Sociology, 1954-2026

This thesis asks how undocumented and mixed status people in the United States think about privacy and safety when they use social media and other digital platforms. I focus on public online conversations where users ask questions like whether they should delete old accounts, hide posts, or separate identities. I also observe whether others answer with advice, warnings, or personal stories. Using qualitative, digital photography, I collect and analyze post and comment threats from platforms, such as Reddit, TikTok, and Facebook to see how people describe risk, how they decide what to share, and how they talk about being surveilled.

I find that privacy does not appear as a simple right or setting. Instead, undocumented communities treat privacy as an everyday practice necessary for self protection. While some users suggest disappearing completely, others describe strategies like staying “low-key” by keeping some accounts clean and limiting identifiable information. These strategies are not the same for everyone. Mothers, students, workers, and queer users are given different advice and are held to different standards about what “being careful” means. By showing how these expectations are created, this research adds to conversations on privacy and immigration by centering the voices of undocumented communities through purposeful and consent-first methodology.

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.

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.

Freedom is a human birthright. Therefore, restoring the agency and autonomy required to live a self directed and fulfilled life is the primary motivation for this research. This study takes an unconventional and wide ranging approach by guiding the reader through Western history and tracing the parallels between historical systems of oppression and their modern counterparts. Given the breadth of the topic, this paper examines a wide variety of societies, ideas, and time periods in order to understand how systems of domination evolved rather than disappeared. Through this process, it becomes easier to identify the structures that continue to limit freedom today. However, reform cannot begin without first recognizing our collective entrapment and confronting the illusions of freedom we have been conditioned to accept. This study argues that slavery did not disappear after the abolition of chattel slavery but instead evolved into less visible forms of control through political systems, capitalism, social conditioning, and technology. By examining the influence of Ancient Greece on later Western empires, particularly the United States, this paper reveals how celebrating America as the land of freedom and opportunity can ironically perpetuate modern slavery by keeping its existence concealed.

Incarceration in the U.S. has long been recognized by mortality and criminology scholars as a driver of inequality in health outcomes. Scholars have studied the relationship between conditions of incarceration and mortality across prison conditions such as crowding, facility healthcare providers, and even temperature. Less, however, is known about how this relationship unfolds in jails. What little research does focus on the associations between jail conditions and in-custody mortality, nearly exclusively focuses on jails with large populations as a result of limited and often incomplete data on jail deaths. This quantitative study explores how jail turnover rate and crowding impact mortality in Louisiana’s jails using jail death records from 2015 to 2024 and facility data from the Census of Jails. It further analyzes whether those associations differ across jails with different population sizes. I find that turnover rate is positively associated with all-cause jail mortality, at the one-percent level, while crowding is negatively associated with all-cause mortality, at the five-percent level. When negative binomial regressions were repeated for small, medium, and large jails, separately, however, only mortality in small jails was significantly associated with turnover rate, and crowding was significantly associated with mortality only among large jails. Results further find that the share of the incarcerated pretrial population is positively associated with mortality and the share of incarcerated non-U.S. citizens is negatively associated with mortality, both significant at the one-percent level. These findings complicate previous research by demonstrating that associations between jail conditions and mortality vary significantly by jail size.

Keywords: jail, mortality, crowding, turnover, conditions of incarceration

The thesis seeks to explore how influencer culture constructs beauty as meritocratic while being dependent on and concealing class-based privileges within short-form media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram Reels. By analyzing four popular video genres, “Get Ready With Me” (GWRM), “Outfit of the Day” (OOTD), “Self-Care,” and “Glow-Up,” the research examines how influencers utilize these platforms to present beauty as a form of symbolic capital. Founded on theories by Lynn Chancer, Pierre Bourdieu, and Herbert Marcuse, the thesis argues that influencer culture reimagines structural looksism as individualized efforts and merit across the digital landscape. Using a multimodal content analysis, the study aims to uncover how contemporary digital beauty discourse is actively built through the repetitive nature of online images of individual effort. By situating digital beauty culture within broader systems of neoliberalism and platform capitalism, this research aims to further scholarly discussions on media, gender, and overconsumption.

