Course Catalog
The course catalogue is constantly evolving. The below list contains the current offerings of the department.
For more detailed scheduling information about these courses, please visit the registrar's office.
Department of Sociology Graduate Courses 2007-08
30001. Sociological Inquiry. Gives an overview of the major modes of sociological reasoning and research. It seeks to present main intellectual and empirical traditions which continue to influence the sociological endeavor. Clemens, Laumann. Autumn.
30003. History of Social Theory. An introduction to the classical paradigms of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel. Glaeser. Spring.
30004, 30005. Statistical Methods of Research 1, 2. A two-quarter comprehensive introduction to quantitative methods. The first quarter includes analysis of variance and multiple regression; the second quarter covers logistic regression, time series analysis, and network analysis. Raudenbush. Winter, Spring.
30101. Organizational Analysis. A systematic introduction to theoretical and empirical work on organizations broadly conceived, such as public and private economic organizations, governmental organizations, prisons, health-care organizations, and professional and voluntary associations. Topics include intraorganizational questions about organizational goals and effectiveness, communication, authority, and decision-making. Using recent developments in market, political economy, and neo-institutional theories, we will explore organizational change and interorganizational relationships for their implications in understanding social change in modern societies. Laumann. Autumn.
30102. Social Change. The course focuses on economic development, political development, social movements, and opinion change. Case materials are drawn from currently developing countries, European historical patterns, and the contemporary U.S. Parish. Autumn.
30103. Social Stratification. Social stratification is the unequal distribution of the goods that members of a society value -- earnings, income, authority, political power, status, prestige, etc. This course introduces various sociological perspectives about stratification. We will look at major patterns of inequality throughout human history, how they vary across countries, how they are formed and maintained, how they come to be seen as legitimate and desirable, and how they affect the lives of individuals within a society. The readings incorporate classical theoretical statements, contemporary debates, and recent empirical evidence. Stolzenberg. Winter.
30104. Urban Structure & Process. This course reviews competing theories of urban development, especially their ability to explain the changing nature of cities under the impact of advanced industrialism. Analysis includes a consideration of emerging metropolitan regions, the microstructure of local neighborhoods, and the limitations of the past American experience as a way of developing urban policy both in this country and elsewhere. McRoberts. Spring.
30107. Sociology of Human Sexuality. After briefly reviewing several biological and psychological approaches to human sexuality as points of comparison, we shall explore the sociological perspective on sexual conduct and its associated beliefs and consequences for individuals and society. Topics are addressed through a critical examination of the recent national survey of sexual practices and beliefs and related empirical studies. Substantive topics covered include gender relations, lifecourse perspectives on sexual conduct in youth, adolescence and adulthood, social epidemiology of sexually transmitted infections (including AIDS), sexual partner choice and turnover, and the incidence/prevalence of selected sexual practices. Laumann. Spring.
30108. The Institution of Education. This course is a general survey of the properties of education considered as an institution of historical and contemporary societies. Particular attention is given to institutional formation and change in education and to education's role in processes of social control and social stratification. Bidwell. Winter.
30111. Survey Analysis-1. How to analyze and write up previously collected survey data: the basic logic of multi-variate causal reasoning and its application to OLS regression, percentage tables, and briefly log odds. Emphasizes practice in writing. NOT a course in sampling methods. Davis. Autumn.
30116. Global-Local Politics. Globalizing and local forces are generating a new politics in the United States and around the world. This course explores this new politics by mapping its emerging elements: the rise of social issues, ethno-religious and regional attachments, environmentalism, gender and life-style identity issues, new social movements, transformed political parties and organized groups, and new efforts to mobilize individual citizens. Clark. Winter.
30118. Survey Research Overview. This course is focused on finding a good research question and using this question to guide your overall research design. It is a single-quarter course offered each Fall and Winter Quarter. The course walks students through the steps involved in survey research -- finding a funder, writing a grant proposal, sampling, questionnaire design, coding, cleaning and data analysis. One cannot learn HOW to do all these things in a single quarter course, but rather what each consists of, why and how it matters, how these different processes fit together, how to evaluate real-world trade-offs that need to be made between cost and quality, and where one can go to take specific courses in each topic alone. This is a good place to start for those interested in survey research because it provides the big picture of what to consider when designing survey research and how to approach the different tasks involved in a survey project. Students turn in weekly assignments that provide feedback from the instructor, then combine these pieces into a final research proposal. van Haitsma. Autumn, Winter.
