Graduate Sociology at SUNY Albany

Area of Specialization: Social Demography

The graduate program in the Department of Sociology is particularly strong in social demography. Many faculty members focus the majority of their research on social demographic issues. We have strong ties with the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis. Directors of the Center have been sociology faculty members and many students have received valuable research experience there. Students may take any of the following relevant courses, may pursue the Demography Certificate, and may choose to focus on demography for one of their specialization examinations at the doctoral level or for a master's thesis or dissertation topic.

Demography Courses in the Sociology Department

• Soc 551: Introduction to Demography
• Soc 552: Demographic Techniques
• Soc 607: Demography Internship
• Soc 665: Special Topics in Demography (various topics including fertility, mortality, migration, families and households, residential segregation, and others)

Demography-related courses in the Sociology Department

• Soc 550: The American Community
• Soc 560: Families
• Soc 575: Ethnicity and Race
• Soc 627: Urbanization
• Soc 638: Social Mobility
• Soc 640: Gender Inequality
• Soc 673: Human Ecology
• Soc 662: Sociology of Aging

Demography-related courses in other departments

• Ant 511: Human Population Biology
• Ant 512: Human Population Genetics
• Gog 556: Snowbelt/Sunbelt: Regional Change in the United States
• Pln 502: Urban and Regional Structure
• Pln 561: Comparative Urbanization and Spatial Development

Center for Social and Demographic Analysis

The Center for Social and Demographic Analysis (CSDA) is a multi-disciplinary research unit with connections to several departments, schools, and colleges on the University at Albany campus. CSDA provides extensive support for population-related research by social scientists at the University. CSDA’s Computing/Statistical Core supports a state-of -the-art computing environment, including a UNIX network, with several SUN Work stations; a NOVELL network with PC access; printing and plotting facilities. CSDA’s information/Data Services Core maintains a collection of reference materials, census materials, dataset documentation, and selected journals. The Administrative Core is responsible for managing the Center’s accounts, as well as planning special functions such as colloquia, workshops, and conferences. Professor Richard Alba is Director of the Center and Professor Nancy Denton is Associate Director. For additional information about the Center, visit CSDA’s website at: http://www.albany.edu/csda/.

Certificate Program in Demography

The Certificate in Demography at the University at Albany is a graduate program designed both for students already enrolled in graduate programs in social science, public policy, or others and for members of the community who wish to learn more about demography. The program focuses on how population processes such as fertility, mortality, and migration operate in societies and how they interrelate with other social processes.

Graduates of the program will emerge with both the sound theoretical background and practical abilities to play an active role in demographic demographic research and/or decision making. Students will acquire:

• a general appreciation of the importance of demographic structure and change for both developed and developing societies
• demographic analysis skills, such as population forecasting, life table construction, and other techniques
• knowledge of how to access and interpret the vast wealth of demographic data.

Because of the unique design of this program and the growing recognition of the importance of demography, the Certificate program should prove useful to students with diverse backgrounds, from those with an awareness of the relevance of demography for their research interests to employees of government and the private sector who frequently work with demographic data.

The Certificate in Demography is a self standing program of l8 credit hours. It may be undertaken alone, or in conjunction with M.A., M.S., or Ph.D. programs through the Sociology Department or other departments. Requirements for the program include Soc 551, 551, Soc 552, and at least two semesters of Soc 665 (or one semester of Soc 665 and one semester of Soc 607).

The additional credit hours may be fulfilled by repeating Soc 665 (on different topics) or by taking demography related courses in the Sociology Department or other departments. In addition to the 18 credit requirement, all students are expected to have completed one graduate statistics course in sociology or a related field.

Faculty in Demography

Richard D. Alba
Ph.D. Columbia University

Professor Alba has broad interests, as his four books and numerous research articles demonstrate, in ethnic and racial diversity. For much of his career, he focused on assimilation processes among European-ancestry Americans, culminating in his book, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. More recently, he has expanded his focus to include new immigrant groups and African Americans, as evidenced in his collaborative project (with John Logan) on the residential patterns of immigrant and racial minorities. A new interest, stimulated by a Fulbright award, is in immigration and ethnicity in Germany. As the founding director of the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis, he has also done widely recognized work on the demography of New York State.

Angie Chung
Ph.D. University of California at Los Angeles

Professor Chung’s research interests include urban sociology, international migration, race relations theory, interethnic relations, Asian American studies, and ethnic organizations. She has published on the topic of interethnic coalitions, ethnic community-based organizations, race relations theory, and 2nd generation youth in several journals and books. Her most recent work examines the diverse ways 1.5/ 2nd generation ethnic organizations in Koreatown are able to construct ethnic political solidarity within the context of community power structures. She is currently working on a monograph on the inter-generational politics of the Korean American community in Los Angeles and preparing a pilot study on Asian American suburban neighborhoods in NY City and New Jersey.

Christine E. Bose
Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University

Professor Bose's academic interests lie in the areas of stratification, historical demography, gender studies, and race/ethnicity. She has published in the areas of occupational prestige, gender and status attainment, the social impact of household technology, women and development, and has just completed a book on women’s role in the U.S. political economy in 1900. She is especially active in the research area of gender and employment. She served as Chair of the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association (1989 - 90) and is currently the Editor of Gender & Society. Recently, she was elected Vice-President of the Eastern Sociological Society. Professor Bose holds joints appointments in the Departments of Latin American and Carribean Studies and Women's Studies and was the founding director
of our Institute for Research on Women.

