This page outlines some of the research currently going on in our department. To learn about the research of the faculty members not listed here or greater detail from the faculty members who are, contact them directly.

Vern Bengston - The goal of this research is to investigate effects of recent socio-historical change on the interactions and aging of successive family generations. The research has two general objectives: (1) to explore how the structure, functions, and consequences of intergenerational relationships may have changed across the recent decades, in response to macro-social trends in population aging, female labor force participation, family formation and dissolution, occupational relationships influence well-being in the context of life-course transitions from early to middle to late adulthood. This research will extend the Longitudinal Study of Generations, which began collecting data in 1971 on over 2000 adult members of three- (and later four-) generation families. By continuing the three-year collection of data through the years 2003 and 2006, we can realize the first fully-elaborated generation-sequential design — comparing sets of parents and adult-children at the same age across different historical periods. Collection of two additional waves of data will allow investigation of four specific aims: (1) to identify how intergenerational solidarity and conflict evolve over 35 years of adulthood and across four generations; (2) to chart the effects of social change on the capacity of families to buffer stressful life transitions experienced by older and younger generations; (3) to examine how family relationships serve as genetic, environmental, and social conduits by which values, resources, and behaviors are transmitted over multiple generations; (4) to identify similarities and differences in the strength, configuration, and impact of intergenerational solidarity between African American and white families. This study will extend our understanding of the relationship between social change, family functioning, and individual well-being over the adult life course and across successive generations.

Tim Biblarz - Current projects include a study of how the gender of parents matter for children; a comparative study of heterosexual-, gay-, and lesbian-couple families with children in the 2000 U.S. Census; and a study of religious transmission from grandparents to grandchildren.

Barry Glassner - Barry Glassner's current research enlarges on his earlier work on the use of fear by politicians, marketers, advocacy groups, and the news media. In addition, he has completed a book on contemporary food beliefs and practices in the United States (The Gospel of Food; HarperCollins, 2007). This project continues his long-standing engagement with the sociological study of American culture, the U.S. media, and social construction. Glassner is focusing upon how particular foods, flavors, restaurants, and cooking practices come to be regarded especially favorably or unfavorably, and on political contests over societal problems relating to food and hunger.

Elaine Bell Kaplan - Elaine Bell Kaplan is currently working on two projects. With Patricia Literte, the first study, A Study of First Generation College Students by Race, Class, and Gender, explores the dynamics of social mobility of minority students. This qualitative study will focus on the process of social change as people move from one class status to another. This study asks questions such as what happens when the marginalized begin to gain access to the mainstream through educational achievement. What kind of negotiations do they enter into with family, community, and others during this process? How are marginalized people restricted or pushed through the educational process? The study will examine the complex intersection of race, class, and gender, the shaping and reshaping of identity, values and the availability of family and institutional support.

With Karen Sternheimer, the second study, The Sociology of Childhood and Adolescence, takes a social constructionist and structural approach, offering an in-depth examination of the social realities of children's lives in the United States. We include a chapter on children in other countries. Rather than simply focusing on children as appendages of adults or adults-in-training, this book seeks to understand children as social beings in their own rights, worthy of study and analysis. The Sociology of Childhood and Adolescence is forthcoming from the Roxbury Publishing Company, 2006. The findings from the two students will be the basis of a larger study on inner-city adolescents.

Paul Lichterman - Paul Lichterman recently published Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America’s Divisions (Princeton University Press, 2005), based on his ethnographic study of nine liberal and conservative Protestant-based volunteering and advocacy projects in a mid-sized American city. Many scholars and citizens alike have counted on civic groups to create broad social ties that bind society. Some hope that faith-based civic groups will spread their reach as government retreats. Lichterman asked if religious groups, long central in civic America, could create broad, empowering social ties in an unequal, diverse society. He listened as these groups tried to create bridges with other community groups, social service agencies, and low-income people, just as the 1996 welfare reforms were taking effect. Counter to long-standing arguments, Lichterman discovered that powerful customs of interaction often stunted external ties and even shaped religion's impact on the groups. Comparing groups, he found that successful bridges outward depended on group customs that invite reflective, critical discussion about a group's place amid surrounding groups and institutions. The book draws on Alexis de Tocqueville, John Dewey, and Jane Addams in addition to contemporary sociology, and develops a much-needed alternative to the popular "social capital" concept. To create broad civic relationships, Lichterman found, groups need more than the right religious discourses, political beliefs, or resources. They must also learn new ways of being groups and new definitions of civic action. Paul is further developing material from this recent book project: In one article he is showing how the social capital concept fails to predict the ways that volunteer groups do or don’t create broad social ties, and fails to live up to its Tocquevillian aspirations; this article is forthcoming in Theory and Society. Another article project expands our understanding of what people do with religion in public, beyond current models in the research literature.

Paul also is beginning a comparative ethnographic study of local civic groups, secular and religious, investigating how they create ties with state agencies, social movements, and other civic groups; later he plans to bring French comparison cases into the project. One major goal of the study is to understand how and when people decide to act as citizens rather than or in addition to being clients of state agencies or consumers in the marketplace. Another goal is to clarify how different cultural and institutional contexts create different understandings of what counts as "volunteering," "political activism," "charitable service," "cultural affirmation," or other forms of civic engagement. People often draw lines between what is political and not political, what is charitable and what is not. Those lines are not natural, and they have important implications for collective action. The study should help us understand better how widespread, taken-for-granted definitions of good citizenship come to be.

