Diffusion in Sociological Analysis

Birth Cohort Changes in the Association Between College Education and Religious Non-Affiliation

“…This finding supports the first hypothesis. It also fits with expectations from a cultural diffusion model (Palloni 2001;Pampel and Hunter 2012;Rogers 2003), which suggests that religious innovations that begin disproportionately among the highly educated eventually diffuse to the remainder of the population. While cultural diffusion is not easy to directly address through survey-based research, extending the above analyses to incor porate international samples could provide additional evidence.…”

“…This diffusion becomes a self-sustaining process once the new behavior reaches a certain threshold (Palloni 2001). Eventually, less-educated seg ments of the population should adopt these behaviors in large numbers.…”

“…With regard to the non-college-educated, the recent religious deinstitutional ization of non-college-educated Americans (Wilcox et al 2012) suggests increases in religious disaffiliation among the less educated in particular. Finally, cultural diffusion research shows that the highly educated are often "early adaptors" and even "innovators" of new beliefs and behaviors (Rogers 2003), but that novel ways of believing and behaving then diffuse to lesseducated segments of the population (Palloni 2001;Pampel and Hunter 2012), and this process manifests across genera tions (Edmunds and Turner 2002). Thus, the positive effect of higher education on religious disaffiliation should decline across generations, and higher education may even be negatively associated with religious disaffiliation in younger generations.…”

Social context of first birth timing in a rapidly changing rural setting

“…A large body of empirical literature has shown that patterns of social interactions can help explain the dramatic changes in social and demographic behaviors (Casterline 2001; Kohler 2001; Kohler, Behrman, and Watkins 2001; Palloni 2001). Using data from a rapidly changing rural setting in Nepal, this paper examines the influence of social context on the rate of first birth.…”

Sociology as a Population Science

“…Goldthorpe identifies two main approaches to mechanism-based explanation. The first, associated with 'analytical sociology', is to draw upon a catalogue or toolkit of social mechanisms, one example being social diffusion mechanisms (e.g., Palloni 2001). While this approach has the advantage of allowing theoretical integration across substantive domains, it has the inherent danger of prioritizing the mechanisms themselves and searching for examples that best illustrate their explanatory power rather than seeking to account for observed population regularities.…”