Soc 320 Research Opportunity, Fall 2025: Transcription Assistant for Interviews About Flirtation

Term: Fall 2025 (Soc 320, Section 136) Status: CLOSED Contact: Please contact Chloe Hart chloe.hart@wisc.edu to apply for this position. See details below. It is available for 1-2 credits. Description: How have large societal shifts like the #MeToo movement and the Covid-19 pandemic shifted Americans’ views toward appropriate sexual behavior? I take up these questions …

Collective Defense Mechanisms by Mustafa Emirbayer (2025)

American Sociological Review Abstract: Despite being an uncommon topic in sociological inquiry, collective defense mechanisms are a widely known phenomenon in social life. Whenever people experience anxieties in common, shared defensive processes can arise at an unconscious level, shunting off these anxieties from reflective awareness. This can happen in social and organizational settings that are …

Working for the Public Good: Organizational Dilemmas & Strategy in Public-Sector Unions by Sara Gia Trongone (2025)

Work and Occupations Abstract: Despite the success of “Bargaining for the Common Good”, only educators have used this strategy at scale in the public sector. Why are some workers more likely to strike and bargain over “common good” demands than others? This article compares two social justice-oriented union locals in Chicago to explore how workers’ …

Counterfactual Slopes and Their Applications in Social Stratification by Ang Yu and Jiwei Zhao (2025)

Sociological Methodology Abstract: This paper addresses two prominent theses in social stratification research, the great equalizer thesis and Mare’s (1980) school transition thesis. Both theses describe the role of an intermediate educational transition in the association between socioeconomic status and an outcome variable. However, the descriptive regularities of the two theses may be driven by …

High housing costs lead to delayed medical care, Erin Gaede tells WPR

Erin Gaede was interviewed by Wisconsin Public Radio about a new report she co-authored with Tessa Conroy and Steven Deller, which reveals that rising housing costs are causing some Wisconsinites to delay medical care. “Housing financial stress is not an individual issue — it does impact the broader community’s health outcomes,” said Erin Gaede, a …

Max Besbris selected as H.I. Romnes Fellow

Congratulations to Max Besbris on his selection as an H.I. Romnes Fellow! This award is intended to recognize and support faculty up to SIX years past their first promotion to a tenured position. Max studies how individuals make decisions in economic markets, how these decisions are affected by interactions with others, and how these decisions, …

Intergenerational Occupational Mobility and Health in the United States by Hyeyun Jeong, Jiahui Xu, John Robert Warren, Liying Luo, Eric Grodsky, and Chandra Muller (2025)

  Social Science & Medicine Abstract: Does intergenerational occupational mobility impact health and well-being net of occupational origins and destinations? Are the net effects of mobility homogeneous across demographic subgroups? Using data from High School and Beyond cohort (HS&B:80) and two mobility effect models (Luo’s Mobility Contrast Model and Sobel’s Diagonal Reference Model), we find …

Human Rights as a Lay Category of Thought: Content and Structure in the United States by Katherine Jensen, Monika Krause, and Benny Witkovsky (2025)

Socius Abstract: What are human rights? Although legal scholars point to a growing list of international entitlements, social scientists have highlighted underlying ideological assumptions and the selective interpretation of human rights in practice. Lay conceptualizations of human rights, however, merit further examination. This study brings together human rights research and cognitive sociology, deploying a novel, …

Do Peers’ Skills Matter for Learning in Preschool Classrooms? Within- and across-Classroom Differences in the Relationship between Peers’ Academic Skills and Individual Skill Gains by Rebecca Bier, Elizabeth Vaade and Culleen Witthuhn (2025)

American Educational Research Journal Abstract: Peer interaction offers critical learning opportunities for preschool students, yet exposure to peers of different skill levels varies within and across classrooms. We explore two ways peers may affect learning: differences in who children play with in a classroom and differences in student composition across classrooms. We find that playing …

Epistemological Vigilance as Ethnographic Practice by Katherine Jensen (2025)

Qualitative Sociology Abstract: With “In Praise of ‘Thick Construction,’” Loïc Wacquant offers a welcome manifesto for ethnography infused with Bourdieusian epistemology. Continuing in that spirit, I elaborate the need (and offer practical tips) for epistemological vigilance—that is, to reflexively interrogate one’s own thinking—in the face of prenotions that threaten the thick construction of ethnographic objects. …