June 2009
Khaya Delaine Clark and Tyrone Forman, Emory University, $6,880, Racial Attitudes in Childhood: Conceptual Problems and Measurement Issues. This study seeks to improve the way in which racial attitudes are measured in young children by expanding the response categories to include the following options: “both” “neither” and “I don’t know” as opposed to the forced choice situations that are generally included in psychological tests of race preferences for children.
John M. Eason, Duke University, $7,000, Prison Proliferation and Rural Disadvantage. Most studies of incarceration study the supply side of the phenomenon or the growth of the prison population. In contrast, this study investigates why prisons are located where they are and what is the impact of location? Eason examines the effects of prisons on small towns in terms of economic development and population characteristics.
Elisabeth Brooke Harrington, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, $6,900, Reproduction of Wealth and Inequality in the U.S. and Europe: The Role of Trust and Estate Planners. This study focuses on how inequality in wealth is produced among the economic elite. Instead of examining the elite themselves, the PI scrutinizes the strategies of professionals who serve the wealthy, namely trust and estate planners, who help the rich shelter their money. The PI finds that these professionals play a vital role in the perpetuation of social stratification.
Tomas Roberto Jimenez, Stanford University, $7,000, Immigration, Assimilation, and the U.S. Host Society. Recent research on immigration to the United States emphasizes the assimilation and changing identities of post-1965 immigrants and their dependents. Rather than viewing immigration as a one-way process, this study asks how the growth of immigration affects the identities of U.S. citizens who have been in this country for three generations or more.
Caroline Lee, Lafayette College; Michael McQuarrie, University of California-Davis; and Edward Walker, University of Vermont, $7,000, Democratizing Inequalities: Participation without Parity?. The topic of this project has been referred to as “regressive progressivism” or the unintended consequences of the expansion of lay participation in government, corporate, and nonprofit decision-making. Some of these unintended consequences include the elevation of new industries, professionals, and bureaucracies to conduct “facilitated engagement.”
Paulette Lloyd, Indiana University, $7,000, Cooperative Exchanges in Confronting Transnational Crime. Transnational crime has become a global issue with nation-states embracing differing responses to the use of terrorism, the invasion of civil liberties, and incarcerations. The study informs discussions about whether the similarity of cultural and legal systems, shared memberships (focus theory), or nation-states pursuing their interests (realism) best explain international cooperation.
Frederick F Wherry, University of Michigan, and Nina Bandelj, University of California-Davis, $7,000, The Cultural Wealth of Nations. This conference proposal asks “How do stocks of “cultural wealth,” for example, in the form of heritage sites or indigenous crafts shape economic activities?” The conference explored how this form of capital is constructed and deployed in economic development or how the failure to do so dampens economic activities.
December 2009
Katherine K. Chen, the City College of New York and the Graduate Center, $5,900, Sustaining Innovative Organizing in Networks Across Multiple Environments: Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities-Supportive Service Programs. This research aims to understand the conditions under which networks of organizations that serve aging residents in a designated area can retain innovation. The PI hypothesizes that without sufficient coordination and support, networks risk fragmentation and thus fail to connect clients with services. This project is the first stage of an in-depth, comparative qualitative study that targets four “Naturally Occurring Retirement Community-Supportive Service Programs:” one private co-operative, one in public housing, one serving private and public housing, and one headed by a faith-based organization. These comparisons will help assess how such conditions affect the ability of these organizations to develop and sustain innovations. Content analysis of public and internal documents will also take place.
Bridget K Gorman and Jenifer Bratter, Rice University, and Kristen Schilt, University of Chicago, $5,534,Opting Out or Careers Deferred? Gender Differences in the Graduate School Experience. The purpose of this project is to investigate why women with PhDs in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) enter academia at lower rates than their male peers. Taking Rice University as a case study, the PIs will investigate whether gender and disciplinary differences exist in the graduate school experience, and if so, whether these differences translate into unequal outcomes for men and women. The research design follows a cohort of 2007-08 first-year graduate students from the natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, and humanities as participants in order to assess gender differences in MA/MS attainment, attrition rate, commitment to attaining a PhD, and aspirations to a career in academia. The study will investigate the third year of graduate school and to use latent growth curve models to examine how disciplinary versus individual characteristics shape graduate school success over time.
