversations about sex occurring in Malawi between 1999 and 2011—we show that men deploy discourses of risk to question and undermine the status advantages enjoyed by attractive women. Men simultaneously portray attractive wome…
From Privilege to Prevalence: Contextual Effects of Women’s Schooling on African Marital Timing
In Africa and elsewhere, educated women tend to marry later than their less-educated peers. Beyond being an attribute of individual women, education is also an aggregate phenomenon: the social meaning of a woman’s educational attainment depends on the educational attainments of her age-mates. Using data from 30 countries and 246 birth cohorts across sub-Saharan Africa, we investigate the impact of educational context (the percentage of women in a…
Visualizing Africa's Educational Gender Gap
This figure depicts the gendered patterns of educational expansion across Africa. The horizontal axis displays educational access, and vertical lines represent educational gender gaps for 267 country-specific birth cohorts, representing adults born between 1941 and 1992 in 32 African countries. The gaps take on an almond shape. In early stages of educational expansion, boys enter school at higher rates than girls; female enrollment begins to catc…
The myth of agency and the misattribution of blame in collective imaginaries of the future
Fearing Such a Lady: University Expansion, Underemployment, and the Hypergamy Ideal in Kampala, Uganda
In Uganda, the cultural norm of hypergamy, which dictates that husbands should have higher economic and social status than wives, is pervasive and influential. Yet hypergamy has recently been challenged by women's gains in education relative to men and by an unemployment crisis leaving educated young men unable to find steady work. Using interviews with recent university graduates in Kampala, we investigate how highly educated young adults naviga…
Intramarital Status Differences Across Africa's Educational Expansion
Objective:This article documents how intramarital differences in educational status vary across Africa's heterogeneous educational expansion, which has encompassed an enormous breadth of educational opportunities during the past 50 years.Background:Educational expansion influences intramarital status differences both by altering the educational composition of men and women and by reconfiguring the social conventions associated with a given educat…
Attitudes Toward Intimate Partner Violence in Dyadic Perspective: Evidence From Sub-Saharan Africa
Although intimate partner violence (IPV) is inherently a relational event shaped by couple-level factors, most empirical examinations of IPV-related attitudes have used individuals as the unit of analysis. We apply a dyadic perspective to the study of attitudes about the acceptability of IPV, harnessing couple-level data from 33 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, a region characterized by particularly high levels of both the incidence and acceptanc…
Moralizing the Production and Sale of Student Papers in Uganda
Sociologists have shown that moral understandings of market exchanges can differ between historical periods and institutional settings, but they have paid less attention to how producers' moral frameworks vary depending on their unequal positions within both markets and institutions. We use interviews and ethnographic observations to examine the vibrant market of research shops selling academic work to students around two of Uganda's top universi…
No End to Hypergamy when Considering the Full Married Population
The worldwide expansion of female educational opportunities in recent decades has prompted demographers to assess the frequency with which women marry up (hypergamy) or down (hypogamy) with regard to education. A series of articles documented dramatic and nearly universal declines in hypergamy over time and across female educational advantage. However, this previous work investigated hypergamy only in the context of unequal educational pairings, …
The Educational Differentiation of African Birth Timing
As educational access has expanded across Africa, birth timing has remained quite stable. Using data representing 51 birth years and 34 countries, we show that these modest aggregate changes mask more dramatic changes within educational groups. Over time, educational attainment has become an increasingly salient predictor of birth timing, as highly educated women have delayed first births and lengthened subsequent birth intervals more. The educat…
Leveraging reddit data for context-enhanced synthetic health data generation to identify low self esteem
Low self-esteem (LoST) is a latent yet critical psychosocial risk factor that predisposes individuals to depressive disorders. Although structured tools exist to assess self-esteem, their limited clinical adoption suggests that relevant indicators of LoST remain buried within unstructured clinical narratives. The scarcity of annotated clinical notes impedes the development of natural language processing (NLP) models for its detection. Manual char…
Sociology (17 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Economics (10 works) · Demography (8 works) · Economic growth (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Geography (6 works) · Medicine (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works)