Sociology News & Events

"American higher education should really provide sustained support to Chinese international students" due to the anxieties they face during the COVID-19 scare, says Yingyi Ma, associate professor of sociology and director of Asian/American Studies.

"While life expectancy has continued to improve in large highly educated urban hubs, life expectancy declines have been much more pronounced in former industrial cities, much of Appalachia, and in many small towns and cities across America’s heartland," says Shannon Monnat, associate professor of sociology and Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion.

A group comprised of four researchers — representing the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and the Maxwell X Lab — will receive approximately $500,000 over three years in support of their research on different opioid court treatment interventions across New York State. 

"There is less access to healthcare overall in rural towns compared to urban areas of the U.S. Many rural parts of the country don’t even have a hospital, much less specialty care like dermatology," says Shannon Monnat, Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion.

Yingyi Ma, professor of sociology, suggests that Chinese students are motivated to study abroad because of disappointment with the Chinese education system, which they assert “stifles creativity” and “entails hellish hours of studying.”

According to Yingyi Ma, associate professor of sociology, and her co-authors, U.S. institutions need to invest more in direct recruiting in China, do more to integrate Chinese students, and provide diverse networking opportunities for them.

While the urban opioid crisis is a crisis of heroin and illegal drugs, the rural opioid crisis of prescription drugs is largely a story of growing spatial inequality and of places left behind, most often occurring in places that tend to have a declining industrial base, finds a study co-authored by Shannon Monnat, Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion.

“Many people who misuse opioids are also misusing other substances, and a common driver of this is self-medicating,” says Shannon Monnat, associate professor of sociology and Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion, whose research examines the connections between social disadvantage, place, public policy and health.

The degree to which religion is decoupled from prosocial goals and spirituality in contemporary young adults is one of many research questions to be addressed in the project “Spirituality and Prosocial Values in the Absence of Religion Among Millennials and Their Families.” This study will be led by Merril Silverstein, the Marjorie Cantor Endowed Professor of Aging Studies in the Falk College and the Maxwell School.

The Maxwell School’s Tenth Decade Project provides seed funding for worthy scholarly projects that have the potential to produce significant external research funding and high-impact publications. Since it was created, the Tenth Decade Project has attracted nearly $850,000 in gifts from 267 individual donors, including a lead gift from long-time Maxwell supporters Gerry and Daphna Cramer.

"Historically, grandparents have always provided care," says University Professor Madonna Harrington Meyer. "What we’re seeing now is grandparents providing care that looks a lot more like parenting: more hours and more tasks."

“The faculty promoted are nationally recognized scholars, outstanding teachers, and engaged in making their work accessible to broader audiences in an effort to shape future research, and dialogue and practice,” said David M. Van Slyke, dean of the Maxwell School.