121 - 130 of 210 results for: SOC

What are the historical trajectories and consequences of marriage, divorce, and premarital cohabitation? Where have gay rights come from and what is the future of gay rights in the US? What are the gender differences in marriage, family and housework? What does it mean for the personal to be political? What are the racial differences in family life and how have those differences been politicized? How did marriage equality go from being impossible to being the law of the US? We will study social change from the perspective of public opinion, legal changes, and family politics.

After decades of decline, U.S. cities today are undergoing major transformations. Young professionals are flocking to cities instead of fleeing to the suburbs. Massive increases in immigration have transformed the racial and ethnic diversity of cities and their neighborhoods. Public housing projects that once defined the inner city are disappearing, and crime rates have fallen dramatically. Do these changes signal the end of residential segregation and urban inequality? Who do these changes benefit? This course will explore these issues and strategies to address them through readings and discussion, analyzing a changing neighborhood in a major city in the Bay Area in groups (which will include at least one site visit), and studying a changing neighborhood or city of their choice for their final project. The course does not have pre-requisites.

This course surveys quantitative methods to make causal inferences in the absence of randomized experiment including the use of natural and quasi-experiments, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, fixed effects estimators, and difference-in-differences. We emphasize the proper interpretation of these research designs and critical engagement with their key assumptions for applied researchers. Prerequisites: Prior training in multivariate regression (e.g., ECON 102B or the permission of the instructor).

This course focuses on the skills needed to conduct theoretically-informed and policy-relevant descriptive social science. Students read recent examples of rigorous descriptive quantitative research that exemplifies the use of data to describe important phenomena related to educational and social inequality. The course will help develop skills necessary to conceptualize, operationalize, and communicate descriptive research, including techniques related to measurement and measurement error, data harmonization, data reduction, and visualization. Students develop a descriptive project during the course. Prerequisite: satisfactory completion of a course in multivariate regression.

(Graduate students register for 260.) Organizations are ubiquitous: they educate us, manage our finances, and structure our daily routines. They also distribute resources, status, and opportunities. This course will explore the role of formal organizations in contemporary social life, and their consequences for individuals. Drawing on a range of research in the social sciences and examples from the real world, we will examine several topics, including: the origins of organizations, how decisions are made in organizations, why some organizations survive while others die, incentives and employment relationships, how social networks shape social stratification, and what kinds of organizational policies promote diversity.

Post-WW II transformation in the Asia-Pacific region, with focus on the ascent of Japan, the development of newly industrialized capitalist countries (S. Korea and Taiwan), the emergence of socialist states (China and N. Korea), and the changing relationship between the U.S. and these countries.

(Graduate students register for 270). Sociologists seek to understand how society works, specifically: how social life is organized, changed, and maintained. Sociological theory provides hypotheses for explaining social life. All empirical research in sociology is enriched by, and has some basis in, sociological theories. This course introduces students to the earliest sociological theories and the thinkers who developed them. Specifically, we will discuss the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx. We will compare and contrast how they thought about important modern-day social realities such as capitalism, racism, crime, religion, and social cohesion. We will consider how these early theories and thinkers influence the way sociologists think about and study the social world today.

This course examines the ways in which higher education structures and policies interact with gender, gender identity, and other characteristics in the United States, around the world, and over time. Attention is paid to how changes in those structures and policies relate to access to, experiences in, and outcomes of higher education by gender. Students can expect to gain an understanding of theories and perspectives from the social sciences relevant to an understanding of the role of higher education in relation to structures of gender differentiation and hierarchy. Topics include undergraduate and graduate education; identity and sexuality; gender and science; gender and faculty; and feminist scholarship and pedagogy.

Today we interact with our friends and enemies, our team partners and romantic partners, and our organizations and societies, all through computational systems. How do we design these social computing systems - platforms for social media, online communities, and collaboration - to be effective and responsible? This course covers design patterns for social computing systems and the foundational ideas that underpin them.