This research paper investigates the impact of “amenity migration” on the local populations in rural mountain towns during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as potential barriers to healthcare that arise when the infrastructure of these communities is strained by a large and sudden population boom. It aims to explore the distinct perspectives, challenges, and adaptations of local residents and healthcare providers by employing interviews as the primary method. The study delves into motivations to live in the mountains, housing limitations, remote work, community dynamics, and balance between full-time and part-time residents during the pandemic. Furthermore, this study takes an analytical approach to theories of social ambivalence as a means to understand the complex and contradictory emotions local populations may experience towards amenity migrants. The social determinants of health play a significant role in analyzing the needs of these communities as they continue to undergo change because of these in-migrants. This paper contributes to the existing literature by filling gaps in understanding the nuanced responses of locals, healthcare workers, ski patrollers, and mountain rescuers to the pandemic in rural settings, offering insights into their distinct coping strategies, perceptions, and contributions to community well-being. This paper aims to identify the existence of “amenity migrants'' in rural mountain towns proposed by previous literature, understand their impact on local populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how the health landscape has been altered in the equitable distribution of healthcare. In bringing attention to this phenomenon, I aim to further inform policies and interventions that will support the diverse needs of both the locals and amenity migrants in the areas faced with the challenges posed by the pandemic.

The athlete-to-businessperson pipeline is extremely popular with collegiate student-athletes. Inspired by this observation, this thesis asks how former collegiate athletes now working in business describe how their athletic experiences prepared, or failed to prepare, them for a career in business. Existing literature explores the statistical correlation between athletics and business, but focuses much less on qualitative narratives from the athletes themselves. Thus, this thesis employs semi-structured 15-30-minute-long interviews with twelve former collegiate student-athletes to uncover how they view their journey from athlete to businessperson. The findings, which cover a range of sports and business professions, conclude that athletes are often drawn to, and able to succeed in, business professions due to the development of executive functioning skills and emotional intelligence characteristics along with environmental factors. Ultimately, the research contributes to the sociological conversation by discussing the effects of the social institutions of education and athletics on the individual.

Pittsburgh’s Strip District offers a look into how urban redevelopment disproportionately affects the communities within. Utilizing 20 semi-structured interviews, it was determined that individual experiences were dictated by certain characteristics that were investigated, like age or one’s social role in the neighborhood. These divergences in lifestyle and overall position in the Strip, therefore, complicate each individual’s perception of growth and their corresponding outcomes. Young residents, who occupy the new residential spaces introduced to the area, accept change as a positive, utilizing the refurbished environment and amenities to their advantage. However, business owners, belonging to an older demographic who better represent what the area once was, meet this change with apprehension. Concerns about fading identity, misguided policy, and displacement repeatedly expose the harmful effects of redevelopment in an urban context. Together, the findings demonstrate how growth presents itself unevenly, with any positive change benefiting only select groups.

Existing literature on penal farm labor is dominated by the prison-industrial complex (PIC), which argues that private companies profit from penal labor and incarceration more broadly. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola Prison, incarcerated men perform fieldwork. In this thesis, I ask: how does penal farm labor shape the material, corporeal, and emotional conditions of men who are serving time at Angola? What was the utility of penal farm labor for the state of Louisiana from the 1980s until the 2010s? I conducted interviews with 26 formerly incarcerated men who described their violent experiences with fieldwork at Angola. I argue that fieldwork is a disciplinary mechanism that helped the state of Louisiana manage its political economic crisis beginning in the 1980s. The PIC fails to explain Angola’s farm economy because the food produced at Angola stays within the state prison system. My proposed framework of carceral reproduction fills in the gap left by the PIC. Carceral reproduction captures how Angola’s closed, circular farm economy reduced the Louisiana state prison system’s operating costs. In doing so, penal farm labor at Angola offered a solution to the political conundrum of how to run a prison system when the state lacked the money to do so.

