Guides: SOCI 010: Social Stratification: Library Resources

Reference works

Encyclopedias and handbooks offer good summaries of specific topics, covering major issues and controversies, identifying important theories and scholars, and brief bibliographies of useful works. Handbooks are built from journal article-length chapters that usually provide more context and discussion than encyclopedia articles, and they will have longer bibliographies, too.

HINT! Handbooks often place their bibliographies in a separate chapter at the end of the volume. To work quickly, open the bibliography chapter in a new browser window. You can toggle back and forth from text chapter to bibliography chapter. You'll need to open a third browser window for the PennText Article Finder, too.

"Stratification and inequality". Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology Online (Wiley Online Library, 2007).
Several dozen articles on family topics, from the leading encyclopedia in the field. Articles will include brief bibliographies.
"Feeling class: affect and culture in the making of class relations" / Beverley Skeggs, in Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Sociology (Wiley Online Library, 2012)
A chapter from a very recent handbook that covers a wide range of sociological topics. You might want to browse some of the other chapters for related topics, such as "Racial and ethnic issues" / Brittany Chevon and Joe R Feagin.
Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities (Wiley Online Library, 2007)
This handbook provides chapters on conceptualizing inequalities, epistemology and methodology in studying inequality, family, community, and education, policy responses to inequalities, and media and technology.
"Social stratification". Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Handbook-like articles intended to explore social topics from an interdisciplinary research-front perspective.
Annual Review of Sociology
A journal of literature reviews. That is, it offers articles on specific topics that attempt to survey the past literature and the current state of scholarship, with a huge bibliography.
HINT! If title, keyword, or abstract searching retrieves overwhelming results, then try browsing individual volumes online - each volume includes a block of articles on "Differentiation and Stratification". If you don't wish to browse recent annual volumes online, then try searching for AnnRevSoc's articles in Sociological Abstracts.
Routledge handbook of poverty in the United States (Routledge, 2014)
Families: a social class perspective / Shirley A Hill. (Pine Forge, 2012)
Handbook on poverty and inequality / Jonathan Haughton and Shahidur R Khandker. (World Bank, 2009.)
Based upon notes to support training courses on poverty analysis, this work offers tools to measure, describe, monitor, evaluate, and analyze poverty, with background materials for designing poverty reduction strategies.

Good Reading on Families

The Penn Libraries have an enormous book collection on social stratification, social classes, and inequality. The collections below offer respected scholarly monographs and collected works made available in convenient ebook formats.

Franklin Catalog - the Penn Libraries catalog - lists books, e-books, journals, e-journals, videos and videostreams, and many more things for your use. Try a few searches, look at the sidebar Subject facet to discover relevant subject headings, then do new Advanced Searches to build clusters of synonyms and related concepts.
HINT! To show the range of topics available and to suggest subjects, here's a list of Franklin subject headings for Russell Sage Foundation books and e-books on social stratification.

Russell Sage Foundation e-books on social stratification
E-books from one of the most prestigious sociology presses. Many Russell Sage Foundation books are built from chapters by leading scholars, including current and former Penn professors, for example:
• Social class: how does it work? / Annette Lareau and Dalton Conley (eds).
• Categorically unequal: the American stratification system / Douglas S Massey.
NOTE! Franklin describes many more Russell Sage Foundation books in paper format. Russell Sage Foundation has only recently started to release e-books. To see print and online titles, click OFF the "Online" limit.
SAGE Knowledge e-books on social stratification
SAGE is a leading independent publisher in the social and behavioral sciences. SAGE Knowledge, their e-book platform, includes reference works as well as scholarly monographs.
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Penn's house journal for sociology and related topics, starting in 1890. Each issue treats one topic. See especially the issues compiled around the recently-initiated annual Daniel Patrick Moynihan Lecture on Social Science and Public Policy:
• "Living in a high-inequality regime". AAAPSS 663 (January 2016).
• "Monitoring social mobility in the twenty-first century". AAAPSS 657 (January 2015).

Finding journal articles & other scholarly lit

These bibliographies and databases will help you to identify interesting readings on social stratification and related subjects. Some of these databases will provide fulltext, but they should all have PennText Article Finder buttons or links that will point to online fulltext or print versions.

HINT! Try a few test searches, look at titles that catch your attention, read their abstracts and note down their subject headings or descriptors. Then try to build searches using synonyms and clusters of subject headings or descriptors.

