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Research & Workshops > Research Areas
Research Areas
Research conducted by faculty and graduate students in the Department of Sociology at LSU covers a wide array of topics, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. A critical mass of faculty and students specializes in criminology. Common denominators for research conducted in the department are the study of both social inequality and social capital. The paragraphs below provide brief descriptions of each of these core areas and list related research carried out by members of LSU Sociology.
Criminology encompasses the study of crime and criminal behavior including their etiology, consequences, and control. The Sociology faculty members at LSU have expertise in both macro- and micro-criminology. Their research spans such areas as violence, community structures and crime, cultural influences on crime rates, and individual-level social processes and delinquency. Our criminologists have recently formed an informal research group in conjunction with various individual researchers across campus to consolidate the various competencies related to crime research. More information can be found on the home page of the Crime and Policy Evaluation Research group.
Social inequality is the study of the distribution of valued resources in a society and the impacts of the ways these resources are distributed among the members of society on both their life-styles and the opportunities that are available to them. In advanced capitalist societies, five variables determine/reflect social inequality. They are, without regard to their relative importance, class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Faculty research on social inequality, a traditional strength of our department, often intersects with studies in the other two core areas, criminology and social capital. Our diverse research foci include: poverty and “welfare-to-work” transitions in our state, the way in which cultural capital enables and constrains academic achievement in young children, the effects of social network structure and resources on health in disadvantaged neighborhoods, the effects of cyclical patterns in the oil industry on the economic outcomes of communities, the relationship between race and class consciousness, the role class background plays in the lives of academics, the role of NGOs in education in developing countries, and the development of civil rights legislation in the US.
Social capital has to do with the connections among people in society. It is a fairly new term, but it encompasses many familiar areas, several of which the department covers. It includes social networks, community, civic participation, social trust, identity and sense of belonging. It may focus on the resources people have ("whom you know"), or it may describe the structure of interaction of people or groups in society. Research on social capital carried out by members of LSU Sociology has explored how social networks affect access to resources after a natural disaster, how a person looks for a job, how new technology spreads in third world countries, how community solidarity can reduce crime, how religious organizations help integrate immigrants into society, how the relations among civic associations or political parties enable a new democracy to emerge or an established one to survive. |
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