Research on how groups form, change, and relate. Coverage tracks demography, family, race, class, education, and the institutions that shape daily life.
Dowry deaths have risen since the protest years — more than 6,500 in 2022 — even as the public mourning faded. In Public Culture, Kriti Kapila traces the silence to the 1955 reform that cut dowry loose from ritual and let it behave like a commodity.
Most US police de-escalation training has never been rigorously tested on actual use of force. Of dozens of programs adopted nationwide, only two show solid evidence of reducing force.
Why do Americans so rarely marry across race and class lines? A new Census-linked study of 31 million people finds residential segregation explains over a third of class-based marriage sorting but less than 5% of racial sorting. Desegregation could boost interclass marriage, while barriers to interracial marriage run far deeper than neighborhoods.
A new UC Berkeley Labor Center analysis profiles California’s 186,000 security guards. Most earn below a living wage, over half the low-wage tier lack employer health insurance, and annual turnover nears 92 percent. Researchers link that churn to weaker safety, citing airport screening data. The workforce is overwhelmingly people of color.
About half of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots, roughly double the 2024 share. But a new Pew Research Center survey finds views tilting negative. Most say AI is moving too fast and will make their data less secure. Even younger adults, the heaviest users, are the most skeptical about AI’s future impact.
A four-year RAND street census across Hollywood, Venice, and Skid Row finds unsheltered homelessness has stopped falling. Tent encampments have shrunk, but rough sleeping now dominates and carries higher clinical need. New evidence links tent confiscation to rising rough sleeping, suggesting LA’s encampment-focused strategy has hit its limits.
NIST has released technical findings on the 2021 Champlain Towers South collapse that killed 98 people. Investigators traced the disaster to two failed garage column connections beneath the pool deck. Weak safety margins, design and construction deviations, and long-term corrosion left the Surfside building dangerously vulnerable. A final report with safety recommendations is forthcoming.
