The presence on our campus of almost fifty diverse researchers on women and/or gender issues is clearly fostering the development of a large group of graduate students doing Master's theses or Doctoral dissertations in this area. There are large concentrations of graduate students researching gender topics in diverse departments such as Sociology, English, Anthropology, Social Welfare, and the Doctor of Arts program, to name only a few.
The Sociology Department now has a graduate level specialty in the area of gender, is developing a brochure which describes this concentration, and thus provides an interesting (though preliminary) sampling of the types of graduate research occurring at the University at Albany.
Of the ten students mentioned by sociology faculty, three are working in fertility or sociology of medicine. Baffour Takyi is using the Ghana Fertility Survey to investigate the determinants of fertility-related attitudes and behavior, focusing particularly on market work. Pamela Robert's thesis, "Women's Experience of Childbirth: Choices for Place of Birth and Type of Medical Attendant," analyzes the decline of home birth in the United States and the resurgence of out-of-hospital birth after 1975. Using in-depth personal interviews on women's birth experiences, she plans to interpret the meanings assigned to birth and how these meanings influence the decision regarding place of birth. Lucille Pulitzer is using historical methods to study the medicalization of conception and birthing technologies.
Four graduate students are making use of the new Families and Households Survey data. Peggy Shaffer-King is looking at paid work, parenthood, and well-being. Annee Roschelle is planning to investigate the relation between home and market labor, with a focus on racial ethnic women and using a socialist feminist critique of the contemporary literature in this area. (Annee is also working on a comparative analysis of union participation and satisfaction among a sample of women and men who work in manufacturing industries.) Joyce Robinson is studying household labor and marital power. (She is also working on an analysis of gender differences in small business success among entrepreneurs in New England.) Finally, Pat Hofmaster is using this national data set to investigate the childcare arrangements of employed women.
Other students have used different data sets, created their own data sets, or made use of other approaches. Sonia Miner is using data collected in the Albany area by Professors Spitze and Logan to study the effects of divorce on intergenerational relations. Brian Fisher is using data on New York State employees to show the structural properties of promotions within agencies, and how these structures differentiate opportunities for men and women. While Monika Reuter-Echols is interested in the influence of technology on women's structural position in labor markets using a cross-national framework.
The volume and diversity of this work illustrate why a graduate student research group is now forming, and developing its own goals. In future issues, we hope to highlight graduate student research in other departments.