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News and Events from around the department.
Board of Visitors’ Enrichment Fund Will Support Student Interns in Liberal Arts
"I was never so poor in my life than when I was a student,” said Penn State sociology alumnus Charles Kulp, recalling the financial challenges he faced while an unpaid intern in the attorney general’s office of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation. “I had no money, but I had to buy five suits because I needed to wear one every day. I didn’t even have the funds to go out to lunch.”
People With Gay and Lesbian Acquaintances Tend to Support Same-sex Marriage
Friendship bonds that may seem superficial at first glance could be just deep enough to produce attitude changes that help spark social transformations, according to a Penn State sociologist.
PSU Alumna Combats Foreign Interference in U.S. Elections
Laura Rosenberger, a 2002 College of the Liberal Arts alumna at Penn State, has created a policy blueprint for countering authoritarian interference in democracies. As the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a senior fellow at The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), Rosenberger focuses on an issue that has dominated headlines for the last two years—Russian interference in U.S. elections.
Social Network Analysis With Ashton Verdery
In our latest podcast, Ashton Verdery, assistant professor of sociology and demography at Penn State, discusses social network analysis (SNA). One increasingly important use of SNA is to study marginalized populations who are otherwise hard to sample. In health, behavioral, and social sciences, SNA has been used to examine how people relate to one another; how relationships affect the flow of items such as diseases, goods, information, or behaviors; how individual positions in broader network structures affect the risks of contracting diseases, hearing of opportunities, or generating new ideas; and more.
"The Schooled Society" by David Baker Translated into Korean
Congratulations to Professor David Baker whose book The Schooled Society, Stanford University Press (2014) has been translated into Korean and published in 2018 by Pakyoungsa Press (박영사), Seoul, Korea.
Students Face Traumatic Transition from Middle School into High School
According to the study, students who changed to a new school between middle and high school also were more likely to report no friendships with their school peers, said Felmlee. This type of social isolation is associated with poor health, low self-worth and suicidal ideation, according to previous research.
Adoption: A Strategy to Fulfill Sex Preferences of U.S. Parents
PHD candidate Ashley Larsen Gibby and Kevin Thomas, Associate Professor of Sociology, Demography, and African Studies, paper on adoption and parents' sex preferences is now out in the Journal of Marriage and Family.
John Iceland, Professor of Sociology and Demography, Examines Black-White Differences in Happiness
Racial and ethnic inequality continues to be among the most significant social issues in the United States today. This is evidenced by the attention it receives in the media, political discussions, as well as in academic work. Among these racial and ethnic divisions, the black-white color line may be the starkest. Nevertheless, by many measures, levels of black-white inequality have declined, especially when measured over a long period of time. For example, there has been some narrowing of the gap in educational attainment, poverty, life expectancy, and residential segregation and neighborhood economic conditions since the 1960s (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016a; 2016b; CDC, 2016; Logan and Stults, 2011; Firebaugh and Farrell, 2016; Iceland, 2017). Some black-white disparities, however, have not narrowed, including median family income and wealth (U.S. Census Bureau, 1986, 1990, 1994; 1995, 2001; 2013, 2016c).
Jenny Van Hook, Roy C. Buck Professor of Sociology & Demography, and Collaborators Comment About Recent Estimates of Undocumented Immigrants
Jenny Van Hook Roy C. Buck Professor of Sociology & Demography, and collaborators comment about recent estimates of the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States in the last edition of PLOSONE.