Areas of Study
Class Stratification
Faculty interests include income and wealth inequality, educational disparities, health disparities, residential segregation, social inequality in political participation, stratified health outcomes, and environmental sociology.
Gender
Faculty interests focus on gender ideology, sexuality, gender differences in the transition to adulthood, and gender differences in juvenile delinquency, income, crime, values, and in educational plans.
Race and Ethnicity
Faculty interests include health disparities, residential segregation, the interaction of culture and power in processes of domination, educational attainment, life outcomes, and collective identity.
Faculty interests include juvenile delinquency, LGBT youth and sexualities, deviant identities, control theory, family and crime, gender differences in the causes of crime, crime and the life course, child maltreatment, gangs, drugs/crime nexus, deception detection, and criminal justice program evaluation.
Cross-National Sociology
Faculty interests include globalization, immigration, integration of immigrant populations, international development, cross-national inequality, the world economy, the diffusion of world culture and political and economic models, education and HIV/AIDS in South Africa, and comparative/historical institutions.
Environmental Sociology
Faculty interests include culture and the environment, environmentally-related illness and health, environmental social movements, structural human ecology, and social and demographic drivers of environmental pollution, deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions.
Social Demography
Faculty interests include residential segregation, rural-to-urban migration, immigrant adaptation, household demography and children's health and well-being, sexuality and health risks, contraception, and marriage and fertility.
Family
Faculty interests include family-related attitudes, family formation behaviors, religion's relationship to family formation and functioning, co-parenting and fathers’ parenting of their non-resident children, family and crime, work-family conflict, the division labor in the home, health and aging with an emphasis on long-term care, transition to adulthood, and the life course.
Religion
Faculty interests include religious demographics, inequality in religious organizations, religions in their comparative and historical contexts, religion and Family, religion and politics, and the links between religion and education, gender, sexuality, and social inequality.
Methods of Study
Faculty interests focus on the techniques, strategies, and processes of using mathematically, statistical, and computational based models to explain social phenomena with an emphasis on study design, sampling, and statistical analysis.
Faculty interests focus on collecting and analyzing non-numerical data to understand concepts, opinions, and experiences to explain social phenomena, with emphasis on grounded theory, ethnography, action research, phenomenological research, and narrative research.
Faculty combine elements of both quantitative research and qualitative research in the same study, collecting and/or analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data, and “mixing” them to explain social phenomena and answer research questions.
Faculty use evaluation methods to determine the impact of a social intervention or a particular program with emphasis on assessing the design, implementation, improvement or outcomes of a program.
