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The present article selectively reviews the large number of recent studies that have been described as based on mixed methods. I begin by discussing a body of work that has emerged to promote mixed methods research across the social sciences. I then review and critique empirical studies in each of two general approaches to mixed methods: mixed data-collection studies, which combine two or more kinds of data; and mixed data-analysis studies, which combine two or more analytical strategies, examine qualitative data with quantitative methods, or explore quantitative data with qualitative techniques. I argue that, although mixed methods research is by no means new, empirical studies today combine methods in more diverse and, at times, innovative ways. Nevertheless, important methodological tensions will likely surface as the research becomes more self-reflexive.

Social capital theorists have shown that inequality arises in part because some people enjoy larger, more supportive, or otherwise more useful networks. But why do some people have better networks than others? This book argues that the answer lies less in people's deliberate “networking” than in the institutional conditions of the churches, colleges, firms, gyms, and other organizations in which they happen to participate routinely. This book introduces a model of social inequality that takes seriously the embeddedness of networks in formal organizations, proposing that what people gain from their connections depends on where those connections are formed and sustained. The model is illustrated and developed through a study of the experiences of mothers whose children were enrolled in New York City childcare centers. As a result of the routine practices and institutional conditions of the centers—from the structure of their parents' associations, to apparently innocuous rules such as pick‐up and drop‐off times—many of these mothers dramatically increased their social capital and measurably improved their wellbeing. Yet how much they gained depended on how their respective centers were organized. This book identifies the mechanisms through which childcare centers structured the networks of mothers, and shows that similar mechanisms operate in many other routine organizations, from beauty salons and bath houses to colleges and churches. The book makes a case for the importance of organizational embeddedness in the study of personal ties.

Current theories of how individuals in poor neighborhoods access information and resources have focused primarily on social ties, with concepts such as social isolation dominating discussion. But these theories ignore that individuals often access resources through interorganizational ties. The author suggests that an important role of neighborhood institutions such as churches and childcare centers is to serve asresource brokers—organizations that have ties to businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies rich in resources and that provide their patrons with access to these resources. This article presents a set of propositions to understand how and why neighborhood institutions broker resources and applies these propositions to a case study of 16 childcare centers in high poverty neighborhoods in New York City. The author argues that resource brokers may be understood as interorganizationally networked, loosely coupled entities whose actors respond to pressures of multiple origins, including professional norms and state mandates. He shows that, through mechanisms that vary in their formality and staff dependence, childcare centers provide access to a remarkable array of resources from external organizations. Findings suggest that resource access among the poor should be understood as an organizationally embedded process, and that true disadvantage may result not merely from living in poor neighborhoods, but from not participating in well-connected neighborhood institutions.

Objectives. This study examines which of five neighborhood conditions help account for racial differences in social networks. Methods. The data set is the Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey, a survey of blacks, whites, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans clustered in Chicago Census tracts, matched to 1990 Census data. I estimate HGLM models predicting five indicators of social isolation and five indicators of number of social ties as a function of race, controls, and the following neighborhood conditions: neighborhood poverty, proportion black, residential stability, ethnic heterogeneity, and population density. Results. Although initial estimates confirm the existence of racial differences in network size, most of these differences are not robust to controls for neighborhood conditions. Among the neighborhood variables, only neighborhood poverty is consistently associated with size of social networks. Conclusions. Findings suggest that while residential segregation has created conditions in which some races are more likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods, it is the poverty, not the racial composition, of the neighborhoods that is significantly associated with weaker social ties.

Recent work on neighborhood effects has rekindled interest in social organization theory and its relationship to local social capital. This article addresses several gaps in our knowledge about the mechanisms linking structural conditions to social (dis)organization and the role of culture in this process. Relying on the case of a predominantly Puerto Rican housing project in Boston, it investigates changes in one aspect of social organization-participation in local community activities-suggesting the theory should incorporate the role of cohorts and cultural frames and rethink the relationship among structure, culture, and change.

Today, ethnographers and qualitative researchers in fields such as urban poverty, immigration, and social inequality face an environment in which their work will be read, cited, and assessed by demographers, quantitative sociologists, and even economists. They also face a demand for case studies of poor, minority, or immigrant groups and neighborhoods that not only generate theory but also somehow speak to empirical conditions in other cases (not observed). Many have responded by incorporating elements of quantitative methods into their designs, such as selecting respondents 'at random' for small, in-depth interview projects or identifying 'representative' neighborhoods for ethnographic case studies, aiming to increase generalizability. This article assesses these strategies and argues that they fall short of their objectives. Recognizing the importance of the predicament underlying the strategies – to determine how case studies can speak empirically to other cases – it presents two alternatives to current practices, and calls for greater clarity in the logic of design when producing ethnographic research in a multimethod intellectual environment.

