Graduate Program - Student Highlights

STUDENT Highlights

National Science Foundation Research Grants

Sociology graduate students at Iowa are encouraged to apply for grants to help fund their doctoral research. Faculty advisors and other Ph.D. committee members work closely with graduate students and assist them in submitting their applications to some of the nation's most prestigious granting agencies. Our graduate students continue to have amazing success attaining National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grants. The following were received just in the last several years, and are indicative of the diversity of substantive interests among graduate students in the program:

• Chris Barnum, "Status, Group Identity and Influence: An Experimental Test"

• Kristen Marcussen, "Marital Status and Psychological Well-Being: A Comparison of Married and Cohabiting Individuals"

• Sarah Beth Estes, "Family-Responsive Workplace Policies, Parenting, and Children's Well-Being"

• Tom Stucky, "A Pooled Cross-Sectional Time-Series Analysis of the Role of Institutional Politics in Crime and Crime Control at the City Level"

• Scott Fitzgerald, "Church and State in Collective Action: Faith-Based Community Development as Social Movement Phenomena"

• Heather Wendt, "Market Transition and Entrepreneurial Success in the Ukraine"

• Will Kalkhoff, "Collective Validation in Multi-Actor Task Settings: Extending the Berger et al. Theory of Legitimation"

• C. Wesley Brakefield-Younts, "The Effects of Model Status and Collective Validation on the Enactment and Cultural Transmission of Deviance"

• Leda Kanellakos, "Formal Vocabulary as a Status Cue: "Interactions with Diffuse Status Characteristics"

The exceptional quality of dissertation research at Iowa, facilitated by NSF support, helps to explain the continued success of our graduate students on the job market.

Recent graduates of the Iowa Ph.D. program have attained tenure-track positions at major universities:
Melissa Bonstead-Bruns (University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire)	Kristen Marcussen (Kent State University)
Anne Eisenberg (SUNY, Geneseo)	Leda Kanellakos Nath (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater)
Sarah Beth Estes (University of Cinncinati)	Nicolas Pedriana (Louisiana State University)
Will Kalkhoff (Kent State University)	Thomas D. Stucky (Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne, School of Public and Environmental Affairs)
Jeffrey Lucas (University of Akron)	Tor Wynn (Wichita State University)

American Sociological Association Research Awards & University Teaching Awards

With a balanced emphasis on producing excellent research and on developing teaching abilities, the Sociology graduate program at Iowa provides its students with strong skills in both of these areas. Early mastery of professional research and teaching techniques is shown in the repeated success of our graduate students in university-wide and national competitions. In 1998, Will Kalkhoff and Chris Barnum received the Outstanding Student Paper Award in the Social Psychology Section of the American Sociological Association for their research on "The Effects of Status-Organizing and Social Identity Processes on Patterns of Social Influence." Jeffrey Lucas also received this award in 2000 for a paper stemming from his dissertation research on "Status, Legitimacy, and Institutionalization of Woman as Leaders." In addition, Anne Eisenberg, Ashley Finley, Jeffrey Lucas, Kristen Marcussen, and Tor Wynn were all chosen recently to receive the prestigious University of Iowa Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award by the Council on Teaching.

Presentations at Regional & National Conferences

Among the indicators of Iowa Sociology's national impact is its high rate of participation at professional conferences. We compiled statistics for a recent annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. We counted the number of graduate students from every department that participated in the meetings. We then calculated the likelihood that a graduate student from each department would participate in the meetings by dividing the number of graduate student participants from a department by its number of full-time graduate students. The table below shows the top five departments in the country according to this index. Iowa ranks number two in the nation in terms of the rate at which its graduate students participated in a recent meeting of the ASA.

Rank	Department	Participation Rate
1	Stanford	0.91
2	Iowa	0.69
3	Harvard	0.66
4	North Carolina	0.64
5	UCLA	0.56

Publications in Top Social Science Journals

In a recent quantitative study of the quality of US sociology programs, Iowa ranked number one in terms of the rate at which its faculty publish in the field's top journals (ASR, AJS, and SF).

Iowa graduate students in sociology are also involved in publishing research. For example, a recent UI study involving several sociology graduate students (Jeff Houser, Jeff Lucas, and Shane Thye) gained national attention because of its implications for understanding the sources of racial differences in standardized test scores. The research was headed by Professor Michael Lovaglia, and Professor Barry Markovsky was a collaborator on the project. Results of the study appeared in the AJS. Lovaglia and collaborators found that experimental subjects who are made to believe that performing well on an ability test will bring negative consequences, end up scoring lower on those tests than subjects to whom negative ramifications are not suggested. The UI researchers concluded that test scores depend not just on the content of the test but also on the expected consequences of the test. Since African-Americans who excel in academics are often penalized in some sense - with resentment or suspicion, for example - the study could help to explain why scores on standardized tests for African-American students are systematically lower than for European-American students.

Professor Lovaglia has appeared on CNN Headline and News Talk Radio to discuss the research that he and his collaborators conducted, and the study was disseminated by the Associated Press.

Other recent publications involving graduate students (in bold type) include:

• Glass, Jennifer and Ashley Finley. "Coverage and Effectiveness of Family-Responsive Workplace Policies" (Human Resource Management Review)

• Kalkhoff, Will and Chris Barnum. "The Effects of Status-Organizing and Social Identity Processes on Patterns of Social Influence in Task Settings" (Social Psychology Quarterly)

• Fitzgerald, Scott, Mack C. Shelley, II, and Paula W. Dail. "Research on Homelessness: Sources and Implications of Uncertainty" (American Behavioral Scientist)

• Spohn, Ryan and Howard Kaplan. "Adolescent Substance Use and Adult Health Status: A Critical Analysis of a Problematic Relationship" (Advances in Medical Sociology)

• Holtzman, Mellisa, and Jennifer Glass. "Explaing Changes in Mothers' Job Satisfaction Following Childbirth" (Work and Occupations)

• Troyer, Lisa, C. Wesley Younts, and Will Kalkhoff. "Clarifying the Theory of Second-Order Expectations: The Correspondence Between Motives for Interactioin and Actors' Orientation Toward Group Interaction" (Social Psychology Quarterly)

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