From stadiums to neighborhoods, from who gets ahead to who lives and who dies, our faculty study the forces shaping an uncertain world.
An Introduction to this Year's Research:
In a world that feels more divided and less predictable than it has in a generation, sociology is a discipline that can help us understand why. It studies how social structures – neighborhoods, families, workplaces, institutions, policies, and networks – frame our lives. The following themes broadly describe research undertaken by OSU’s Department of Sociology during the 2025-26 academic year.
Sports, community, and the ties that shape us.
Chris Knoester’s National Sports and Society Survey contributes evidence to understanding how sport affects our lives; Chris Browning’s AHDC study maps how Columbus adolescents move through and are shaped by their neighborhoods. The institutions we build for belonging – teams, families, congregations – can sustain us or reproduce inequality.
Crime, violence, and the pursuit of justice.
From Laura Dugan’s Global Terrorism Database, to the Criminal Justice Research Center, to Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira’s work on genocide and its aftermath, departmental research follows justice from the scale of a single sentencing decision to the mass atrocity.
Inequality – who gets ahead and who falls behind.
This is the intellectual core of the department’s top-10 national ranking in stratification. Vincent Roscigno’s decades of work on workplace discrimination, recognized this year with his election as president of the Sociological Research Association, anchors a group that traces inequality through wealth, debt, education, and elite institutions.
Who’s being born, and why not.
Sarah Hayford’s research contributes to understanding why fewer children are being born in the United States: Americans haven’t stopped wanting children, the barriers to having them have grown.
Who lives, who dies, and why.
Mortality, health disparities, and the social forces that determine survival. Cindy Colen traces how a person’s place in a workplace hierarchy affects their health; Mike Vuolo tests whether our drug policies save lives; and Sam Clark builds mortality models used to understand health and longevity.
In uncertain times, rigorous social science is not a luxury: it is important to both seeing and understanding the whole picture.