Research

Curtis Child

Parents and School Choice Project

Professors Child, Phillips, and Dufur have been collecting data from low-income parents in a school district with unlimited enrollment options. Any of these parents could have chosen to take their children out of “failing” schools and put them in schools with better test scores, but almost none of them make this choice. The professors wanted to know why: do parents not know about things like test scores and open enrollment, or do they have different definitions of what good or failing schools are? More than fifteen student research assistants interviewed 93 parents and are working on transcribing, translating, and coding the interviews looking for patterns in parental opinions. They are also looking for whether there are different patterns for parents from different ethnic backgrounds, as the sample is drawn from a neighborhood with relatively heavy Hispanic and Polynesian representation. Students on this project have presented papers at conferences in Chicago and St. George, have received ORCA grants, and have gotten course credit for working on the project.

Eric Dahlin

Professor Dahlin is studying the sociology of innovation, which represents a burgeoning field of investigation and an increasingly important topic. The sociological view he is developing highlights the ways social and cultural phenomena enable or constrain innovation. Aspects of the social context Dahlin is interested in include social networks, organizational practices, political institutions, and geography. Additionally, while there is little disagreement about the antecedents of innovation, people poorly understand how novel products impact their everyday lives. Thus, several additional research projects he is conducting explore the social impacts of innovation.

Mikaela Dufur

International Family Structure and Transitions Project

Professors Dufur and Jarvis (along with Shana Pribesh at Old Dominion University) are working on a project looking at how family structure transitions affect child and adolescent outcomes. This project uses multiple data sets to examine how family structure and disruptions affect children's lives. The particular focus of the project is comparative, examining potential differences in the effects of family structure and disruption across different cultures. For example, does it make any difference if a child adds a parent compared to losing a parent? Is having multiple transitions worse than having one major life change? They are currently using US, UK, German, Australian, Canadian, and Korean data to examine the effect of family transitions across settings. Outcomes have included children's behavior problems, stress, obesity, gender ideologies, and academic resources. Students who have worked on the project have presented papers at conferences in Philadelphia, San Antonio, Montrea, Germany, Switzerland, and Scotland, and have received ORCA grants and been accepted with full funding at multiple graduate programs. With so many data sets to juggle, they are always looking for students with data skills to work for course credit, co-authorship (sometimes including travel to present at conferences), or, when the stars really align, a paid job.

Parents and School Choice Project

Professors Child and Dufur have been collecting data from low-income parents in a school district with unlimited enrollment options. Any of these parents could have chosen to take their children out of "failing" schools and put them in schools with better test scores, but almost none of them make this choice. The professors wanted to know why: do parents not know about things like test scores and open enrollment, or do they have different definitions of what good or failing schools are? More than fifteen student research assistants interviewed 93 parents and are working on transcribing, translating, and coding the interviews looking for patterns in parental opinions. They are also looking for whether there are different patterns for parents from different ethnic backgrounds, as the sample is drawn from a neighborhood with relatively heavy Hispanic and Polynesian representation. Students on this project have presented papers at conferences in Chicago, Washington D. C., San Antonio, and Montreal. They have received ORCA grants gotten course credit for working on the project, and been accepted at multiple graduate programs.

International Education Gaps

Professors Phillips, Erickson, Dufur, and Jarvis are working on a project looking at country-level test scores on math and reading tests. News outlets often complain about the United States being 37^th in the world in math scores, while countries like Finland and Singapore score much higher. But how big a difference is there between the scores in those countries? Some scholars have suggested that the reason for the United States’ relatively low scores is because of the country’s relatively high levels of diversity and the large gap between rich and poor students, but these explanations have rarely been tested. These professors’ work combines data from the Programme for International Student Assessment and the Luxembourg Income Study to test these questions. Among other results, they have found that the US’s richest and poorest students perform at the international average, while students from the middle of the income range perform below average. They’ve also shown that country-level policies and inequality affect individual students’ scores. Students who have worked on this project have presented in Philadelphia, Japan, and Switzerland.

Race and Opportunity in Sport

Professor Dufur is working with students looking at the ways race and hometown affect mobility for athletes in US professional and collegiate football and in international-level rugby. They've gathered data on nearly 30,000 athletes from all over the world and combined the football data with information from US Census tracts to allow for comparisons between macro- and micro-level effects. They're interested in questions like whether race affects the positions athletes play, and whether that varies across the US football setting and the international rugby setting. They're also examining questions like whether characteristics of where players come from affect their willingness to travel farther from home for an athletic scholarship, whether they transfer out of their original school, and the quality of the team they play for. They are especially interested in how hometown characteristics do or do not interact with players' ethnicity. Students on this project have presented papers at conferences in San Diego and Montreal, have received ORCA grants, have gotten course credit for working on the project, and have been accepted into PhD programs.