30120. Urban Policy Analysis. This course addresses the explanations available for varying patterns of policies that cities provide in terms of expenditures and service delivery. It also covers urban and ethnic reading materials for the Ph.D. Prelim exam in Sociology. Topics include theoretical approaches and policy options, migration as a policy option, group theory, citizen preference theory, incrementalism, economic base influences, and an integrated model. Also examined are the New York fiscal crisis and taxpayer revolts, measuring citizen preferences, service delivery, and productivity. Clark. Autumn.
30125. Rational Foundations of Social Theory. This course introduces conceptual and analytical tools for the micro foundations of macro and intermediate-level social theories, taking as a basis the assumption of rational action. Those tools are then used to construct theories of power, social exchange, collective behavior, socialization, trust, norm, social decision making and justice, business organization, and family organization. Yamaguchi. Winter.
30129. Economic Development in the Inner City. This course will explore conceptually what the issues are around the economic position of cities in the early 21st century, and how to think creatively about strategies to generate economic growth that would have positive consequences for low income residents. Community Development Corporations, empowerment zones, housing projects, business development plans through credit and technical assistance will all be considered. Taub. Winter.
30131. Social and Political Movements. This course provides a general overview and a synthesis on theories of social and political movements. Emphasis will be on the importance of state and state society relations to the rise and outcomes of a social or political movement. Zhao. Winter.
30146. Culture and Politics. This course explores how cultural activities such as rap, rock, and martial arts can mobilize and legitimate political constituencies (e.g. Black Power, gays). Political leaders frame and spin images through music and talk shows. Culture and politics blend in post-industrial society, which is increasingly driven by knowledge and consumption. Personal acts defining identity (eating vegan) can grow into social movements (eco-protest). New cultural groups conflict with each other and transform the dynamics of class, party, interest groups, and clientelism. We examine U.S. and global examples with a focus on subcultural and regional transformations. Students will write memos and a paper. Clark. Autumn.
30152. Migration and Immigration: Causes/Consequences. Reviews basic concepts, research methodology, and theories (economic, demographic, sociological and social-psychological) for all forms of spatial mobility: local moving, internal migration, and immigration. Equal emphasis is given to the U.S. and other world regions. This course is intended to prepare students for independent research and/or policy investigation on a wide range of topics and issues pertaining to the voluntary and involuntary spatial movement of people in the modern world. Each student will have an independent term project. Bogue. Spring.
30157. Mathematical Models. This course examines mathematical models and related analyses of social action, emphasizing a rational-choice perspective. About half the lectures focus on models of collective action, power, and exchange as developed by Coleman, Bonacich, Marsden, and Yamaguchi. Then the course examines models of choice over the life course, including rational and social choice models of marriage, births, friendship networks, occupations, and divorce. Both behavioral and analytical models are surveyed. Yamaguchi. Autumn.
30169. Global Society and Global Culture: Paradigms of Social and Cultural Analysis. This course introduces students to major theories of globalization and to core approaches to global society and global culture. We discuss micro- and macroglobalization, cultural approaches to globalization, world systems theory, glocalization and hybridization approaches and the Òstrong programÓ in globalization studies. Empirically oriented topics include global love, global finance, global terrorism and the globalization of nothing. The empirical ethnographies of the global are chosen to illustrate the interest and feasibility of globalization studies and of critical studies of dimensions of globalization. Knorr Cetina. Autumn.
30179. Labor Force and Employment. This course introduces key concepts, methods and sources of information for understanding the structure of work and the organization of workers in the United States and other industrialized nations. The course surveys social science approaches to answering key questions about work and employment, including: What is the labor force? What determines the supply of workers? How is work organized into jobs, occupations, careers and industries? What, if anything, happened to unions? How much money do workers earn and why? What is the effect of work on health? How do workers and employers find each other? Who is unemployed? What are the employment effects of race, gender, ethnicity, religion and other ascribed characteristics? Stolzenberg. Spring.