Given the salience of feminine devaluation within the gay male community, several studies have outlined anti-effeminacy as a harmful, regulatory force within gay male relationships. This study explores how this prejudice informs gay male relationship formation. I developed a two part methodology to determine the role that anti-effeminacy plays in gay male relationship formation. First, I administered the Negative Attitude Towards Effeminacy survey to determine how anti-effeminacy was correlated with various relationship and demographic factors of gay men. Then, I conducted semi-structured interviews with gay men to determine how anti-effeminacy informed how they approached romantic, platonic, and community relationships with other gay men. Results indicated that masculine gender expression is positively correlated with anti-effeminacy and that anti-effeminacy works as a filtering phenomenon, motivating both feminine and masculine gay men to exclude themselves from potentially unfulfilling or harmful relationships based on assumed or perceived gender expression.

This paper expands conventional understandings of globalization by examining how outsourcing reshapes both global processes and local realities in the Philippines. Focusing on Dumaguete City, I ask: How is outsourcing reshaping our understanding of globalization? Moreover, how is it reconfiguring the city’s spatial landscape and urban economy, and what does this reveal about globalization as an embedded, locally mediated process? Drawing on qualitative interviews with 17 executives, managers, and industry experts, complemented by ethnographic observations, I found that globalization is not merely an external force imposed upon localities, but a process that is embedded, negotiated, and reproduced within them. Central to this analysis is the concept I term the “globalized non-mobile population,” which captures how individuals participate in global labor markets without physical migration. Beyond labor, I show how the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry transforms Dumaguete’s urban landscape through multiplier effects, including the emergence of a nighttime economy, the expansion of secondary industries, and the reorganization of everyday life around global time zones. At the same time, these changes reconfigure social relations, expanding youth autonomy and negotiating power while continuing to reproduce, albeit in reworked forms, existing gender norms. Finally, I demonstrate how the localization of the transnational workplace is produced, reproduced, and sustained through organizational practices and the promise of upward mobility.

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is a substantial initiative that has had a tremendous impact on the housing market throughout the United States. The tax credit was created due to the privatization of the affordable housing industry. With this privatization, the United States government created the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) with the intent of subsidizing private owners/operators who work to create affordable housing. This program has been a tremendous success overall, but this study looks at the disparity of LIHTC in rural versus urban areas, specifically in Texas. Privatization often leads to profit maximization, and this profit maximization can hinder rural affordable housing development and preservation. Through a comparative analysis of two rural cities and two urban cities, this study shows that the rural cities have a disproportionately lower amount of LIHTC-funded housing units per capita. This disparity is then understood through the 2025 Texas Qualified Allocation Plan, and how several factors of the plan, such as amenity-based scoring and rents calculated based on Area Median Income, inadvertently favor urban cities. Looking at this disparity and the causes involved, Karl Polanyi’s concepts of “embeddedness” and “double movement” and Viviana Zelizer's concept of “relational work” provide a useful framework to understand how policy and profit maximization have mixed to create the spatial disparity. This study recommends policy changes that can even out the incentives for the private sector to operate in rural cities to help close the LIHTC disparity in rural versus urban cities.

Systematic discrimination has had long term effects on the African American community, limiting the ability of this demographic to receive affordable housing, high education, and positions within the workforce that provide substantial wages. In the workplace specifically, cultural biases and homophilic networks decrease access to positions for African Americans, even when these workers are qualified for the position. Through the analysis of in-depth qualitative interviews held amongst six professional players and five MLB executives, this thesis investigates these racial preferences in the context of professional baseball, exploring the factors that have led to decreased participation of African Americans in the MLB. Factors such as early exposure to the sport, financial support, and barriers to accessible baseball all play large roles in forming the small supply of Black players seen today. In addition, organizational preferences and the surplus of talent coming from Latin American countries, have influenced the markets of players that professional teams invest in. Furthermore, this paper explores the experiences of Black players, bringing to light the struggles that come with playing a sport dominated by white contemporaries. By investigating these topics and understanding the social mechanisms that have limited Black participation in baseball, this paper brings awareness to the challenges that this demographic faces and current initiatives aimed at reintegrating black athletes into baseball.