Michael Messner - Michael Messner's current research focuses on two projects. (1) With Suzel Bozada-Deas, he is studying persistence and change in sex segregation among adult volunteer coaches in major youth sports organizations. Of particular interest in this research is the ways that persistent sex segregation among adult volunteers fits into the construction of symbolic race and class community boundaries. (2) Through an examination of the media imagery of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, he is studying the ways that public displays of masculinity by political leaders are played out in elections and in the process of governing. Of particular interest in this research is examining how public displays of gender — for women and for men politicians — serve to limit the range of the kinds of people who are considered "legitimate candidates" for major offices, and how, once they take office, these same gender displays work against the creation of policies that might address the needs of subordinate and oppressed groups of people.

Jon Miller - Recent scholarly interest in religion has focused on the interweaving of religion with all other aspects of culture. At USC, this research is anchored in the interdisciplinary Center for Religion and Civic Culture (CRCC), which has several sources of funding to support faculty and student research. Research on immigration conducted through CRCC has often found religious organizations to be the providers of an institutional space where diverse ethnic communities protect their cultural identities at the same time that they are forging their accommodations to the larger society around them. Community organizing, social action, and microeconomic development — all aimed at cultural reconciliation and social stability at the neighborhood level — often involve religious actors who assemble interfaith and intercultural coalitions that can find resources and negotiate policies that bear on pressing social problems. Working with Donald E. Miller, Grace Dyrness, and a team of CRCC field researchers, Jon Miller is involved in a multi-year field study that examines the role of religion in communities of recent immigrants to the Los Angeles area. This research, supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts, will be featured in several Ph.D. dissertations by Sociology graduate students and will be published in Immigrant Religion in the City of Angels, a book under contract with the University of California Press. CRCC also provides support for historical research on religion and for investigations of such diverse topics as religious movements, global religion, spirituality, and visual religion.

Kelly Musick - Kelly Musick is starting a program of research, New Family Forms in Social Context. This project investigates new family forms and their implications for adults, children, and the population-level reproduction of family change. It pays close attention to heterogeneity within categories commonly applied in family research, looking, for example, at distinctions between never-married and divorced mothers, cohabiting and married two-parent families, and high and low conflict two-parent families. It addresses the dynamic nature of families, tracing change over time both within and across family types. In addition, it situates individuals within families, neighborhoods, and other social contexts that affect their attitudes and behaviors. It relies on new data from three complementary sources: the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), the National Survey of Families and Household (NSFH), and the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A.FANS).

Ed Ransford - With the decrease in the number of religious based hospitals (with their charter of outreach to the poor and uninsured) and a concomitant increase in "for profit" hospitals, new immigrants to the Los Angeles area often fall between the cracks. They approach clinics with high anxiety about language, cost, citizenship papers, and long waits. Using open ended interviews of 90 Latino immigrants, 12 Hometown Association leaders and 10 religious leaders and health practitioners, this study is investigating the extent to which Latino immigrants perceive barriers in using County Hospital and other clinics, the degree of trust/distrust of U.S. physicians, the use of alternative medicine (such as massage, herbal remedies, alternative healers, and prayer), and the degree to which the church is or is not helping immigrants in seeking health care through programs such as parish nurse programs. The interviews have been conducted and analyzed and the resulting study is under review in a major journal. Funding for this research is provided by the Pew Charitable Trusts grant (Religion and New Immigrants; Grace Dyrness, Donald Miller, and Jon Miller).

Leland Saito - Leland Saito's current book project examines events in New York City, San Diego, and California. In New York City, I am studying city council redistricting in 1990-1991 in the area around Manhattan's Chinatown. I examine the constellation of local and national practices and policies — both explicitly racial in character and those that appear race neutral — that work to exclude racial minorities from the political process, constituting the "sedimentation" of political inequality. Economic redevelopment policies continue to be an important focus of my research. In San Diego, I use the history of the Chinese Mission church, and the successful effort to save it, to examine the struggle over racial exclusion and inclusion in San Diego. A major theme is how individuals and groups organize to shape government policies regarding economic redevelopment and historic preservation. One constant in U.S. history is that local, state, and federal levels of government exert tremendous control over access to, and the usage of, urban territory. During the period when the Chinese American community organized to save the Chinese Mission Church, the Douglas Hotel — which played a key historical role in the African American community — was demolished. By comparing the adaptive reuse of the Mission with the failed attempt to save the Douglas Hotel, I examine the role of race and politics in historical preservation and urban redevelopment policies. As the third and final component of this book project, I examine the 2000 redistricting of state electoral districts in California. Redistricting created the potential for interracial conflict among racialized minorities. Yet, redistricting generated an unprecedented working alliance among Latino, Asian American, and African American redistricting groups. One of these groups, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), filed a lawsuit, Cano v. Davis, against the final plan. In contrast to the interracial alliance among the community redistricting groups, since the plan was supported by the vast majority of Latino state legislators, the lawsuit created a racial divide, pitting progressive Latinos in MALDEF and the state legislature, while allies on other issues, against each other. I am also working on another project in which I examine economic redevelopment in downtown Los Angeles. One of the key issues is the way that local community groups have become involved and worked with developers and city officials to spread the benefits of development to low-income and working class residents. This is in contrast to the displacement of such residents that historically has occurred through urban renewal and economic redevelopment projects.

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo - Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo's new research examines gardens and society.  As a discipline, sociology grew as a distinctively urban enterprise, and has largely ignored gardens as social projects or sites of inquiry.  But gardens and greenscapes are all around us.  While gardens evoke Eden, they are grounded in society.  As such, they reflect prevailing social relations of power, culture, race, class and gender, and there are social and environmental consequences to the way we garden.  Through a series of empirical studies of gardens in Southern California, my research will reveal the social processes and consequences of gardens and gardening activity.