Glenn Deane
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Professor Deane's demographic interests are in the areas of multiple race identifications, population and environment, spatial processes, and historical demography. He is also interested in research methodology, including error dependence, missing value imputation, spatial lags, and methods for pooled cross-sectional analysis. Recent papers include a direct test of the interrelationship population and the environment using annual county-level population estimates and annual counts of dust storms from weather stations situated throughout the U.S. Great Plains; an innovative use of the log-multiplicative association model for imputing missing values in nonignorable nonresponse data; a simple, yet more defensible, alternative to single-race assignment schemes for multiple race identifications; and a critique of commonly employed specifications of the complex relationship between neighborhood racial composition and median neighborhood housing values.

Nancy Denton
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania

Professor Denton's research has focused on measuring and explaining the levels and trends of residential segregation for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians in large metropolitan areas of the U.S. With Douglas S. Massey she is the author of American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, which won the 1995 ASA Distinguished Publication award. Her current research is looking at patterns of racial change at the neighborhood level and examining characteristics of persons who live in ethnic and integrated neighborhoods. She is also beginning an analysis of spatial and racial effects on housing value appreciation, as well as studying the adjustment process of poor mothers in Chicago who move from concentrated poverty neighborhoods to low poverty neighborhoods

Walter M. Ensel
Ph.D. University at Albany, State University of New York

Dr. Ensel's research interests center on the role played by stressors and social support in the life stress process. Focusing primarily on psychological well being, his work has also examined gender, marital, and economic differences in psycho social determinants of well being. He is currently conducting a study on the structure of social support and its effects on mental and physical health.

Donald J. Hernandez
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley

Professor Hernandez’ interests include life course processes, children and the family, social and economic stratification, immigration, race and ethnicity, and public policy. His book America’s Children: Resources from Family, Government and the Economy presented the first national analyses of the timing, magnitude, and reasons for revolutionary changes experienced by children since the Great Depression in family composition, parents’ education, fathers’ and mothers’ work, and family income and poverty. More recently in From Generation to Generation: The Health and Well-Being of Children in Immigrant Families (edited with E. Charney) he assessed historical and contemporary differences among children in immigrant and native-born families. Future plans include studies of the effect of welfare reform on the well-being and development of children.

Hayward Derrick Horton
Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University

Professor Horton's research areas are racial/ethnic demography and population theory. Recent research has focused on the demography of race and entrepreneurship, demographic analyses of racial differentials in home ownership and housing values, rural-urban differences in poverty within the black population, the impact of sex ratios on black community development, and black male marriageability over time. He is currently establishing a new paradigm, Critical Demography. This innovative approach facilitates the development of theories, concepts, and methods that do not fit the prevailing paradigm, Conventional Demography. Critical Demography makes explicit the manner in which the social structure differentiates dominant and subordinate populations. Professor Horton has initiated a five-year project to develop a body of literature and a community of scholars for this dynamic, new paradigm.

Zai Liang
Ph.D. University of Chicago

Professor Liang’s areas of research interests include migration, urbanization, and race and ethnic relations. His recent research projects have covered such topics as market transition and migration in China and intermarriage of Asian Americans in the United States. New areas of research include population and health and population and environment.

Lawrence Raffalovich
Ph.D. Indiana University

Professor Raffalovich studies Social Stratification, Economic Sociology, and Quantitative Research Methods. Recent publications have investigated inequality among income earners in the United States, income ineqaulity between propertied and non-propertied classes in the advanced capitalist democracies, and statistical methods for analyzing time-series data. His current research on Inequality, Democracy and Development is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. A primary objective of this project is to understand how the dynamics of income growth and distribution are shaped by the structure of social institutions.

Scott J. South
Ph.D. University of Texas

Professor South's research examines the influence of social and geographic context on intergroup relations, life-course trajectories, and demographic events, with particular emphasis on family formation, marital dissolution, and patterns of residential mobility and migration. His recent projects include a study of residential mobility between neighborhoods of varying socioeconomic and racial composition and a study of neighborhood effects on the life-course of adolescent and young adults.

Glenna Spitze
Ph.D. University of Illinois

Professor Spitze's research interests include gender and families, intergenerational relations, and paid and unpaid labor. She is co-author (with John Logan) of Family Ties: Enduring Relations between Parents and Their Grown Children (Temple University Press, 1996, winner of the 1997 Goode Distinguished Book Award). Her current work focuses on family divisions of paid and unpaid labor, sibling relations, relationships between older parents and adult children, and the role of personal networks in older adults’ health outcomes. She holds a joint appointment in the Women’s Studies Department.

Katherine Trent
Ph.D. University of Texas

Professor Trent's primary research interests are in the areas of fertility and family demography. Her work has examined a range of attitudes about fertility and family issues. Her research also focuses on the determinants of fertility for different age groups of women, although she has a strong continuing interest in adolescent parenthood. She has studied the correlates and the social and economic consequences of young mothers’ living arrangements. Professor Trent’s work also examines the determinants of divorce with much of her research in this area reflecting an interest in the consequences of parental divorce for children and adults. Her research predominantly focuses on American women, families and households, although she has also published cross-national studies.

Russell A. Ward
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin

Professor Ward has a wide range of interests in the sociology of aging. His current research focuses on family relations in middle and later life, including coresidence by parents and adult children and patterns of marital quality among couples in the “sandwich generation”. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Health and Aging, and is affiliated with the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis.

-From 2006 Brochure