As in economics, racial discrimination has long been a focus of research in sociology. Yet the disciplines traditionally have differed in how they approach the topic. While some studies in recent years show signs of cross-disciplinary influence, exposing more economists to sociological perspectives on racial discrimination would benefit both fields. We offer six propositions from the sociology of racial discrimination that we believe economists should note. We argue that independent of taste and statistical discrimination, economists should study institutional discrimination; that institutional discrimination can take at least two forms, organizational and legal; that in both forms the decisions of a contemporary actor to discriminate can be immaterial; that institutional discrimination is a vehicle through which past discrimination has contemporary consequences; that minor forms of everyday interpersonal discrimination can be highly consequential; and that whether actors perceive they have experienced discrimination deserves attention in its own right.

Introduces a series of journal articles devoted to the subject. Adapted from the source document.

In 2018, a staggering 38 million Americans, about one in every nine, faced income poverty. Seventeen million of them experienced deep or extreme poverty, defined as a household income below 50 percent of the household’s poverty threshold (Semega et al. 2019). Extreme poverty has almost doubled between 1995 and 2016 (Brady and Parolin 2019). Given the magnitude of the problem both in the United States and worldwide, it is hardly surprising that poverty has had a steady place on the agenda of the social sciences. Nonetheless, not all of its features have received equal attention. A recent literature review of the causes of poverty (Brady 2019) distinguished between three dominant explanations for poverty: individual behaviors and risk factors (e.g., unemployment, single motherhood, cultural schemas, and repertoires guiding behaviors), structural factors (e.g., the economic and demographic context), and power and institutions that create policies affecting poverty rates (e.g., by redistributing resources, investing in capabilities, or “disciplining the poor”). Both structural and institutional explanations have included meso-level factors, such as neighborhoods and organizations. These meso-level conditions have also received attention in other reviews (Desmond and Western 2018; Small and Newman 2001) and special issues (e.g., Allard and Small 2013; Friedrichs, Galster, and Musterd 2003; Lee et al. 2015).In contrast, a meso-level concept that has received far less attention in such reviews for its role in poverty is that of social networks. This limited attention is surprising, since poverty is profoundly relational (Desmond and Western 2018; Hall 2019; Walker 2014) in the sense that it is lived, managed, negotiated, and reproduced in relationships with others. Research into social networks and poverty has made it clear how important it is to pay attention to the role of networks in how people experience, cope with, and seek to escape poverty. Nonetheless, researchers have drawn widely diverging conclusions. Some authors have emphasized how networks are an essential survival mechanism, whereas others find that they exacerbate the risk of social exclusion, and still others present alternative perspectives. It is unclear how these contrasting findings can be consolidated.This volume aims to push our understanding of the role of social networks in the day-to-day subsistence of families and individuals suffering economic hardship further. We have two objectives: (1) we seek to update the literature with new, fieldwork-based evidence on how networks affect how people cope with poverty; and (2) we aim to refine and expand on the theoretical processes through which networks are mobilized in times of need. The multiple causal pathways between network conditions and poverty remain only partly mapped out. While many social relationships emerge in organizations in which people routinely participate (Small 2009), little is known about the conditions under which these organizations contribute to the creation of social capital among their clients or participants. The studies and results reported in this volume intend to inform theory, substance, and practice by expanding on the many ways networks are related to poverty.In this introductory article, we first provide a brief overview of the different types of effects that networks can have on well-being. Then, we review the interdisciplinary literature on the role of social networks in coping with poverty to help the reader to situate the contributions of this special issue. We discuss three contrasting perspectives on networks among the poor that have dominated the literature: pervasive solidarity, pervasive isolation, and selective solidarity (Raudenbush 2016). The perspectives are partly analogous to traditional perspectives on the organization of personal networks in modern society, where community is “saved” (or “found”; Drouhot 2017), “lost,” or “liberated” (Wellman 1979). Then, we outline the contributions of the articles presented in the current volume. The collection of articles provides new evidence and theory of how networks are mobilized in poverty, showing the wide empirical variation in network access and returns among the poor and analyzing the roles of organizational brokerage and evolving networking practices that may help to explain contrasting outcomes. We conclude with a brief discussion of pathways for future research.