![]() I didn't have a clear sense of purpose before I wandered into that class," he says. Inspired by that course, Alexander chose to major in sociology. "What really appealed to me was to look at data and evidence and try to discern patterns in data in a way where you could make sense out of those patterns." "Most everybody else hated the course, and I really liked it," he recalls. He grew up in working-class neighborhoods in west and northeast Philadelphia in the years after the Second World War, and he fell in love with sociology in an undergraduate statistical methods course at Temple University. The 68-year-old Alexander has the tall, lean build of a basketball player and sports a close-cropped white beard and wire-framed glasses. The vast majority born poor are almost certain to stay that way. Education and hard work lift people from the inner city out of poverty only in exceptional cases. Contrary to the popular American narrative that everyone has equal access to opportunity as long as he or she is willing to work hard, the reality revealed by the study is grim. The researchers show how, at each step on the path to adulthood, neighborhood and family and school conspire to pass down advantage and disadvantage from generation to generation. In their book The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood (Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), co-authors Alexander, Entwisle, and Linda Olson, an instructor in the School of Education, combine an explication of 25 years of data with powerful anecdotes-stories of murdered friends and siblings, absent fathers, mothers too addicted to drugs or alcohol to provide basic care, dreams deferred. But for poorer children, the picture was largely bleak. Many of the middle-class children in the study progressed through life's stages as expected: school, college, work, marriage, parenthood. Pulling these strands together, the researchers wove a rich tapestry from the lives of children growing up in Baltimore from the early 1980s through the mid-2000s. The sociologists combined this information with data from earlier interviews of both study subjects and their parents, along with profiles of the neighborhoods where their subjects grew up, school report cards, and family backgrounds. They collected a mountain of data: each subject's work history, how far he or she had advanced in school, their past drug use, number and ages of children and other family members, and relationship status. The vast majority born poor are almost certain to stay that way.Īlexander and his colleagues recorded every story. Some hoped to earn their GEDs after they got out.Įducation and hard work lift people from the inner city out of poverty only in exceptional cases. One subject had enrolled in his prison's master gardener program. That's really something to grow up with.'" The tales weren't all bleak. "You hear something like that, you say, 'Wow. One subject told the researcher that he had seen his brother hang himself outside his window. The stories the interviewees told could be heart-wrenching, even to a veteran sociologist like Alexander. "It's amazing what people will talk to you about, especially in the interviews we did in lockups," Alexander says. They spoke freely about the most personal aspects of their lives: unfulfilled dreams, time spent using and dealing drugs, relationships and sex. They were polite and respectful and relaxed in conversation. The researchers discovered that these young people, even if they were in jail for some "pretty nasty things" like attempted murder, usually made great interview subjects. Image caption: Sociologist Karl Alexander
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