"Social stratification" / Robert Andersen. Oxford Bibliographies Online: Sociology
OBO is intended to highlight basic, important, and useful works on specific subjects. See also the page on "Class" / Jeff Manza and additional pages on specific social classes.
Sociological Abstracts + Social Services Abstracts (combined)
lace to look for published research in sociology, social policy, and social welfare. The two databases use the same subject descriptor vocabulary and they share the same pool of source journals.
HINT! Classification codes are a quick way to narrow your search to a general topic. Use this string in one of your search lines to isolate SocAbs records on social stratification and social mobility: CL(1019)
See ProQuest Help for more SocAbs classification codes.
IBSS - International Bibliography of the Social Sciences
Larger than SocAbs, IBSS covers sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science - particularly useful for researching stratification. IBSS has strong international coverage, being produced for Unesco by the London School of Economics.
PolicyFile
Describes the gray literature of public policy, that is, informal thinktank and other research center reports that are often overlooked by SocAbs or IBSS. Provides fulltext and links out to original fulltext. Try pasting one or more of these Subject terms: "Affirmative Action", "Domestic Issues (U.S.), "Economic Issues", "Education", "Welfare", then adding your own keywords.
ERIC / US Department of Education (via ProQuest)
If your topic is about children, then searching ERIC is a must. This comprehensive bibliographic database of research literature on all things education includes filters for subject population's educational level.
JSTOR
A fulltext collection of major scholarly journals, particularly strong in sociology.
CAVEAT JSTOR usually does NOT provide fulltext for a journal's most recent five years. Want current scholarship? Do not look at JSTOR.
Also, JSTOR is a fulltext database. If you're not very careful, then your search results will overwhelm you. Use SocAbs or another bibliographic database.

Finding statistical information

These e-resources will help you find U.S. federal government statistics on social stratification and related topics.

ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the United States (Online edition)
The current and ongoing replacement to the U.S. Census Bureau's Stat Abs, published annually 1789-2012.
HINT! Remember - this is an ABSTRACT of federal statistical publications as well as a factbook. Use its tables to identify federal agencies and their statistical publications that might provide more detail than Stat Abs itself.
Historical Statistics of the United States (Millennial edition)
A many-year cumulative alternative to Stat Abs, produced by Cambridge University Press with the U.S. Census Bureau.
HINT! Take the time to read the essays accompanying the section you're using, and pay extra careful attention to the "Full Documentation" for each table, where variations and peculiarities in the time series will be noted.
People and Households / U.S. Census Bureau
Provides links to government statistical reports and data sources on equal employment opportunity, income, poverty, race, educational attainment, and many other social characteristics, including the American Community Survey and the Decennial Census, the Current Population Survey, and the Survey of Income and Program Participation.
See also Income Inequality / U.S. Census Bureau.

Proquest Statistical Insight
Use this to identify publications with statistics and other data sources, including U.S. federal and state statistical publications. PQSI doesn't always provide a direct URL to the publication, so you might need to Google away or ask for help.
HINT! Start with an "Advanced Search", change a dropdown to "Subject/Index Terms", then "Select from list". Although there's no subject term for stratification, you'll find relevant terms under many headings. After your search is completed, use the sidebar facets.
CAVEAT Don't be worried about overwhelming results. PQSI provides a record for every year a publication is issued - that's a LOT of records! Sort results by year to get a feel for the variety of information available.

General Social Survey
The large omnibus personal interview survey of U.S. households designed to monitor changes in both social characteristics and attitudes, conducted by NORC almost annually during 1972-1994, now biennially, 1994-2014. The GSS contains a standard core of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest.

Librarian & Coordinator of Social Sciences Collections

Lauris Olson

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Contact:

University of Pennsylvania Libraries
203 Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center
University of Pennsylvania
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Philadelphia, PA 19104-6206
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215-898-0119

Subjects: African Studies, Aging Studies, Communication, Criminology, Data & GIS, Economics, Food Studies, Health & Societies, Immigration, Linguistics, Philadelphia Studies, Population Studies & Demography, Social Sciences, Sociology, Urban Studies

Using Citations to Find Resources

You may already have citations of relevance to the text on which you are working. These resources will help you find an online or print version of the cited work.

Have a complete article citation? Use the PennText Article Finder on the library homepage.
HINT! Fill out the PennText form with complete journal title, volume and issue numbers, date, and first page number.
Only know the journal title? Use FindIt! on the library homepage.
Quick E-Lookup searches a custom list of our library's e-resources.
Looking for a book? Use Franklin Catalog on the library homepage.
HINT! If you know the title, then use "Title Browse" searching! Just the first few title words will do the job.

Style guides and manuals

American Sociological Association style guide
Most recent: 5th ed., 2014. Earlier editions also available.
"Quick Tips for ASA Style" (ASA website)
A 2-page overview of the ASA Style, per the ASA Style Guide (4th ed., 2010).
"Preparation checklist for ASA manuscripts" (ASA website)
"ASA Writing an Informative Abstract" (ASA website)
A guide to writing sociology papers / The Sociology Writing Group.
7th ed., Worth Publishers, 2013.
Step by step through the writing process. Includes separate chapters on genres: text analysis, qualitative, quantitative.
The sociology student writer's manual / William A Johnson et al.
5th ed. Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006 and earlier editions.
Publication manual of the American Psychological Association
APA style guide to electronic references
Most recent: 6th ed, 2010. Earlier editions also available.
The APA style is the de facto social-science writing style.
Chicago guide to writing about numbers and
Chicago guide to writing about multivariate analysis
These two books by Penn alumna Jane Miller offer guidance on presenting numeric information in your writing. Both books have recently been issued in 2nd editions.