How Am I Different? Childhood Cancer Survivors' Perspectives on Change and Growth

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51193/1/426.pd

Mobility and inequality in the professoriate: how and why first-generation and working-class backgrounds matter

Social science research has long recognized the relevance of socioeconomic background for mobility and inequality. In this article we interrogate how and why working-class and first-generation backgrounds are especially meaningful and take as our case in point the professoriate and the discipline of sociology, – i.e., a field that intellectually prioritizes attention to group inequality and that arguably offers a conservative empirical test compared to other academic fields. Our analyses, which draw on unique survey items and open-ended qualitative materials from nearly 1,000 academic sociologists, reveal significant background divergences in academic job attainment, tied partly to educational background. Moreover, and especially unique and important, findings demonstrate significant consequences across several dimensions of inequality including compensation and economic precarity, professional visibility, and isolation at departmental, college or university, and professional levels. We conclude by highlighting how our discussion and results contribute in important ways to broader sociological concerns surrounding mobility, group disadvantage, and social closure.Published versio

The graduate school pipeline and first-generation/working-class inequalities

Sociological research has long been interested in inequalities generated by and within educational institutions. Although relatively rich as a literature, less analytic focus has centered on educational mobility and inequality experiences within graduate training specifically. In this article, we draw on a combination of survey and open-ended qualitative data from approximately 450 graduate students in the discipline of sociology to analyze graduate school pipeline divergences for first-generation and working-class students and the implications for inequalities in tangible resources, advising and support, and a sense of isolation. Our results point to an important connection between private undergraduate institutional enrollment and higher-status graduate program attendance—a pattern that undercuts social-class mobility in graduate training and creates notable precarities in debt, advising, and sense of belonging for first-generation and working-class graduate students. We conclude by discussing the unequal pathways revealed and their implications for merit and mobility, graduate training, and opportunity within our and other disciplines.Published versio

Meaning making and childhood cancer: A study of structure and agency in the narratives of Mexican, Mexican American, and Anglo-American mothers of children with cancer.

How do mothers construct meaning around the experience of childhood cancer? For most people, cancer is a specter of death that enters without warning like a ruthless secret invasion (Sontag 1978). But when it strikes children, cancer is even more mysterious and threatening, for then it attacks the most innocent and most vulnerable members of society--those who society wants most to protect. In depth interviews were conducted with a total of fifty Mexican, Mexican-American, and Anglo-American mothers of children with cancer in two different hospital settings (in the United States and Mexico). The narratives that resulted from those interviews were then analyzed using qualitative, inductive, and thematic coding procedures. Narrative meaning was defined as sets of cognitive connections created by mothers in order to try to fit the reality of their child's diagnosis and treatment into a framework of understanding. These sets of connections clustered around problematic and/or particularly salient aspects of the experience of having a child in treatment for cancer. Discussion focuses on the ways differing sets of schemas and resources combined to create different meaning systems in the three respondent groups around issues such as cost of treatments, severity of symptoms at diagnosis, Latina self awareness, loosing sense of self, looking for causes, finding personal strength, and the community of mothers in the hospital. Not all issues were found in all three respondent groups.Ph.D.Ethnic studiesIndividual and family studiesSocial SciencesSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129501/2/9513504.pd

A Brief Review of the Psychosocial Literature and Our Research Plans/Progress with Adolescent/Young Adult Survivors of Childhood Cancer

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51295/1/531.pd