Michael Allen
My current research interests are in the sociology of culture. I am especially interested in the production of culture. More specifically, I am interested in the relationship between commercial success and creative autonomy in the production of culture. I am currently conducting research on success and opportunity among television producers and film directors.
Irenee Beattie
I am especially interested in how adolescent social contexts (schools, families, neighborhoods) intersect with gender, race, and class to shape young adult experiences with such outcomes as parenthood, work, education, and poverty. One current project examines whether "unrealistic" educational and occupational expectations are associated with racial/ethnic differences in young women's risk of teen motherhood. Another area of inquiry considers how high school coursework shapes young women's pathways to welfare receipt. I am also developing a project that examines how school discipline reinforces gender norms, and how student-initiated court challenges to disciplinary actions have altered this relationship over time.
Lisa Catanzarite
My research centers on gender and racial/ethnic stratification, with a specialization in labor market inequality and poverty. One thrust concerns general processes that operate across gender and racial/ethnic groups. Another special concentration is research on Latinos, with attention to key differences between immigrant and native Latinos. My work generally focuses at the macro level on institutional features of markets or on macro-micro links between market structures and individual inequality. Much of my research concerns occupational and job segregation and addresses processes of change in occupations, illuminating (1) pay erosion over time in women's and minorities' occupational ghettos; (2) shifts in occupations' demographic composition; (3) segregation of immigrant Latinos in what I term “brown-collar” fields; and (4) wage consequences of segregation for both immigrant Latinos and native workers. Other research explores structural contributors to poverty among women of different racial/ethnic/immigrant groups, focusing on both labor market and marriage market conditions.
Don Dillman
My current research focuses on improving the quality of survey data. Specifically, I am investigating how visual design and layout influence answers to Internet and Mail Surveys. I am also interested in how changes in survey data collection modes (e.g. telephone to Internet) may change respondent answers and how to mitigate such changes, as mixed-mode surveys become increasingly important as a means of reducing nonresponse errors in surveys. My survey research is supported by outside funding from federal agencies and collaborative arrangements with both public and private organizations. I have also conducted research on community structures and processes, and how technology impacts communities, but am less active in these areas of research than in the past.
Lee Freese
I am interested in promoting and developing transdisciplinary theory and research in human ecology, in such a way as to integrate principles and findings from the biological and social sciences.
Louis Gray
I am primarily interested in two interrelated aspects of choice behavior: first, the impact of framing and experience on learning and the distribution of behavioral choices and, second, the processes of learning and choice in interactive social situations in which an actors outcomes are partially or wholly determined by the actions of others. My interest in the first area has arisen through the discovery that the form, rather than the content, of the feedback an actor receives in a choice situation can substantially alter behavior. In order to anticipate an actor's choices in multi-alternative situations it is necessary to understand the factors that contribute to the actor's "frame" of the situation and the social circumstances that give rise to it. I primarily use experimental approaches to study these phenomena. My interest in the second area continues investigations of small group behavior first begun over thirty years ago. I conceive of small group interaction as simultaneous learning or choice situations in which each actor's behavior is influenced, at least potentially, by each other actor. At present I am developing computer simulations of small group behavior that can be used to test hypotheses regarding the formation of collaborative relations among group members.
Gregory Hooks
My book, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex: World War II's Battle of the Potomac, presented a theoretically-informed analysis of the World War II economic mobilization. It also laid out an expansive agenda for further research. In pursuing research into U.S. militarism, I have contributed to several sub-areas within sociology, including political sociology, urban and regional sociology and organizations. My current research agenda includes a continuing interest in warmaking, but has expanded in several directions. I am currently involved in research into the rhetoric and the impact of prisons on local economic areas and am pursuing qualitative interviews to examine the interplay of race, wealth and education.
Christine Horne
Broadly speaking, I am interested in the problem of order. More specifically, my research focuses on social norms. Although there is widespread interest in norms among sociologists, legal scholars and others, we know relatively little about them – how they emerge, what makes them effective, and what their relation is to law. I am engaged in a theoretically driven research program that seeks to address these questions and that uses experimental methods to evaluate theoretical predictions. I am also working on some collaborative projects that apply theoretical insights to explain naturally occurring norms. Some completed and ongoing projects include: explaining variation in default-rates across micro-credit borrowing groups (with Denise Anthony); explaining variation in the permissiveness of norms regulating heterosexual sex across cultures, across nations, and across socio-economic groups within the United States; and explaining nations ' commitment to the International Criminal Court (with Darren Hawkins and Dan Nielsen).
Monica Johnson
My research interests are in the areas of work, family, and education across the life course, with particular focus on social psychological processes in adolescence and the transition to adulthood. A major portion of my research activities is focused on stability and change in work values-the importance people attach to various rewards of working. In current projects in this area, I am examining entry into adult family roles and early experiences of limited employment opportunities as potentially consequential for work values and subsequent occupational attainment. I am also currently studying educational experiences in adolescence and the ways in which such experiences set young people on different life trajectories (collaboratively with Glen Elder and Robert Crosnoe).
Andrew Jorgenson
I am currently conducting quantitative cross-national research on the international political-economic causes of unequal ecological exchange and concomitant environmental degradation in the contemporary world-economy, the environmental impacts of sectoral foreign direct investment and domestic social factors in less-developed countries, and an analysis of international economic inequality over the last five centuries. My recent research involved cross-national studies of material consumption, water pollution, and infant mortality, and an NSF funded collaborative project (Christopher Chase-Dunn—PI) dealing with the trajectories of global structural integration, particularly waves of investment globalization over the last two centuries and cycles of economic hegemony in the modern world-system.
