The Art and Science of Social Research

Deborah Carr is a demographer and an active teacher at Boston University, where she regularly teaches the intro course. Her work focuses on sociology of the life course, aging, social psychology, and gender. Carr's latest book, Worried Sick: How Stress Hurts Us and How to Bounce Back, looks at how stress gets under our skin, makes us sick, and how and why people cope with stress differently. Elizabeth Heger Boyle is associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches course on sociology of law, human rights, and women's health. Her research and writing interests include cross-national analysis of legal activity, international law, immigration, and women's rights. Her current research project focuses on abortion politics in the global arena and looks at how transnational organizations like Planned Parenthood and the Catholic Church have gotten involved in shaping abortion policies around the world and the implications of their involvement on women. Ben Cornwell is associate professor of sociology at Cornell University, where he teaches introduction to sociology, the sociology of disasters, and research methods. Professor Cornwell's research interests include sociology of health and aging, social network analysis, organizational sociology, and social stratification. His current research focuses on the implications of socially networked and sequenced social processes for individuals and organizations-and, in particular, how such processes shape social stratification. His most recent work on social sequence analysis demonstrates how the ordering of social phenomena affects a variety of phenomena, including the stress process and the creation of social networks. Shelley Correll is professor of sociology at Stanford University, where she teaches classes on the sociology of gender, sociology of work, and social psychology. Her research is in the areas of gender, workplace dynamics, and organizational culture, examining how cultural beliefs about gender and work influence the career paths of men and women. Professor Correll has received numerous national awards for her research on the "motherhood penalty," research that demonstrates how motherhood influences the workplace evaluations, pay, and job opportunities of mothers. She is currently leading a nationwide, interdisciplinary project on "redesigning work" that evaluates how workplace structures and practices can be better aligned with today's workforce. Robert Crosnoe is associate dean of Liberal Arts and Rapoport Centennial Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. His main research area is the life course and human development, specifically the connections among children's and adolescents' health, psychosocial development, and educational trajectories and how these connections contribute to population-level inequalities. Professor Crosnoe teaches introduction to sociology, sociology of the family, and "Difficult Dialogues: Race and Social Policy in the U.S." He has won the President's Associates Award for Teaching Excellence and the Dad's Association Centennial Teaching Award for Undergraduate Instruction. Jeremy Freese is professor of sociology at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on statistics and data analysis. His research areas include health, medical sociology, quantitative methods, social demography, social inequality and stratification, and social psychology. Professor Freese is interested broadly in the relationship between social differences and individual differences and between social advantage and embodied advantage, and is part of ongoing efforts to better integrate biological and social science thinking. He is a principal investigator for the General Social Survey, the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, and Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences. Mary C. Waters is the John L. Loeb Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on research methods, immigration and ethnicity, race and ethnic relations, and the sociology of sports. Her work has focused on the integration of immigrants and their children; the transition to adulthood for the children of immigrants; intergroup relations; the measurement and meaning of racial and ethnic identity; and the social, demographic, and psychological impact of natural disasters. An elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Waters is the author or coauthor of 11 books and more than 75 articles. Professor Waters has won wide recognition for her teaching and advising, including seven prizes for undergraduate teaching.