Jane McLeod is this year's winner of the Cooley-Mead Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Social Psychology. The Cooley-Mead Award is given annually to an individual to honor their lifetime contributions to distinguished scholarship in sociological social psychology.
In addition to receiving the award, the recipient presents an address to the Social Psychology Section at the 2022 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting.
Jane’s honor places her in the pantheon of Indiana University social psychologists who have won this very prestigious award. Please find them named at the end of the article, but immediately following are some of the tributes to Jane that led to her selection as Cooley-Mead winner.
From the nomination letters:
“Regardless of the topic or approach used in her articles, chapters, and books, some commonalities emerge: her blessedly clear writing style, her state-of-the-art methodological rigor (and her appreciation and use of an array of quantitative and qualitative methods), and her attention to theoretical development and innovation.”
“Professor McLeod’s scholarship creatively weaves together several areas of sociology – including social psychology, medical sociology, sociology of mental health, stratification/inequality and the life course. She draws on theoretical and substantive insights from two of the three “faces” of sociological social psychology (i.e., social structure and personality and social interaction) to elucidate the complex and nuanced processes through which macro-level social structures and meso-level social interactions jointly influence children’s, adolescents’ and young adults’ well-being at the micro-level.”
“While Jane certainly is making important contributions to the development of social psychological thought for social psychologists (especially in social structure and personality, as well as social interaction), we are especially appreciative of Jane’s success in making social psychology more visible and making it much more difficult for sociologists in other areas to ignore the sheer importance of social psychology.”
“Each of her papers is theoretically rich, methodologically sophisticated, substantively important and fundamentally interesting; when viewed as a whole, Jane’s scholarship represents the very best of sociological social psychology.”
“Professor McLeod is among the select few social psychologists who have the distinction of frequently placing their work in the top generalist journals (i.e., the trinity of American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces) and in their top specialty journals (among them, Social Psychology Quarterly [where she also served as an admirably hands-on deputy editor], Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Society and Mental Health, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Social Problems).”
Jane joins Sheldon Stryker (1986), David Heise (1998), Peggy Thoits (2010) and Bill Corsaro (2019) as Cooley-Mead honorees from Indiana University.
Congratulations, Jane!
The College of Arts