Lance Erickson

With Dr. Dufur, Dr. Phillips, and Dr. Jarvis, Dr. Erikson is looking at how socio-economic status affects educational performance, inequality, and advantage across countries using the National Center for Education Statistics' Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) data.

Lance Erickson, Kristie Phillips, Mikaela Dufur and Jonathan Jarvis are looking at how the use of shadow education in East-Asian nations, the countries with the highest educational scores in the world, affects their educational performances using the National Center for Education Statistics' Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) data.

International Education Gaps

Professors Phillips, Erickson, Dufur, and Jarvis are working on a project looking at country-level test scores on math and reading tests. News outlets often complain about the United States being 37th in the world in math scores, while countries like Finland and Singapore score much higher. But how big a difference is there between the scores in those countries? Some scholars have suggested that the reason for the United States’ relatively low scores is because of the country’s relatively high levels of diversity and the large gap between rich and poor students, but these explanations have rarely been tested. These professors’ work combines data from the Programme for International Student Assessment and the Luxembourg Income Study to test these questions. Among other results, they have found that the US’s richest and poorest students perform at the international average, while students from the middle of the income range perform below average. They’ve also shown that country-level policies and inequality affect individual students’ scores. Students who have worked on this project have presented in Philadelphia, Japan, and Switzerland.

Aging and Health

As the population ages rapidly with the baby boom cohort reaching retirement age, cognitive decline and dementia (e.g., Alzheimer's disease) have the potential to become a public health epidemic. Despite significant advancements in understanding cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease, there remains much to be learned and no treatments for most types of dementias have been identified. The Life & Family Legacies Study, beginning in 1966 with a representative sample of high school juniors and seniors in Washington State, is being leveraged to understand the role of early-, mid-, and later-life correlates of cognitive decline. With the recent addition of genetic information on the participants, we will be examining the role of lifetime correlates of cognitive decline in the context of genetic predispositions to cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease to ask which experiences trigger genetic predispositions or protect individuals from the expression of genetic predispositions.

Benjamin Gibbs

With Dr. Jarvis, Dr. Gibbs is looking at whether parenting differences can explain the Asian advantage in cognitive skills in young children using the National Center for Education Statistics' Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) data.

Jonathan Jarvis

Using interview data, Dr. Jarvis is examining the various global educational strategies that have been used to obtain global cultural and social capital. In particular, he is focusing on the experience of studying at foreign universities and the rewards for obtaining a foreign degree in local markets.

Dr. Jarvis is mentoring a student who is looking at access to health care and mental health disorders among North Korean refugees using interview data.

With Dr. Gibbs, Dr. Jarvis is looking at whether parenting differences can explain the Asian advantage in cognitive skills in young children using the National Center for Education Statistics' Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) data.

With Dr. Dufur, Dr. Phillips, and Dr. Erickson, Dr. Jarvis is looking at how socio-economic status affects educational performance, inequality, and advantage across countries using the National Center for Education Statistics' Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) data.

International Family Structure and Transitions Project

Professors Dufur, Phillips, and Jarvis (along with Shana Pribesh at Old Dominion University) are working on a project looking at how family structure transitions affect child and adolescent outcomes. This project uses multiple data sets to examine how family structure and disruptions affect children’s lives. The particular focus of the project is comparative, examining potential differences in the effects of family structure and disruption across different cultures. For example, does it make any difference if a child adds a parent compared to losing a parent? Is having multiple transitions worse than having one major life change? They are currently looking at US, UK, and German data to examine the effect of family transitions on young children’s behavior problems, but have also presented work on sleep problems and bedwetting. They hope to add Australian, Canadian, Korean, and Japanese data for comparative purposes. Students who have worked on the project have presented papers at conferences in Philadelphia and Switzerland and have received ORCA grants. With so many data sets to juggle, they are always looking for students with data skills to work for course credit, co-authorship (sometimes including travel to present at conferences), or, when the stars really align, a paid job.

Melissa Jones

Professor Jones is studying crime and deviance across the life course. Her current research projects focus on how both gender and race shape criminal behaviors and processes. She is currently working on a series of projects that highlight the way abuse, trauma, and other negative life events in both childhood and adulthood shape women's later involvement in the criminal justice system utilizing both quantitative and qualitative data. Professor Jones is also working on a series of projects that look at the effects of post-release supervision on recidivism in Florida and how gender and race shape these relationships.

