Department of Sociology

Keera Allendorf joined the research team for the third wave of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS-III).  This survey of over 40,000 households is the first nationally representative, multi-topic panel survey collected in India.  This third wave will enter the field in 2020 and cover employment, agriculture, health, education, gender, family, and other issues.  Other team members are at the University of Maryland, University of Michigan, and National Council for Applied Economic Research, New Delhi.

Jessica Calarco: As the director of the 2019 Sociological Research Practicum, I've spent the summer working with an amazing team of grad students to collect and analyze data for the Social Networks and Parenting (SNAP) Study. The goal with the SNAP study is to understand how social networks shape parenting decisions (especially decisions about "contested" parenting practices like vaccines, breastfeeding, co-sleeping, spanking, and screen time). The project will follow women from pregnancy through two years postpartum and involves surveys and in-depth interviews about parenting and social networks. If you're interested in getting involved in the project, please let me know!

Byungkyu (BK) Lee joined the department as an Assistant Professor in fall 2019 after spending a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Indiana University Network Science Institute. In May 2019, he was awarded the Robert Merton Award for Best Dissertation in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University for his dissertation, “Networks in Polarized Times: What Americans Talk about, with Whom and When?” His dissertation shows how network dynamics intersect with larger political processes to induce heightened polarization and, consequently, threats to democratic discourse. He continues to work on the project investigating political polarization and social networks using a rich set of textual and relational “big” data in political forums on Facebook. Recently, he initiated several projects including the impact of state policies on opioid epidemics, peer effects of learning conflicts of interests policy during medical school on physicians’s receipt of pharmaceutical payments, and the neighborhood effects on suicide and opioid overdose.

Tim Hallett: I recently published a fun article in American Sociological Review, along with Orla Stapleton (IU graduate student) and Michael Sauder (University of Iowa).  The article examines how social science ideas become public ideas, and it creates an architecture for a sociology of public social science. To our delight, our ideas got a lot of play on Twitter, such that our scholarly research on public ideas became, well, public. If you are curious, you can check out the article here (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122419846628 ) and the Twitter response here (https://sage.altmetric.com/details/60671263/twitter ).

Jane McLeod completed her second year as chair in 2018-19. She and Lydia DiSabatino published an article on parents’ beliefs about autism in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior in March, for which they were invited to record a podcast. She is now working with Amelia Hawbaker and Emily Meanwell on articles from the 2017 SRP; they recently published the first article from that project in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Outside of work, she is President of the Board for a local chamber choir, Voces Novae, that presented a world premiere of commissioned settings of Kurt Vonnegut’s Requiem text in 2018.

Patricia McManus researches gender, family and immigrant incorporation. She has several projects with graduate students in the Department that seek to understand the cultural aspects of immigrant women’s labor force participation in the US.  In other graduate student collaborations she has a project on political interest among children of immigrants in Europe, and a project on the intergenerational transmission of gender ideology in immigrant and native families in Europe.

Ethan Michelson’s article, “Decoupling: Marital Violence and the Struggle to Divorce in China,” is coming out in the next issue of the American Journal of Sociology (September 2019). He is almost done writing the book version, Decoupling: Gender Injustice in China’s Divorce Courts, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.

Dina Okamoto completed the Academic Leadership Program, a leadership initiative run by the Big Ten Academic Alliance, in 2018-19.  She also published two articles from her project on diversity, trust, and civic engagement in in Social Psychology Quarterly and The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, and is continuing to work on her book manuscript, Welcoming Diversity: Blacks, Whites and Immigrants in Segregated Cities, which addresses concerns and debates about the impact of ethnoracial diversity on intergroup relations and civic life in 21st-century America.  Dina also published an op-ed in The Guardian in March 2018 (with Linda Tropp), “Why a U.S. Government Agency Deleted the Words ‘Nation of Immigrants’” and a blog post in Mobilizing Ideas based on her research, “Immigrant Organizing in the Face of Threat.” ​

Brea Perry is busy engaging in primary data collection and managing personnel on several projects. She is looking forward to one day returning to analysis and writing. She was recently overheard lamenting, "I miss you, Stata."

Brian Powell recently was awarded the inaugural Spencer Foundation Mentor Award. His Science Advances article “Denial of Service to Same-Sex and Interracial Couples: Evidence from a National Survey Experiment,” coauthored with IU alumni Landon Schnabel and Lauren Apgar, is this year’s recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Religion Distinguished Article Award. His article “Americans’ Perceptions of Transgender People’s Sex: Evidence from a National Survey Experiment” coauthored with IU alumni Long Doan and Natasha Quadlin, was recently published in Socius. With coauthor and IU alumnus Natasha Quadlin and with contributions by IU graduate student Emma Cohen and IU alumni Emily Meanwell and Oren Pizmony-Levy), he is completing a book, Who Should Pay? Higher Education, Responsibility, and the Public.