Vincent J. Roscigno, Ohio State University, $6,700, Political Legitimation and the Subordination of Indigenous Communities: The Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee Massacre. According to the PI, pivotal moments in Native American history provide a window into how race/ethnic subordination occurs and is legitimated by powerful actors, including the state itself. This research project will draw on historical work and sociological theory on legitimacy, politics, and inequality, in order to analyze legitimating discourses by institutional actors surrounding two consequential cases in Native American history: the Trail of Tears (1831-1839) and the Massacre at Wounded Knee (1890). Data will be drawn from thousands of reports and letters of correspondence, housed at the National Archives.
R. Tyson Smith, Rutgers University, $6,200, Informal Coping Mechanisms of US Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. According to the PI, there are currently more than 1.8 million American veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars. A significant percentage of these men and women will return to the United States after their deployments with mental health problems. Since many of these veterans avoid or fail to attain mental health treatment and care, they rely on each other, close relations, or no one at all to get through their trauma and readjustment. The PI investigates informal networks of care and counseling that operate independent of health bureaucracies such as the Veteran’s Administration. The PI will use ethnographic research and interviews to examine the processes of informal coping and advising.
Arnout van de Rijt and John Shandra, Stony Brook University, $7,000, Why They Juice: The Contagiousness of Performance Enhancing Drug Use in Sports. The central objective of this project is to understand of the forces that drive performance enhancing drug (PED) use in sports. Both anti-doping policies in professional sports and the sports media emphasize individualistic reasons for PED use, specifically rational-economic-based decision making. However, initial findings from the PIs’ ongoing study of PED use in Major League Baseball suggests that the fundamental difference between using and non-using athletes is that the latter trained with other users before becoming users themselves. The data uses a longitudinal dataset on PED use in professional sports. To test the validity and reliability of these data, the PIs propose to construct similar longitudinal databases of drug-testing results for the Tour de France and the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The examination of these three different contexts will provide evidence as to whether the study results are generalizable.
Jessica Mullison Vasquez, University of Kansas, $7,000, Marriage Vows and Racial Choices: Family Dynamics and Assimilation among Latinos. This project uses in-depth, semi-structured interviews with multiple generations of Latino families to determine how marriage influences identity and incorporation processes. The project proposes to investigate whether Latino intermarriage with non-Hispanic whites facilitates the adoption of an “American” identity and integration into the mainstream for both parents and children versus another alternative. Since not all exogamous marriages are with non-Hispanic whites, this study will question whether intermarriage with a non-white racial group member encourages racial minority self-understandings. It will also examine whether intramarriage with Latino co-ethnics promotes ethnic solidarity and cultural retention. Interviews will be conducted in Los Angeles, CA, and Topeka and Kansas City, KS, two states with vastly different proportions of Hispanic populations.
Sharon Zukin and Philip Kazinitz, City University of New York Graduate Center, and Xiangming Chen, Trinity College, $5,435, Creating Cosmopolitan Communities: An International Workshop on the Effects of Migration, Gentrification, and Globalization on Local Shopping Streets. This grant is for an international workshop, to be held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, to organize a collaborative effort to mobilize teams of sociologists, including graduate students, from New York to Shanghai to examine the impact of migration, globalization, and gentrification on the local social spaces of shopping streets. To jumpstart the collaboration, the workshop will bring together two lead researchers from each of the six research sites: New York, Toronto, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo, and Shanghai. According to the PIs this project calls attention to local shopping as a missing dimension of our understanding of the social, cultural, and economic interaction that takes place in cities. The result of the project should be a series of comparative scholarly articles on urban change and a book proposal.