In recent years, it is common for college students to complete an internship. However, there is limited research on how students navigate internships and careers. My study examines the "internship effect": how access to internships shapes students’ post-graduate career paths. It contributes to economic and educational sociology. I collected information on 1,146 Princeton varsity student-athletes graduating in 2020 to 2025 through LinkedIn profiles and other publicly available records. The analysis was conducted in three stages: descriptive statistics, bivariate analysis, and binary logistic regression. My study finds that students with internships are four times more likely to enter elite industries. Athletes on teams with high internship participation rates are around ten times more likely to enter elite industries. There were major findings related to internship timing, geographic location, and inequalities across gender and pre-collegiate background. The evidence emphasizes the need to reexamine how internships are communicated to college students.

While migration to more economically developed countries may be desirable for migrants settled outside their home countries (Bijwaard and Wahba 2023; Della Puppa, Montagna, and Kofman 2021; Mas Giralt 2017; Paul and Yeoh 2021), many migrants ultimately do not migrate, either by choice or due to constraints on their mobility. This thesis challenges the mobility bias in migration studies, particularly in the case of secondary migration. There are many reasons why people who have migrated to countries generally classified as belonging to the “global south” may be unwilling or unable to leave. In this thesis, I use the aspiration-capability framework proposed by Kerilyn Schewel (2020) to analyze three different forms of immobility among migrants. Analyzing thirty (30) semi-structured interviews with Haitian migrants in São Paulo, Brazil, I find that factors beyond individual economic maximization shape migrant immobility. More importantly, I show that immobility involves a complex interplay of pull, push, repel and retain factors, as well as specific capability profiles which together produce specific mobility outcomes. Thus, immobility should not be viewed as the default but rather as the result of elaborate decision-making processes.

This thesis examines how transnational entertainment brands shape identity and belonging through a case study of NCT, a modular K-pop group under SM Entertainment. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea and the U.S., and 36 interviews with fans and industry professionals, the study explores how NCT’s decentralized structure, multilingual content, and visual branding enable regionally tailored fan engagement. Focusing on Korean and Asian American fans, it investigates how fans interpret NCT’s music, fashion, and subunits as tools for cultural connection, self-expression, and diasporic pride. Findings suggest that NCT operates not just as a musical act, but as a flexible platform through which fans emotionally engage, negotiate identity, and construct meaning. By centering fan perspectives, this thesis contributes to the sociology of music, diaspora studies, and media globalization, arguing that K-pop brands like NCT offer infrastructures for global fans to co-create cultural belonging across borders.

This study examines the experiences of Guatemalan Americans, a steadily growing community shaped by migration history and socio-economic challenges. While media narratives since 2017 have focused on caravans from the Northern Triangle fleeing hardship, this research shifts attention to what happens after arrival. Through surveys conducted with participants from the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund (LALDEF), the study explores how informal support networks—especially churches and community-based organizations—help build community cohesion and address economic and legal vulnerabilities. By highlighting these networks’ role in fostering resilience and adaptation, the research fills a gap in the literature and contributes to a deeper understanding of immigrant integration in the U.S.

Over the last nine years, California has come a long way in its efforts to expand state-sponsored Medi-Cal benefits through its Health for All campaign. The campaign aimed to expand full-scope healthcare coverage to ensure that all Californians, regardless of immigration status, would have access to healthcare through this state reform. For the first time, unauthorized Californians could seek full-scope coverage without worrying that being labeled as ‘ineligible immigrant’ would prevent them from being considered, including California’s farmworker population, of which three-fourths are unauthorized. Access to the healthcare coverage can create a much-needed health safety net for California’s unauthorized farmworker population who have been historically been excluded from healthcare reforms, living with disproportionately poor health outcomes and lack of quality care. With ths advent of the full-scope Medi-Cal expansions, I conducted ethnographic research in agricultural communities in California’s Central Valley, specifically the San Joaquin region, among 40 farmworkers seeking to secure access to specialized health care services provided by Medi-Cal. My objective was to learn how farmworkers are, most of them without solid legal standing, navigating the bureaucratic requirements needed to receive Medi-Cal assistance. This senior thesis is an investigation and documentation of their described reality experiencing the reverberating threads of exclusion encoded in the roadblocks they encountered at the application and renewal step.