Julie Kmec
My current research centers around one common theme: race-gender stratification. My first research project explores race-gender inequality in the workplace. The first project uses matched employer-worker data to explore race-gender inequality in urban work organizations. I am especially interested in exploring how work organizations and employers shape work outcomes for white women and men and people of color. My second project is a quantitative follow-up study of urban youth in Philadelphia (the Philadelphia Neighborhood Study with Frank F. Furstenberg). In this project, we are especially interested in studying how race and gender pattern the life course transitions of inner-city at-risk youth.
Kim Lloyd
My core research interests lie in the areas of race/ethnicity and social inequality, particularly with respect to family formation and educational attainment in the United States. I am currently engaged in two principal lines of research.
The first examines the role of U.S. marriage markets in producing divergent family outcomes among Latinos and African Americans in relation to non-Hispanic whites. Recent work in this area includes a methodological piece identifying the racial and ethnic boundaries that delineate the Hispanic marriage market; an examination of intergenerational differences in Latinas' transition to marriage; the construction of a theoretical marriage market constraints perspective to explain differences in marital timing by immigrant generation; and the creation of a new theoretical model - the Structural Assortative Mating Model - to account for the disparate impact of contextual characteristics on Anglo, African American, and Latino men's marital timing.
My second line of research explores ethno-racial inequality arising from differential access to the American educational system. Funded through a previous grant from the Ford Foundation and a current grant from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) I am studying the elimination of race sensitive college-admissions criteria (i.e., Affirmative Action) in the state of Texas and its subsequent replacement with the Top 10% Plan. The goal of this project is to assess minority student outcomes under alternative admissions regimes. Recent work examines the impact of the Top 10% policy on minority high school students' educational aspirations, expectations, and college applications; changes in the admissions and enrollments of minority students in selective public universities before and after affirmative action; and minority representation and success in selective public and private universities under alternative (i.e., race-sensitive vs. race-neutral) admissions regimes.
Lisa McIntyre
My interests include examining the relationship between law and society and developing new qualitative research techniques. I amcurrently working on the second edition of my popular introductory text, The Practical Skeptic, and writing a research methods text for undergraduates.
Clayton Mosher
I conduct research in the general area of crime and deviance, law and society, and in the more specific areas of the individual and structural correlates of substance use and abuse, and the treatment of substance abuse. I am also interested in drug policies, criminal sentencing, and racial issues in the criminal justice system.
Christine Oakley
I am currently interested in the formation, maintenance, and dissolution in interorganizational relationships between public and private organizational partners. In addition I am interested in the role local culture plays in institutional change.
Eugene Rosa
My overarching research interest is driven by the question: Can societies survive the impacts imposed on their environments by human activities? I attempt to research this question in two complementary ways, one through the big picture (macro in the language of sociology) and one through the small picture of human perception and action (micro). The big picture approach has involved the development over the past decade (in collaboration with colleagues and students) of a simple statistical model that we use to uncover the key human activities that are producing undesirable environmental impacts on a global level. The small picture approach has been a focus on the question of risk, meaning to assess the degree of uncertainty and consequences of human choices, especially technological choices. A complement to this risk research is research that seeks to develop more effective forms of democracy for managing technological and environmental risks.
Thomas Rotolo
My primary research explores aspects of voluntary association membership, participation, and group composition. This research uses and tests ideas from social network theory -- most notably the concept of homophily (the propensity for similars to associate). I also enjoy working on interesting collaborative projects that allow me to utilize my programming skills.
Jennifer Schwartz
The unifying theme of my research is understanding how stratification and inequality impact level of crime and social control efforts. My research interests focus on identifying how position in the social structure (e.g., gender and race/ethnicity) interacts with structural features of communities (e.g., inequality, unemployment) to engender varying levels of crime and social control across place. I also have an interest in trends in crime and community sociology. My most current work examines how cross-community differences in family structure impact female and male levels of violence and also how changes in family structure have influenced trends in female and male violence.
James F. Short, Jr.
I continue my interests in violence and violence avoidance, and in social aspects of risk. With support from the National Consortium on Violence Research, I am working with Lori Hughes, who is reanalyzing field observational data from our Chicago gang project for her Ph.D. dissertation. The focus of this work is on situational factors and group processes that are associated with alternative behavioral outcomes. We hope to be able to compare findings from the original research with current research being conducted in New York City and in other settings, such as prisons.
Nella Van Dyke
My research focuses on social movements and hate crime, with attention to the relationship between systems of stratification and movements. I am interested in how structural characteristics of the social context influence levels of protest activity and hate crime. Recent projects include studies of the dynamics of student protest, social movement coalitions, and the factors influencing right-wing mobilization. I am currently conducting research on the AFL-CIO's Union Summer student internship program and how it has influenced student anti-sweatshop protests. I am also doing a study of the extent to which different social movements target the state versus non-state entities. Another current project examines how the gender composition of social movement organizations changes over time.
Amy Wharton
I have long-standing research interests in the areas of gender, work and organizations, and inequality. My two current research projects continue to explore these themes, while paying special attention to the social context of work and its impact on behavior and beliefs. One line of research examines the causes and consequences of work group composition. I am particularly interested in the effects of demographic heterogeneity and homogeneity on individual- and work group-level outcomes, such as organizational commitment. More broadly, I am interested in how and under what conditions particular forms of difference become socially and individually meaningful in the workplace. A second research project explores the fate of work-life policies in a large, financial services firm. This research, funded by the Citigroup Behavioral Sciences Research Council, examines the role that work group characteristics play in shaping people's use and perceptions of work-life policies. I am conducting this research with my colleague, Mary Blair-Loy.