30182. Demography of Russia and the Former Soviet Union. The course covers major periods and events in recent Russian history and their impact on mortality, fertility and migration including World War II, Perestroika, the transition period after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the contemporary period during the rule of President Putin. It focuses on current demographic challenges of Russia including depopulation, high working age mortality and population aging. Sources of demographic data including official publications and surveys are reviewed and analyzed. The course includes a brief description of the past and present demographic situation in the countries of the former Soviet Union as well as original studies on Russian demography published by the instructors. Gavrilov, Gavrilova. Spring.
30183. Simmel's Soziologie (in translation). Despite the fact that Georg Simmel’s Soziologie has been the only work to have influenced American sociology in every decade of the 20th century, the book which Robert Park once called the greatest work in sociology ever written has never before been translated into English in its entirety. This course considers the ten chapters of this exceptionally seminal opus in ten weeks, drawing on just-finished critical translations by a team of young U of C scholars. Levine. Spring.
30302. Implementation of Public Policy. Once a governmental policy or program is established, there is the challenge of getting it carried out in ways intended by the policy makers. Obstacles emerge because of problems of hierarchy, competing goals and cultures of different groups, and because of difficulties in achieving complex new patterns of change. We explore how these obstacles emerge and may be overcome particularly between groups; and between creators and those responsible for implementing programs. We also look at varying responses of target populations. Broughton. Spring.
30303. Urban Landscape as Social Text. This seminar explores the meanings found in varieties of urban landscapes, both in the context of individual elements and composite structures. These meanings are examined in relation to three fundamental approaches that can be identified in the analytical literature on landscapes: normative, historical, and communicative modes of conceptualization. Emphasis is placed on analyzing the explicitly visual features of the urban landscape. Students pursue research topics of their own choosing within the general framework. While mainly a graduate course, advanced undergraduates may be admitted. Conzen. Autumn.
30306. Human Capital. This course covers both micro and macro aspects of human capital. Investments by parents in the education and other human capital of their children. Intergenerational transmission of inequality. The links between specialization in particular types of human capital and coordination costs, general knowledge, and the extent of the market. The relation between human capital, population change, and economic growth is also emphasized. Becker. Autumn.
30308, 30309. Applied Regression 1, 2. This course covers regression methods for analysis of nonexperimental research. Topics considered include simple regression, multiple regression, regression diagnostics, analysis of covariance, path analysis and the interpretation of effects in non-linear and non-additive specifications. The course aims to develop intuition about these methods and focuses on their interpretation. Stolzenberg. Winter, Spring.
30310. Demography of Aging and the Life Course. This course is a seminar in population aging and its social, economic and political ramifications. It examines basic models of demographic and health transitions, trends in aging and health status, characteristics of medical care and long-term care, and the implications of these for the development of public policy. Emphasis is placed on life course approaches to the study of aging. Specific topics include health, functional status, and well-being; socioeconomic status and inequality; family structure and living arrangements; formal and informal long-term care; early life predictors of health and longevity. Cagney. Autumn.
30311. Theorizing Religion. The class combines lectures and discussions on the concept of religion, the logic of practices, religious propaganda, the universality of religion, and secularization. Riesebrodt. Autumn.
40101. Basic Demographic Analysis. This course is an introduction to the concepts and methods of demographic analysis. It is intended to provide students with a general understanding of the processes that shape population size, structure, and dynamics and with the logical bases for the most frequent measures of these processes. The emphasis will be on measurement issues in human population while making clear the broader relevance of demographic analysis to the study of any population or system. Yang. Winter.
40107. Fertility/Reproductive Health in the 3rd World. A review of recent trends in fertility, HIV infection, and maternal and child health in Third World countries. Identifies remaining "trouble spots" and discusses research and program interventions, include gender equality, that are being made to accelerate their resolution. Bogue. Autumn.
40109. Loglinear Analysis. Introduction to basic and intermediate level loglinear and logbilinear models and methods for the analysis of categorical data with an emphasis on applications to social science analysis of categorical data with an emphasis on applications to social science research (procedure Loglinear for SPSS procedure Loguistic for SAS, and in CDAS are used for applications). Topics include hierarchical loglinear models, logit and multinominal logit models, loglinear and logbilinear models, loglinear association models for two-way and multi-way table analysis, fixed and variable distance models, and cumulative logit models for ordinal dependent variables. Yamaguchi. Autumn.
