The goal of the
Sociology Department Student-Scholar Partnership Program is to create an
opportunity for students and faculty to work together on research projects. The
goal is twofold – to provide students and recent alums with meaningful
experience working on sociological research projects and to provide some
collaborative assistance to faculty scholarship.
To be eligible
to apply you must be a current Sociology major or a recent graduate of the
Sociology Department, and you must have completed at least one course in Social
Theory and one course in Sociological Research by the end of Fall 2015.
Selected participants will receive $500 for 50 hours of work during the Spring
2016 semester.
Selected students
will commit to:
1.
Complete
a partnership contract and submit to the Chair by January 29, 2015.
2.
Meet
weekly or biweekly with your faculty partner during the academic semester to
review progress and discuss short-term goals.
3.
Fill
out a biweekly log documenting hours spent working on project and/or in
meetings about project.
4.
Meet
periodically with other participants to provide mutual support and guidance.
5.
Prepare
a presentation of the research for a forum open to students and faculty.
6.
Prepare
a poster for the Undergraduate Research Symposium in April.
To apply:
1)
For
each project you wish to apply to, write a short (2-3 paragraph) summary of why
you would like to be involved and why your skills and interests are a good fit
for the goals of the project. If you plan to apply for more than one project
please be sure to write this summary for each. Save this document as a PDF
file.
2)
Choose
a writing sample of about 5 pages (from a class paper or something else you
have previously written without collaborators) and save as a PDF file.
3)
Save
your unofficial transcript as a PDF file.
If you are
chosen as a finalist you will be asked to schedule an interview with the
faculty member whose project you are applying for.
2015-2016 Student-Scholar Partnership Opportunities:
Increasing Gender Inclusivity in Faculty Members’ Teamwork Practices
Prof. Kacey Beddoes
The
low numbers of women in engineering remains a concern, and prior research on
students’ experiences demonstrates that classroom experiences and interactions
with other students and faculty disproportionately cause negative experiences
for female and other minority students and lead to attrition from engineering
programs. For a variety of reasons, teamwork is one component of engineering
education frequently experienced differently by women and other minority
students than by male students. Given that teamwork is of central and
increasing importance, it is vital that faculty members understand how to
maximize gender inclusivity of their teamwork components. This Student-Scholar
Partnership will contribute to that outcome through creation of training tools for
engineering faculty members.
The student will: 1)
help create an online training tool for faculty members, and 2) help plan a
workshop that utilizes the tool. The student will have the opportunity to be
part of an interdisciplinary group of researchers and faculty development
experts working on a product with real-world impact. Additionally, the student
will also have the opportunity to be part of the new Research In Sociology of
Engineering group as that is put in place over the course of this year. The
student will thus become part of an institutionalized group in which they can
continue to participate at the end of the Partnership, if they choose.
The student should: 1)
have an interest in gender and diversity; 2) have word processing and internet
research skills; 3) be responsible, proactive, and organized; and 4) be
detail-oriented.
The DREAM
Generation: The Emergence of the Student Immigrant Movement (SIM) in Massachusetts
Prof.
Thomas Piñeros Shields
Immigration
remains one of the most hotly debated policy and social issues of our
time. In particular, there are
approximately two million unauthorized immigrants who entered the United States
as children and attended public high schools but have little to no way to
normalize their citizenship status.
Through an in-depth ethnography of a social movement organization, the
Student Immigrant Movement (SIM), my doctoral dissertation explained how these
undocumented immigrant students emerged as political social movement actors
between 2006 and 2012 to become known as “DREAMers.” Today DREAMers are included among central
actors in the field of immigrant rights movement, and are invited into public
debates around stats and federal policies of immigrant inclusion and
exclusion. The current project will
extend this project since the passage of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals (DACA) that provided a temporary and conditional legal status to
undocumented immigrants.
Specifically,
this project is part of a book prospectus that explains how undocumented immigrant students emerged as political actors in
Massachusetts. In this book, I expand upon the presence of
both organizational factors and opportunities/threats by defining the emergence
of undocumented immigrants as an interactive process of self-definition in
relationship to previous generations of immigrants. This research contributes to scholarship and
extends the concept of the ‘political generation’ that has been used by social
movement scholars (McAdam 1982; Whittier 1997; Braungart 2013) to explain the
emergence of “Freedom Riders” and other 1960’s-era social movement actors.
The
project is a mixed-method study that includes further analysis of existing
ethnographic data and interviews, quantitative analysis of demographic data,
and an analysis of media representations.
Specifically, over the next several months, as part of this project I
will:
1.
Write
a chapter/article that analyzes American Community Survey (ACS) data from the
U.S. Census Bureau to explain the demographic evolution of the “DREAM
Generation” from the late 1990’s to today.
This chapter establishes a demographic context for DREAMers as a
“political generation.”
2.
As
part of another chapter/article, identify patterns of public discourse around
DREAMers through an analysis of media representations of these actors with the strategic action field from 2001 to 2015
(Fligstein and McAdam 2012).
3.
Interview
allies and other adult members of the immigrant rights movement, members of the
media and policy makers to map the strategic
action field of DREAMers in Massachusetts.
4.
Interview
current members of the Student Immigrant Movement (SIM) to explain the
evolution of SIM since the passage of DACA, as a new conclusion to the text.
5.
Conduct
a comparative narrative analysis of DREAMers with U.S.-born citizen children of
undocumented immigrants that have been labeled “anchor babies.” This final part of the project depends upon
approval of previously collected interview data by the Institutional Review
Board (IRB) for the Protection of Human Subjects.