This thesis examines the relationship between immigrant density and Reform UK's vote share in the 2024 UK general election by testing whether Markaki's (2014) U-shaped findings persist. Using OLS regression across 521 constituencies, I analyze three immigration measures: the total foreign-born population, the non-EU foreign-born population, and the EU foreign-born population. Results show a linear negative relationship between all immigration measures and Reform UK support. Relative deprivation is the strongest predictor across all models. These findings indicate that Brexit restructured immigration politics in England: Reform UK's success reflects relative deprivation rather than reactions to local immigration. Immigrants serve as scapegoats for structural decline, not direct sources of threat. Three insights emerge: Markaki's U-shaped curves do not apply to post-Brexit voting behavior; relative deprivation predicts far-right support more strongly than immigrant density; and immigration attitudes must be distinguished from immigration-related voting behavior.

A growing trend of second generation Haitian-American youth and young adults from their Haitian congregations has prompted the question ““Why are Haitian-American youth leaving the Haitian church?” Scholars in the fields of religion, anthropology, and more specifically, divinity and theology, have framed the attrition of Haitian American youth from their respective Haitian churches under a similar question or concept. However, in the field of sociology, such a question has not been explored. Through the implementation of personal testimonies and literature across various fields, this research question aims to explore the sociopolitical, historical, linguistic, ethno-racial, cultural, and religious contexts that are influencing the exit of this cohort from their churches.

This thesis examines how state-level investment culture shapes individuals’ investment choices in the U.S. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Mark Granovetter’s theory of embeddedness, this paper argues financial behavior is influenced by shared dispositions and social environments in which people are embedded. Using the 2024 FINRA National Financial Capability Study State-by-State and Investor Surveys, this study constructs a state-level measure of “investment culture,” composed of three components: financial dispositions, financial engagement, and financial informational environment. These components are used to analyze participation in four categories of non-retirement investments: traditional, pooled, alternative, and other investments. The findings show the relationship between investment culture and investment behavior is strongly state-dependent. Pooled investments reveal consistent positive association with investment culture, while traditional and alternative investments are more heterogeneous across states. These results suggest investment behavior is socially and contextually structured, with implications for financial welfare and state-specific policy design.

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 study examines the differences between the expression and internalization of filial piety within long‑established multigenerational White American families and South Asian families, primarily Bengali immigrants, focusing on how adolescents internalize their parental expectations. Existing literature suggests that South Asian families, and those from other Asian backgrounds, tend to emphasize stronger filial obligation, in contrast to how White American families tend to emphasize autonomy and negotiation based parenting styles. The goal of this research is to examine how filial piety acts as a social process embedded within families and how it shapes adolescents' academic and family life. This study utilized 18 semi-structured in-depth interviews with parents and children from the same families to analyze how authoritarian and reciprocal forms of filial piety are expressed. The findings within this study suggest that in some South Asian families, filial obligation is directly tied to immigration history of parents. In White American families, a hands off approach is emphasized wherein the parents are still able to support their children through healthy communication styles.

Income segregation, the separation of households of different income levels, continues to define the social landscape of the United States. Social scientists have long posited that exclusionary zoning policy plays a crucial role in income segregation’s persistence, and recent empirical work suggests that this is indeed the case. In this study, I improve upon the extant literature by employing the most recent and expansive zoning dataset, by mitigating the biases affecting estimates of income segregation, and by estimating linear models that account for the effects of different forms of zoning in the presence of one another. Consistent with previous research, I find that larger minimum lot sizes across metropolitan areas are associated with greater segregation of middle- and high-income households. I also find that increased rates of inclusionary zoning programs across metropolitan areas contribute to decreased segregation of all income groups.

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.

Where do families belong in the youth justice system? This thesis compares how New Zealand and Maryland treat family engagement within their respective institutions. I define family engagement as the meaningful inclusion of a young person’s family as informants, participants, or decision makers across youth justice processes. Drawing on 18 semi-structured interviews with professionals working in or adjacent to New Zealand’s and Maryland’s youth justice systems, I ask: (1) how is youth justice conceptualized in theory? (2) where does family fit into this framework? and (3) how do institutional practices align with and deviate from the stated goals? Interviewees across both cases articulate a strikingly similar vision of an ideal youth justice system, yet the two institutions’ practices differ significantly. Maryland’s system maintains a rhetorical commitment to family that is not translated into practice, while New Zealand’s system structurally embeds families in decision-making processes.

