Student-Scholar Partnership Program 2015-2016

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.

4)    Send these three documents to mignon_duffy@uml.edu by November 15, 2015.

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