Hoarding, a condition characterized by the acquisition of and inability to discard possessions, resulting in the extensive buildup of clutter, is a complex psychological and social problem affecting up to 4% of the U.S. population. Hoarding is often detected by actors in the community and reported to cities and other authorities. Detection can lead to eviction, forced cleanouts, loss of dependents, and other sanctions. To understand whether the detection and management of this condition by community actors contributes to widening disparities in the housing, health, and wellbeing of vulnerable populations, I use mixed methods: administrative data analysis and ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with stakeholders who detect and manage hoarding and those with personal experience of it. This project aims to learn how building codes and housing laws related to clutter are implemented; the trajectories of community-detected hoarding cases; and whether the way hoarding is defined, detected, and “treated” exacerbates existing gender, racial, and socioeconomic inequalities.
The accumulation, display, and use of objects have long been recognized as a means through which individuals construct social position and the self. Consumption can thus be thought of as investment, with seemingly infinite payoff as more status items are consumed. However, in the context of overaccumulation, privileged individuals with “cluttered” homes are disposing of their still-valuable possessions. This article uses narrative and content analyses of a critical case, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, a Netflix program designed to help families with cluttered homes sort through their things, to explore the meanings associated with accumulating “too much”: namely, uncontrolled, unactualized selves; class transgression; and failed gender and parental roles. Discarding items, regardless of their value, reduces the clutter, which eliminates the problems symbolized by having too much. Thus, divestment is framed as a means through which individuals can invest in the self, particularly in class position, gender and parental roles, and agency.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14695405221140545
Received 2023 Best Graduate Student Paper Award from the Sociology of Consumers & Consumption section of the American Sociological Association
Obituaries are often the only published record of an individual’s life and elicit community reactions, including stigmatization. Because obituaries are typically written by the bereaved, their content reflects the writer’s perceptions of mores governing the social context of the next-of-kin and decedent. When a cause of death is stigmatized, it can influence the way the bereaved write the obituary. However, what constitutes a stigmatized cause of death may change as larger societal discourses of morality shift and conditions or events become framed differently. Using a sample of obituaries (N = 210) from obituary aggregator Legacy.com of “off-time,” or premature, deaths in West Virginia from 2010, 2015, 2017, and 2019, this article explores whether the presentation of overdose deaths in obituaries changes alongside the shift in the public framing of the opioid crisis as medical rather than criminal. I find obituaries including terms associated with drug use and overdose become both more common and explicit over the course of the study period. This suggests that the shift in public framing of the opioid crisis from criminalization to medicalization corresponds with a decrease in drug stigmatization in obituaries. Obituary analysis can be a useful means of exploring the stigmatization of other controversial causes of death, such as suicide, cirrhosis, and lung cancer.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953624003708
Received 2024 Honorable Mention for Best Graduate Student Paper from the Sociology of Mental Health section of the American Sociological Association
Computer use during leisure time is often feared to detract from time spent engaging in physical activity, the latter of which is tied to positive health outcomes. However, research is inconclusive as to whether this is indeed the case or if computer use may actually encourage or motivate physical activity. To examine the relationship between computer use and physical activity, this study uses data from adult respondents from the 2017 American Time Use Survey (N = 9908), a nationally representative dataset documenting how civilian Americans spend their time. Using binary logistic regression analyses, this research finds that computer use is associated with higher odds of engaging in exercise activities, a relationship that persists after including several potentially confounding sociodemographic variables. However, there was no association with the likelihood of engaging in sports and recreation. The analysis also finds that exercise is unequally distributed among different age and socioeconomic status groups and those with children. Potential explanatory measures, not measured in this study, such as the consumption and production of health and fitness content and hypervisibility and scrutiny of the self via social media, may contribute to the higher likelihood of exercise, but not sports and recreational activity, among computer users.