The total fertility rate is declining in countries across the world, with many countries below the replacement level needed to sustain a healthy population. When analyzing trends of declining fertility in post-industrial societies, scholars largely take a structural approach, focusing on the economic, social, and cultural influences on women’s family formation. This study explores how women in two high-income countries with different levels of gender equity perceive their work-family constraints, or the balance between work, homemaking, and childrearing duties. It draws on 20 semi-structured interviews with college-aged women across two elite institutions in Japan and the United States. Across the sample, there is a demand for emotionally intelligent partners who allow for an equal division of labor and a strong desire to have children. Japanese participants face constraints in their pool of potential partners, and United States participants allow passion to drive their career trajectories.

This study aimed to better understand the experiences, application accessibility, and barriers to aid faced by single mothers on government assistance in Brooklyn, NY. The research was designed in interview format with 19 single mothers and complemented by ethnographic observations in the field. The study emphasized the role of exclusionary practices among government assistance policies that produce barriers for single mothers with varying citizenship statuses. Findings from the interviews emphasized immigrants’ appreciation for assistance programs in New York as compared to a lack of aid in their home country. These findings remained consistent despite a variety of application and access barriers. However, the gratitude expressed by participants was often misattributed to government assistance programs despite the fact that the aid was offered by a private charity. The study proposes further implementation and funding of navigator programs to increase accessibility and government assistance literacy.

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.

Across disciplines, it has been established that exposure to household violence in early adolescence leads to the reproduction of toxic masculinity behaviors. These studies, however, have focused on the effects of household violence in males and have not paid attention to whether females reproduce the same perceptions on dating violence and traditional gender norms of masculinity after being exposed to household violence. This study examines the answers provided to the questionnaire of the Bullying, Sexual, and Dating Violence Trajectories From Early to Late Adolescence in the Midwestern United States, 2007-2013. By taking the answers from the 1,162 students throughout 7 waves, this study looked at how male and female students who answered that they were exposed to household violence (wave 4) responded to questions regarding their perceptions of toxic masculinity and the acceptance of dating violence (wave 7). Six linear regression models that looked at this relationship with covariates and with an interaction model were run. The findings indicate that the exposure in early adolescence to household violence is a statistically significant predictor of increased acceptance of both traditional masculinity norms and dating violence. Additionally, males exhibited a higher baseline of acceptance compared to females. Nonetheless, the effect of household violence is present across both males and females. This suggests that the relationship between household violence and the higher level of acceptance of toxic masculinity and dating violence in later adolescents is not isolated to males. At the same time, interaction variables show that there is no clear difference across gender on the effect of household violence and an increased acceptance of traditional masculinity perceptions. Thus, the reproduction of traditional masculinity perceptions seems not to be gender tied; instead, it happens regardless of gender. This paper addresses the current literary gap in existing discourse, which highlights how imperative the female perspective in studies about the normalization of violence is.

Transportation noise pollution disproportionately burdens low-income and minority communities in the United States. Yet, existing research has primarily focused on quantitative analyses of noise distribution, leaving how overburdened communities themselves experience and conceptualize noise as an environmental concern largely unexamined. I conducted a qualitative case study of the Ironbound neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, a working-class, predominantly immigrant port neighborhood bound by highway, rail, and airport infrastructure, which has long been recognized as an environmental justice (EJ) community facing disproportionately high environmental burden. Analyzing 15 semi-structured interviews with Ironbound community members, this study finds that transportation noise in the Ironbound is not uniformly understood or collectively addressed as an environmental concern due to a set of unresolved tensions in how residents conceptualize the pollutant: (1) participants simultaneously carry symbolic associations between noise and belonging whilst also understanding noise as a source of frustration and harm; (2) participants describe noise pollution as background noise whilst identifying concrete disruptions in daily routines and physical and/or mental health; and (3) participants acknowledge noise as an environmental concern while the issue remains institutionally unaddressed. These tensions render noise difficult to identify and prioritize as an EJ issue, situating noise pollution at the bottom of a “hierarchy of burden.”