Kevin Kiley

Intentionally mis-formatting em dashes as "--" to let people know I'm a human.

I'm a sociology professor from North Carolina, not a congressional representative from California. Representative Kiley is not on BlueSky.

I am not a representative from California. I'm a professor from North Carolina. Rep. Kevin Kiley is not on BlueSky, as far as I know.

EVERY time?

a new article in Political Psychology: osf.io/rhf4q

we argue that studies of belief change have an identifiability problem much like the APC problem: the composition of change (who changed or how much they changed) is observationally confounded.

with @pablobellode.bsky.social & @stephenvaisey.com:

Check out my new article on xenophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric among US evangelical leaders that just got published (open access) in @sociusjournal.bsky.social

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

A great part of sociology is that you read a bunch of books about completely different topics (Marriage! Naval navigation! Churches!) that are secretly about the same thing, and then you read a bunch of books that are just called “Social Theory” that are completely unrelated to each other.

a snippet from the post, saying: "Critiques like this, mostly coming from the Heterodox Academy quarters of academia, share a familiar structure. They contend that sociology is “politically captured,” yet when it is time to say what scholars should actually do differently, the prescriptions are procedural (new review boards, special grants, and viewpoint-diversity pledges), rather than intellectual."

a "heterodox" critique of sociology is just a critique in search of its orthodoxy. in this short post, I argue that criticism of sociology should be substantive, with *actual* implications for practice.

Criticism of Sociological Orthodoxy Needs to be Substantive
tkeskinturk.github.io/blog/orthodoxy

Misaligned Incentives. A final mechanism is institutional. Fields like sociology—and subfields like cultural sociology—are made up of organizations, sections, journals, prizes, networks, and so on. Although most scholars endorse interdisciplinarity in theory, the strong nature of fields makes doing actually interdisciplinary research an uphill climb. For graduate students and assistant professors, the main impediment is the risk that innovative interdisciplinary work simply won’t be understood or valued by journal reviewers or hiring departments. This is a real concern given how anxiety provoking the job market already is. For senior faculty, the dynamics are more subtle. By the time a cultural sociologist becomes a full professor, she has become embedded in a network of other sociologists. For some, this means citations, speaking invitations, prizes, and—perhaps most important—status deference. To put it bluntly, at the ASA meetings, people recognize me; at the Cultural Evolution Society or Cognitive Science Society conference, they don’t. If, as Randall Collins claims, we seek out successful interaction rituals, I can see why hanging out exclusively with sociologists is a hard habit to break. Why would I want to feel invisible?

I just happened to read @stephenvaisey.com on this www.jstor.org/stable/48642...

I am a professor from North Carolina, not a U.S. congressional representative from California. I don't believe that Kevin Kiley is on bluesky.

Stop micro-blogging and start meso-blogging.

Be the change you want to see in the world! Get a few good buddies and start a blog!

They say this stuff came up "never" or "about once or twice" in past year, but there was substantial difference across topics. Most common topics were related to religion, immigration, and general sentiment toward politicians (we fielded the survey in summer 2024).

What Are You Talking about? Discussion Frequency of Issues Captured in Common Survey Questions Article: What Are You Talking about? Discussion Frequency of Issues Captured in Common Survey Questions | Sociological Science | Posted May 2, 2025

Ever wonder how often the public talks about issues that come up in social science surveys? We asked people how many times in past year they talked about topics of 88 GSS questions, including issues in politics, religion, & morality (short answer: rarely): sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12...

Hot off the presses! I would say go talk about it with your friends, but everything we find leads us to expect that you won't.

While you wait to the PDF link to get fixed, you can always read the preprint: osf.io/preprints/so...

Hey friends, I’m job hunting!

Looking for roles in data science or research—if you hear of anything, I’d love it if you send it my way.

If you’re looking for someone who knows Python, R, Stan, has collected and worked with all kinds of data, and is always excited to learn more—let’s talk! 😊

Cc @tkeskinturk.bsky.social

New study coming in @sociologicalsci.bsky.social. We asked Americans which topics from the GSS they spend time talking about. Generally, people say they talk about these issues "never" (~40%) or "once or twice in the past year." Religious topics much more common than most political, "social" issues.

Some notable difference across groups: Republicans say they talk more about religion. Democrats say they talk more about extramarital affairs (!). Older respondents say they talk more about social security. Younger respondents say they talk more about homosexuality and gay marriage.

Average reported discussion frequency of each issue highly skewed by a few people who talk a lot about most things -- your friends who are always talking about politics. People who say they talk a lot about one thing likely to say they talk more about everything else, too.

New study coming in @sociologicalsci.bsky.social. We asked Americans which topics from the GSS they spend time talking about. Generally, people say they talk about these issues "never" (~40%) or "once or twice in the past year." Religious topics much more common than most political, "social" issues.

I'm not a congressional representative from California. I'm a professor in North Carolina.

I'm not a congressional representative from California. I'm a professor in North Carolina.

Excited about a new article with Reilly Kincaid in ASR @asanews.bsky.social on role-accumulation & mental health across the life course. We identify a disagreement across prominent theories for how role-accumulation should affect mental health, especially in older adulthood. doi.org/10.1177/0003...

Congrats!

There are other fun findings in the paper, so please go read it. But mostly we hope the concept of Cultural Blau Space proves to be a useful tool for thinking about how groups structure culture, cultural homogeneity, and group differences.

For example, people with graduate degrees cluster in a small corner of Cultural Blau Space, while people with only a high school diploma are spread across the whole space.

When we look at homogeneity of categorical labels (how close any two members of a group are in Cultural Blau Space) in space defined by 150 GSS opinion items, we find ascribed categories have low homogeneity, but voluntary/achieved categories are quite homogeneous (esp. high levels of education).

Beyond statistical variables: Examining the duality of persons and groups in structuring cultural space Socially constructed categories are central to sociological investigation, but their use in empirical research on culture is often limited to a role a…

New pub forthcoming with Yongren Shi and Freda Lynn in Poetics (www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...). In it, we conceptualize "Cultural Blau Space," the location of people in a multidimensional space simultaneously defined by many measures of personal culture.