June 2010
Elif Andac, University of Kentucky, $7,000, Reconciling Diversity Among Nation Building: A Comparative Study of Ethno-religious Conflict in Turkey. This study investigates the conditions that result from diverse religious and ethnic communities living together in relative peace in the midst of conflict-torn regions of Turkey. Data will be collected from fieldwork and in-depth interviews for two comparison groups that will be analyzed with the diverse and relatively conflict-free community.
E.J. Bjornstrom, University of Missouri, Columbia, $5,279, Neighborhood Built Environment and Individual Sense of Control: A Fundamental Cause Approach to Improving Population Health. This study examines the relation between residential built environments and individual sense of control, assuming that built environments are “fundamental causes of health”. Multilevel modeling and three data sets will be used to examine characteristics of the built environment including the provision of resources to aid routine activities and the facilitating of social relationships and individual sense of control.
Arina Gerstava, Washington State University, $3,193, Developmental Links between Victimization and Offending. This study compares inter-individual differences in order to empirically test if there is co-development of victimization and offending over the life course. The PI uses the National Youth Survey data on the frequency of minor and serious crimes committed and victimization experienced (such as sexual and other physical attacks) to empirically respond to her hypotheses. These data will be used to model trajectories of offending and victimization using two data-analytic techniques—latent growth modeling and auto-regressive cross-lagged panel models.
Melinda D. Kane, East Carolina University, $6,084, Creating Safe Space: Predicting the Presence of GLBT Student Groups on College Campuses. The goal of this project is to explain the presence of university-recognized GLBT student groups on the college and university campuses in six U.S. states, and why some campuses are more institutionally supportive than others. The Principal Investigator will use Hierarchical linear modeling to examine the importance of public opinion on campus, community resources, and institutional and political environments.
Pamela Popielarz, University of Illinois-Chicago, $7,000, Schools of Bureaucracy: Fraternal Orders in the Industrializing Midwest, 1890-1920.The purpose of this study is to ascertain the link between the popularity of fraternal orders and the growing bureaucratic organizational form in the industrializing Midwest.The PI will investigate whether fraternal orders are “schools for bureaucracy” by incorporating a fixed division of labor, hierarchy of offices, formal rules, and permanent written files.
Pamela Quiroz, Vernon Lindsay, and Endea Murry, University of Illinois-Chicago, $3,800, Marketing Diversity and the New Politics of Diversity: An Engaged Ethnography of Race, Space, and Place. This funded study is part of a larger ethnographic study of the race and class micro processes that are part of the larger Chicago school reform effort in the “new politics of desegregation”. The fourth year of data will be collected on a small cohort of African American male high school students selected from a highly-rated Chicago high school and a cohort of students not selected for the program. Once collected, this cohort data will be entered into the ethnography and the entire data collection effort will be analyzed.
Laura Stark, Wesleyan University, $6,900, How Have Research Participants Affected Biomedical Research? This study hypothesizes that human subjects’ beliefs, and the organizations that recruit them, can affect biomedical research practices. The interaction between human subjects and the bureaucratic structures that have been developed to protect them is the focus of the study. Oral histories will be used to create an initial data set of human subjects who lived at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health between 1953 and 1966; the years that heralded the beginning of a change in medical ethics that culminated in human subjects’ protections. The author proposes to link the subjects’ beliefs with changing medical practices.
December 2010
Marc Dixon, Dartmouth College and Andrew Martin, Ohio State University, $7,000, Social Protest and Corporate Change: Assessing the Impact of Corporate Campaigns. This project focuses on understanding the role of social movements in corporate behavior by examining 32 wide-ranging “corporate campaigns” waged by social movement organizations against corporate targets. Utilizing event-study analysis as well as qualitative comparative analysis, the authors will assess how these campaigns and protest actions can alter corporate practices and, additionally, determine why some campaigns are more successful than others. The project should contribute to an understanding of how outside forces/challenges impinge on corporate practices by moving beyond discrete case studies of particular campaigns in order to discern general factors that have more or less impact. This project contributes to the areas of collective behavior, social movements, and corporate social responsibility.
Pamela Elaine Emanuelson, University of South Carolina, $4,800, Emergent Beliefs in Information-Poor Social Networks. The PI of this study will conduct experimental research on information-poor networks and network knowledge. The PI challenges the assumption that actors’ beliefs of a network’s structure are accurate in exchange networks in which they have information about only a few of the other members. The author hypothesizes that this is not the case, and that those in information-poor networks may develop common beliefs about network structure. The research will be conducted by undergraduate students and the results will be analyzed using the emergent beliefs about network structure and exchange outcomes as the dependent variables. The goal of this project is to connect research on information levels in networks with research on interaction outcomes.
Christy M. Glass and Peggy Petrzelka, Utah State University, $6,978, Global Migrants, Guest Workers, and Good Mothers: A Study of Gender and (Con) Temporary Labor Migration to Spain. The authors seek to examine how gender affects policies about temporary labor migrants, and in turn, how these policies affect the hiring practices and experiences of labor migrants in Spain. The authors study these processes at three levels: macro (policies), meso (recruitment practices of employers), and micro (experiences of labor migrants). The project examines three components: priorities and assumptions that shaped this policy, the recruitment practices, and the experiences of the migrant women. The authors identify an assumption that migrants choose when and where to migrate without considering the role that employers play in creating and directing migration flows. Along with other scholars in the field, they hope to illuminate this gap.
Amy Hanser, University of British Columbia, $6,952, Diversity on the Street: Food Vending, City Planning, and Cultural Narratives of the City. This study examines how cultural understandings of sidewalks and commerce influence the regulation of urban space. The author will conduct a comparative study of food vending in Vancouver and Portland and investigate the evolution of city policies toward sidewalk commerce (food carts), including experiences of vendors, public officials, and customers. Central to the analysis is the relationships between cultural discourses and economic forms, mediated by urban politics, as street vending moves from being seen as an unsanitary public problem to part of urban revitalization.
Carrie L. Alexandrowicz Shandra, Hofstra University, $6,990, A Longitudinal Analysis of Occupational Sex Segregation from Adolescence to Young Adulthood. This project will investigate the relationship between sex-segregated jobs during youth and sex-segregated adult jobs using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth and the Current Population Survey. Little research has examined the outcomes of the kinds of employment in which the majority of youth engage, that is, care work for girls and manual labor for boys. To better understand this relation as a process, the author proposes to examine the role of several intervening variables such as academic performance, course of study, family resources, and future expectations. The main objective of the proposal is to produce an occupational crosswalk that will be available online. Further, the author will examine the policy implications of her research findings for school-to-work programs.
Jody Agius Vallejo, University of Southern California, $6,900, Class and Assimilation Among Latino Entrepreneurs in the Formal Economy. This study examines immigrant entrepreneurs’ assimilation and economic success in Los Angeles. Specifically, the author will study assimilation among upwardly mobile and middle-class Latino business owners. She seeks to understand why middle-class Latinos start businesses, the mechanisms that foster upward mobility, and how these vary by race and gender. These groups include those in non-traditional sectors such as professional services, in traditional sectors such as food services, and those non-middle class entrepreneurs in ethnic enclaves. The researcher will conduct 30 qualitative interviews in order to gather information about life histories including social networks and family involvement.