While
these projects are part of a book, portions might also be used as separate
articles.
Possible tasks for student involvement
and skills desired in a student partner.
While the
actual tasks for students will be developed after meeting the student, possible
project activities include:
1.
Organizing
and inventorying media files about the Student Immigrant Movement (SIM)
chronologically, and then coding these files thematically around the evolution
of the portrayal of “DREAMers.” The
student might begin with the several boxes and drawers of newspaper clippings
in my office and then collect articles from online search of relevant
publications and newswires. This contributes to my analysis of strategic action
fields for DREAMers.
2.
Coding
(or re-coding) existing interview transcripts using Atlas.ti or NVivo.
3.
Developing
new protocols for research interviews with undocumented immigrant students,
allies and adult members of the immigrant rights movement.
4.
Depending
on student skill, ability and interests, attending interviews of current SIM
members and/or adult allies with me to collect data.
5.
Depending
on student skill/ability, cleaning data files from ACS in SPSS and conducting
preliminary frequency and cross-tabulations.
Global Care
– What Difference Does Policy Make?
Prof.
Mignon Duffy
My research focuses on care
work, the labor at the center of the societal imperative to care for those who
are dependent because of youth, age, illness, or disability. In particular, I
am interested in paid care workers, a group I define broadly to include health
care workers (such as nursing aides, home health aides, doctors, and nurses),
social services and mental health care providers (such as social workers,
therapists, group home workers), teachers, and child care workers. The social
organization of care in the United States today is problematic for both the
workers who labor in the care sector and for the recipients of care and their
families. We all know stories of parents who cannot pay for child care, people
who cannot find the mental health care they need, and nursing shortages in
hospitals. And care workers like nursing assistants and child care workers are
among the lowest paid in the labor market, and have often been denied many
basic labor protections.
My previous research has been
almost exclusively focused on analyzing the shape of the paid care labor force
in the United States in order to better understand the roots of these social
problems. I have examined the historical development of paid care occupations
in the United States – why certain jobs have emerged and how particular
occupations became linked with gender, race and class both demographically and
normatively. And I have worked with collaborators to develop tools to measure the
care sector in Massachusetts and in the United States, as a way of
understanding its overall impact, its connections to policy, and its
interdependence with systems of inequality.
My goal in my next project is
to add an international comparative dimension to my overall research agenda. My
collaborator Amy Armenia and I want to measure and map the paid care labor
force in a range of countries for the purpose of comparing the impact of
different policy regimes. For each country we want to ask a series of questions:
How many workers work in care jobs? What are those jobs and how are they
defined? Are these “good” jobs relative to other opportunities in that country?
How are care jobs distributed by race, gender, and immigrant background? At the
same time, we will collect information about the policy regimes that impact the
organization of care in each country. Eventually our goal is to conduct an
analysis that combines quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the
impact of policy on the shape of the care labor force (and all of the
implications of that).
This project is in its
infancy, so in this year we want to begin to explore the literature to identify
countries where policy is very different, and explore possible sources of data
about various countries.
Possible tasks for student involvement
and skills desired in a student partner.
1) Conduct academic literature search to
identify previous research comparing care across international contexts (most
of this literature is about unpaid care – we have not so far found anything
that compares paid care).
2) Conduct research in academic literature
as well as on publicly available websites to identify major policy differences
among countries.
3) Begin to develop recommendations of
countries that would be appropriate for the focus of case studies.
4) Explore possible sources of quantitative
data about the labor force and examine these data sources for comparability.
Skills
desired in an undergraduate partner: interest in gender, policy and
international context, ability to use library databases to conduct literature
searches, familiarity with quantitative data and willingness to learn sources
of data (project will at this stage not involve quantitative analysis), ability
to work independently.
Gender Wage
Gap in Academia
Prof.
Cheryl Llewellyn
The goal of this study is to
assess the state of the gender wage gap in academia. Despite gains in gender
equity, the wage gap persists in most professional fields. In 2015, the
American Association for University Women (AAUW) estimates women’s salaries are
21% less than men’s (or put differently, women make 79 cents for every dollar
that men make). Though sociologically we understand the wage gap is a systemic
and widespread issue, many explanations for the disparity boil down to
individual level choices. For example, one common response to the difference
between men and women’s incomes is that they choose different professions and
subfields. Yet, even when the AAUW controlled for educational attainment and
choice of career, there was still a 7% difference between men’s and women’s
salaries that was explained only by their gender. Our study will address these gender wage gap
issues specifically in the context of academia. We will assess to what extent
the gender wage gap exists in professor salaries and if it varies by geographic
location and other institutional factors (public vs. private, for example).
Mirroring the AAUW study, we will determine if academic discipline influences
salary disparity and if gendered expectations and behaviors (like negotiating
skills) produce differential incomes in men and women.
At this phase in the project,
we need an undergraduate research partner to conduct a literature review and to
collect initial data for analysis. Specific tasks include:
·
Reviewing
literature on the gender wage gap, including writing annotated summaries of
relevant articles
·
Identifying
target colleges and universities for analysis
·
Collecting
information on professor salaries from college or university websites
Skills desired in an
undergraduate research partner:
·
Interest
in gender equality issues
·
Ability
to use academic databases to find journal articles
·
Proficiency
in internet research
·
Previous
experience with Microsoft Excel preferred
