June 2007
Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Brown University; Marcelo K. Silva, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul; Ernesto Ganuza, Instituto para Estudios Sociales Avanzados; and Arturo Alvarado, Centro de Estudios Sociologicos, $3,000, Civic Participation, City Governance, and Transitions to Democracy in Brazil, Spain, and Mexico. This project focuses on the decline in the power and autonomy of national states, and the growth of power and autonomy of local governments due to an expanded global economy and the growth of supranational organizations. The purpose of this project, the first step in a larger project, is to understand how local participatory democracy emerges Brazil, Spain, and Mexico.
Keri B. Burchfield, Northern Illinois University, $6,975, Not in my Neighborhood: Assessing Registered Sex Offenders’ Experiences with Local Social Capital and Social Control. This project looks into the understudied effects of increasingly restrictive community registration laws for sex offenders. Data on sex offenders’ perceptions regarding access to local social capital will be gathered by survey, and results will be used to inform criminal justice theory and these community-based policies.
Mary E. Campbell, University of Iowa, $3,600, Stress and Ethnic Misclassification by Observers. The purpose of this project is to study the effects of mis-classification or mismatch between others “observed” ethnic identities and individual’s own perceived ethnic identities. The project measures the stress white and Latina subjects experience when others perceive their race or ethnicity differently than they do by examining the level of cortisol present in the individual’s saliva.
William V. D’Antonio, Catholic University, and Steven A. Tuch, The George Washington University, $4,000, Religion, Culture Wars, and Polarization in the U.S. Congress, 1971-2006. These funds will be used to conduct the first phase of a study of the relationship between the religious affiliation of members of Congress and the polarization of Congressional voting on issues such as abortion and gay rights. Specifically, the PIs want to learn if roll call voting on abortion became more polarized between 1972 and 2004, and if so, what affect the religion of members of Congress played in this polarization.
Stephen Lippmann, Miami University, $5,400, The Social and Cultural Origins of the Radio Broadcasting Industry in the United States. This project examines the social and cultural dynamics that contributed to the emergence and evolution of the radio broadcasting industry in the United States from 1900-1934.He examines the importance of human agency in the processes of socio-cultural framing and organizational development.
Andrew London and Janet M. Wilmoth, Syracuse University, $2,000, Military Service, Social (Dis)Advantage, and the Life Course. There are numerous unanswered questions concerning how military service directly and indirectly affects life-course trajectories including marriage, divorce, health, fertility, mortality, and socio-economic status. There are numerous longitudinal data sets that can be used to answer these questions. The purpose of this project was to hold a conference to create new collaborative networks that stimulated new empirical and methodological studies that use these data sets.
Leah Schmalzbauer, Montana State University, $5,730, Off the Migratory Map: Uncovering Unknown Family Survival Strategies. The purpose of this project is to study Latino incorporation and family survival in southwestern Montana, a non-gateway immigrant settlement area. Among the major questions addressed are how immigrant families survive without the benefit of ethnic enclaves, what is the role of women in survival strategies, and how does the reception of these immigrants affect assimilation?
Jane Sell, Texas A&M University, and Carla Goar, Northern Illinois University, $3,500, Expanding Experimental Investigations of Race/Ethnicity in Sociology. According to the PIs, experimental sociologists have not made a major contribution to the theoretical literature on race and ethnicity, especially in the study of groups rather than individuals. In order to increase the contribution of experimental research, the PIs organized a conference where participants identify incentives and barriers to experimental research in this area, map out topics that can be studied experimentally, and foster collaborations among established and new experimenters.
Steve Zavestoski, University of San Francisco, $4,300, Embodied Health Movements and Transnational Social Movements: Linking the Local and Transnational through the Spread of Environmental Hazards. Many health movements organize around contestations over the discovery, definition, cause, treatment, and prevention of environmental causes of illness. The PI proposes to focus on social movement organizations in the global South, their formation, strategizing, and outcomes.
December 2007
Tim Bartley,Indiana University, $6,000, Global Standards in Domestic Settings: “Corporate Social Responsibility” in Practice. The PI investigates whether nation-states play an important role in shaping how private standards of corporate social responsibility get put to use. The research documents differences between two types of corporate standards—labor conditions and environmental standards in China, Indonesia, and Mexico. The characteristics of governance systems determine the ease or difficulty in implementing standards.
Linda Dorsten, State University of New York-Fredonia and Yuhui Li, Rowan University, $6,000, Data Collection and Modeling with Hard-to-Study but Rapidly Growing Populations: Socio-Economic Development, Ethnic Population and Elder Health in China. The PIs answer the question of how elder health in China is affected by community resources in areas with high minority concentrations and limited socioeconomic development. They test a series of strategies for measuring age and health and gather individual-level and macro-level data.
Jill Esbenshade, San Diego State University; Roderick Bush, University of St. John’s; and Edna Bonacich, University of California at Riverside, $6,000, Race, Labor and Empire. Funding is for a mini-conference on Race, Labor and Culture, organized by the ASA Labor and Labor Movements Section and the Association of Black Sociologists. The purpose is to bring together scholars on race and race relations with scholars of labor and labor movements to discuss current dynamics that keep workers from uniting across color lines.
Michelle Inderbitzin, Oregon State University, $5,256, Research from the Inside Out: Collaborative Research and Writing with Inmates in the Oregon State Penitentiary. This is a project to train prisoners to collaborate with professional sociologists by engaging in research and writing on issues related to incarceration and changes wrought by increasing imprisonment rates, longer sentences, shift away from rehabilitation, and similar policy shifts.
Mark D. Jacobs, George Mason University; Paul Lichterman, University of Southern California; and Ann Mische, Rutgers University, $1,500, Global Differences in Conceptualizing Culture. These funds were awarded to bring international scholars to a session organized by the ASA Culture section to create a dialogue on the differing concepts of culture in American, French, Swiss, Brazilian sociology. The proposal framed a number of questions to be answered by the dialogue such as “How can American sociologists communicate our cultural sociology with French counterparts?”
Sigrun Olafsdottir, Boston University; Karen Lutfey, New England Research Institutes; and Patricia Rieker, Boston University, $3,100 for Expanding Comparative Frames for Medical Sociology: Professionals, Patients, and the Public. This is the latest in a series of international conferences to encourage comparative research and fostering cross-national collaborations that focus on the relationship between social stratification and health outcomes. By failing to use a comparative framework, themes such as politics, health, and culture and health have been especially understudied by medical sociologists.
Janet K. Shim, University of California-San Francisco, $6,000, Cultural Health Capital: Developing an Approach to Understanding Health Care Inequalities. This study develops the PI’s concept of Cultural Health Capital (CHC), defined as repertoire of cultural skills, verbal and non-verbal competencies, and interactional styles that can influence clinical interactions accounting for social inequities in quality of health care.
Genevieve Zubrzycki, University of Michigan, $6,000, Nationalism, Religion, and Secularization in Quebec and Poland. This project focuses on issues related to the relationship between state reformation, religion, and nationalism by offering a comparative perspective between Poland and Quebec, countries that offer points of convergence and contrast. The study analyzes both institutional/structural dimensions and cultural representations.