Sport is an insightful field of sociology. This is no different in the case of Baseball, specifically in the Dominican Republic. This thesis examines Major League Baseball's academy system in the Dominican Republic as a contemporary neocolonial labor regime. Utilizing institutional document analysis, qualitative interviews, and investigative journalism, this thesis argues that the system operates through the joining of 3 forces: historical continuity, institutional asymmetry, and hegemonic incorporation. The thesis draws on original fieldwork interviews with Kennedy Isaac Conza, an 18 year-old Dominican pitcher training in Las Terrenas, and Jay Quinn, founder of the Baseball Island Foundation, give lived experience context to theoretical analysis. It concludes with policy recommendations for the 2026 CBA negotiations, arguing that meaningful reform must address the many issues that plague the international baseball labor market, including, the international signing age and the absence of a bilateral agreement between MLB and the Dominican Republic. Additionally, a recommendation is made to integrate baseball into Dominican public schools.

This thesis studies if the emergence of financial technologies like Cryptocurrency and Buy Now, Pay Later services has widened financial participation or led to the repackaging of inequalities seen in traditional financial markets. Using the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), this study pools response data from 2021-2024 to compare fintech participation with traditional financial participation across three dimensions: who participates, how participation relates to financial confidence and well-being, and whether prior participation is associated with later financial well-being. In doing so, the main findings show how fintech does not operate uniformly, suggesting that different pathways within fintech produce unique patterns of stratification, participant profiles, and inequalities. Sociologically, this thesis contributes to research on digital finance by showing that expanded access does not necessarily lead to democratization, and that new financial technologies may instead reproduce inequality through new instruments.

This thesis examines the ongoing influence of parental divorce during early years on how parent-child relationships develop as these children grow up and attend college. Most of the studies spotlight the immediate consequences of separation. However, this research delves deeper into how these dynamics shift after custody arrangements end and students step into autonomy. Drawing on twelve in-depth interviews with college students from divorced families, this study highlights four main themes: freedom from household alternation, uneven parental involvement, emotional stress during school breaks, and efforts to rebuild or redefine relationships in adulthood. Through qualitative analysis, the research shows how students reflect on their family past, set boundaries, and redefine love and support on their terms. This study explores how young adults manage parent–child relationships after divorce, highlighting resilience, growing independence, and shifts in self-awareness. It is beneficial to understand the long-term impact of divorce on identity and family connection.

South Korea recorded the lowest total fertility rate in the world of 0.72 in 2023, yet survey data consistently finds that young adults maintain sustained desires for marriage and children. This study investigates this paradox through in-depth interviews with college-educated South Korean women between the ages of 21 and 26, recruited from elite research institutions. Drawing on qualitative thematic analysis, the study examines how these women reflect on and negotiate the timing of motherhood and family formation as they navigate the structural tensions of compressed modernity. The findings demonstrate that their demographic retreat operates as an ethical praxis of self-preservation, as a continuous act of boundary-setting across somatic, spiritual, political, professional, and geographic domains. Rather than passive casualties of economic hardship or expressions of individualistic preference, these women emerge desirous of family life but structurally unable to access it on terms compatible with their professional identities and egalitarian expectations.

As technology is now regularly used in classroom environments, identifying its benefits and drawbacks has grown more important. Although research has studied its impact on young adults, it has not yet shown how a college setting can change social media’s influence. This study, based on interviews with twenty current Princeton students, aims to clarify the correlation between social media usage habits and the overall emotional responses that they can evoke. It finds that though students have an overall positive view of social media, which they use for communicating and networking, they cannot avoid its common side effects, such as lower quality relationships and skewed priorities. These factors, among others, are responsible for the presence and severity of their emotional responses.