Professor Jones is also working on a series of projects with Professor Pierce exploring how early expsoure to adverse childhood events (ACEs) shape adolescent outcomes, such as involvement in delinquency, mental health, and friendship networks using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study.

Jane Lopez

Dr. Lopez's research centers on questions of citizenship and immigration. As a collective, her research program combines broad theoretical knowledge with rigorous qualitative and quantitative methods to reveal the role of institutions--and ourrelationships to them--in mediating everyday life. Her work examines how ascribed and achieved legal and social identities both shape and are shaped by social policy, as well as the links between citizenship, democracy, and social policy and the dynamic relationships of interdependence and influence that they share. Her three current research programs include:

Mixed-Citizenship Families and the Law

While immigrants and citizens are often kept rhetorically and legally separate in policy and public discourse, their lives overlap in meaningful and, in some cases, extremely intimate ways. In this project, Dr. Lopez examines the experiences of mixed-citizenship American couples living within and outside the US to better understand how the family mediates the citizenship relationship and how (non-)citizen status impacts family relationships and opportunities.

Citizenship Obligations

This project re-centers citizenship obligations in understanding the true meaning, function, and value of citizenship as a whole. Dr. Lopez uses quantitative, qualitative, and archival data to examine the unique characteristics of each legally enforceable citizenship obligation--taxation, military service, jury duty, and education-- and their implications for citizenship theory and the citizenship experience. Project findings help explain how citizenship obligations are created, who fulfills them, how they are related to citizenship rights, and their role in sustaining the citizenship regime.

Immigrant Integration in Utah

Utah is a unique site for the study of immigration and immigrant integration given its significant immigrant population in both urban and rural settings and a unique political, social, and cultural climate. This project utilizes interviews and community surveys to assess how immigrants understand and experience integration and which social structures help and hinder immigrant incorporation and sense of belonging in new immigrant-receiving comunities.

Hayley Pierce

Professor Pierce is studying the sociology of family, health, and gender, with particular attention to maternal and child health and well-being. This often includes the relationship between health care, policy, community, and the status of women and how that influences utilization of health services. Professor Pierce is looking at how the status of women affects reproductive and child health using the Demographic and Health Survey data. Also using that data, Professor Pierce is looking at the effects of education, wealth, and urban residence on a variety of indicators across Africa and South-East Asia. Most notably, Professor Pierce is looking at the potentially delinking relationship between sexual debut, marriage, and childbearing.

Domestically, Professor Pierce is involved in collaborations looking at community integration, the #MeToo movement, and Early Adverse Experiences and subsequent adolescent outcomes.

Jacob Rugh

President Donald Trump has so far focused a fair amount of his re-election effort on Florida. It’s where he kicked off the campaign over the summer and where he spends a lot of his time away from the White House. Florida was key to the Trump Campaign’s victory in 2016 –Florida went Republican that year after two election cycles of supporting Democrat Barack Obama. BYU sociologist Jake Rugh has discovered that foreclosures among Latino homeowners in Florida helped turn the state red for Trump in 2016. The findings offer some insight for2020 President candidates. (http://www.byuradio.org/episode/e58bfa23-9e22-4be1-b1cd-f585c4f4eff1/top-of-mind-with-julie-rose-hispanic-homeowners-church-conversion-childhood-trauma?playhead=34&autoplay=true)

Lagging home values and high foreclosure rates among Hispanics, one of the nation’s largest voting blocs, helped Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election in Florida, a new study finds.The analysis, which looks at how homeownership affected the election, offers fresh insights into the habits of Hispanic voters. Sociologist Jacob Rugh examined the voting patterns of Florida homeowners who took out mortgage loans between 2005 and 2007 — the first few years of the nationwide housing crisis that prompted the most recent economic recession. (https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/housing/hispanic-democrats-housing-foreclosure/)

Michael Wood

Professor Wood is studying culture--what it is and how it can be measured. His theoretical work aims to clarify conceptualizations of culture based on what we know about learning, memory, and behavior from the cognitive sciences. His primary empirical focus is personal culture, or the culture inscribed in our bodies as a result of embodied experience in the world. He is especially interested in the measurement of personal culture using computational text analysis. One of his current projects uses data from the National Survey of Youth and Religion to ask: does the way we speak about certain topics contain measurable traces to our past experiences which can be used to predict future behavior? More specifically, does the way adolescents talk about their religious lives correlate with the frequency of their religious practices when they are young adults?

Professor Wood also studies religion more directly. He is currently working with a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame to study the religious/non-religious lives of undergraduate students. The project will be the first major study examining religious service attendance on a weekly basis. With these data, they will be able to observe how personal religiosity fluctuates over the course of a school year and identify the different factors which affect it.