Scholars@Duke
Jessi Streib

Jessi Streib

Associate Professor of Sociology
Sociology
jessi.streib@duke.edu
337 Soc/Psych Bldg, Box 90088, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

Is It Racist? Is It Sexist? Why Red and Blue White People Disagree, and How to Decide in the Gray Areas

Book · January 14, 2025 Why Red and Blue White People Disagree, and How to Decide in the Gray Areas Jessi Streib, Betsy Leondar-Wright. Tom ( research assistant ) : Tell me what made you think it was sexism . Tessa : Because I was treated differently just on ... ... Cite

The Accidental Equalizer How Luck Determines Pay after College

Book · November 19, 2023 The Accidental Equalizer is a frank appraisal of how this “luckocracy” works and its implications for the future of higher education and the middle class. ... Cite

Moving Away from One’s Origins: Predictors of Becoming a First-Generation College Graduate and Not Becoming a Continuing-Generation Graduate

Journal Article Sociological Quarterly · January 1, 2023 Nearly a third of students whose parents do not have bachelor’s degrees become first-generation college graduates and over a third of students with at least one parent with a bachelor’s degree do not become continuing-generation college graduates. We apply ... Full text Cite

Class and the cultural styles applicants present to gatekeepers

Journal Article Poetics · June 1, 2021 Cultural matching theory holds that class reproduction occurs when individuals from different class origins present different cultural styles to gatekeepers, who in turn select advantaged individuals based upon their styles. This theory also suggests that ... Full text Cite

Privilege Lost Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall

Book · 2020 Drawing upon ten years of longitudinal interviews with over 100 American youth, this book shows which upper-middle-class youth are most likely to fall, how they fall, and why they do not see it coming. ... Cite

Presenting Their Gendered Selves? How Women and Men Describe Who They Are, What They Have Done, and Why They Want the Job in Their Written Applications

Journal Article Sex Roles · November 1, 2019 Occupational segregation is due, at least in part, to differences in what jobs women and men apply to and how they are evaluated. However, we know little about one mechanism that may relate to employers’ evaluations and, therefore, to occupational segregat ... Full text Cite

The Equalizing Power of a College Degree for First-Generation College Students: Disparities Across Institutions, Majors, and Achievement Levels

Journal Article Research in Higher Education · August 15, 2019 Researchers have paid increasing attention to issues of access and retention among first-generation college students but have focused less on their post-college outcomes. We extend this literature by investigating if there is a generational wage gap, that ... Full text Cite

Class, culture, and downward mobility

Journal Article Poetics · October 1, 2018 The study of class and cultureis predominately the study of class reproduction, not also downward mobility. This article maintains that sociologists do not see the cultural mechanisms associated with downward mobility because we share three collective blin ... Full text Cite

Benign Inequality: Frames of Poverty and Social Class Inequality in Children’s Movies

Journal Article Journal of Poverty · January 2, 2017 Media targeted at adults tends to portray poverty and social class inequality as the result of individual merit and moral worth. Research, however, has not uncovered how poverty and social class inequality are portrayed in media targeted at children. Drawi ... Full text Cite

The unbalanced theoretical toolkit: Problems and partial solutions to studying culture and reproduction but not culture and mobility

Journal Article American Journal of Cultural Sociology · January 1, 2017 Many theories explain how culture is linked to class reproduction but few explain how culture is linked to class mobility. This article argues that this theoretical imbalance is problematic as it ignores key stratification processes. The article then devel ... Full text Cite

Explanations of How Love Crosses Class Lines: Cultural Complements and the Case of Cross-Class Marriages

Journal Article Sociological Forum · March 1, 2015 Sociologists know little about how actors explain their attraction to a partner who grew up in a different social class or why their accounts are likely. This is problematic as one form of social class heterophily is relatively common-heterophily by class ... Full text Cite

Class origin and college graduates' parenting beliefs

Journal Article Sociological Quarterly · September 1, 2013 Previous studies have documented relationships between parenting beliefs and social class. Few studies, however, have examined how parenting beliefs vary among those who share a class position. Drawing upon interviews with 54 college graduates-27 parents w ... Full text Cite

Class Reproduction by Four Year Olds

Journal Article Qualitative Sociology Cite

Marrying Across Class Lines

Journal Article Contexts Cite