40121. Latent Class and Mixture Models. This course covers various topics of categorical data analysis using latent-class or latent-trait (person-specific fixed effects) models. An emphasis is placed on categorical data analysis with panel data. The topics covered include (1) latent class models (cluster and factor models), (2) multinolial logit latent-class regression models, (3) loglinear path models with latent variables, (4) logistic regression models with an endogenous latent-class covariate, (5) latent transition analysis (latent Markov models) with covariates, (6) fixed effects models with a categorical dependent variable with panel data (fixed effects logit, multinomial logit, and adjacent logit models), (7) switching logistic regression models with panel data, (8) the "black-white" regression models with panel data, (9) fixed effects models for the 16-fold tables, and (10) mixed Markov models for mobility data. Prior knowledge of basic loglinear models and the logistic regression model is highly desirable. Yamaguchi. Winter.
40133. Content Analysis. Introduction to the analysis of textual content for social insight. Students in course will: 1) survey recent advances in natural language processing, information extraction and computational linguistics that can be leveraged to analyze textual content; 2) develop a computational toolkit that implements some of these advances; and 3) design and execute projects that analyze textual data for social inference. Specific topics include text clustering, classification, relevance ranking, and latent semantic indexing. Evans. Winter.
40137. Introduction to Science Studies. This course explores the interdisciplinary study of science as an enterprise. During the twentieth century, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and anthropologists all raised interesting and consequential questions about the sciences. Taken together, their various approaches came to constitute a field, Òscience studies.Ó The course provides an introduction to this field. Students will not only investigate how it coalesced and why, but will also experience the practical application of science-studies perspectives in asking and answering questions about science today. Among the topics we may examine are: the sociology of scientific knowledge and its applications; actor-network theories of science; constructivism and the history of science; images of normal and revolutionary science; and accounts of research in the commercial university. Evans, Johns. Autumn.
40141. Historical Sociology. This course provides an overview of research in historical sociology. We will cover several topical areas within the field, as well as methodological and theoretical approaches common within the area. Lancaster. Autumn.
40148. Contextualizing Survey Data: In-Depth Interviews. Religion as an Ethnic Group: Catholic Communalism in Chicago. The course provides hands-on experience with post-survey qualitative methods using respondents from the 2007 Survey of Chicagoland Catholics. Students learn the "hows" and "whys" behind respondents' attitudes and their decisions to remain or leave the Church. In the process, they learn all phases of how to conduct a post-survey qualitative study including reviewing survey data, designing an appropriate interview guide, organizing in-person interviews with survey respondents (recruiting and scheduling), conducting interviews, and analyzing interview notes. Some travel to Chicago neighborhoods and outlying suburbs is required. Daley. Spring.
40149. Imagining the Social: Ontological Presuppositions of Social Science. This course examines alternative ways of conceiving what the social is, how it exists and how it changes in the course of time. We investigate the consequences of assuming different kinds of basic units of analysis, and compare such "elementism" with models of consequent processualism. We also explore the implications of ontological assumptions for the praxis of research. Inevitably we therefore come to discuss concepts such as methodological individualism, holism, social laws, mechanisms, process dynamics etc. Particular attention is given to the development of the notion of the "duality of the social.". Glaeser. Spring.
40150. Global Ethnography. Ethnography has long been successfully applied to local cultures and communities, to micro-social situations and even at times to national settings. In this class, we start from the global; we explore how ethnography can be extended to global structures, processes, sites and questions. We first examine and discuss the kind of structures and elements that "belong to" global society and global culture. Course work is then built around studies that focus on particular domains in which these structures and elements are exhibited. In the process, we review different ethnography-based methodological perspectives such as grounded theory, ethnomethodology, discourse analysis, phenomenological ethnography, performance ethnography. Knorr Cetina. Autumn.
40151. Logic of Inquiry in Case Study Methods. This course covers basic techniques for interpreting and analyzing case study data, whether ethnographic or historical. Our objective is to think more clearly and logically about case study methods. The seminar will tackle head-on important questions facing case study methods in sociology today: Is case study research, whether ethnographic or historical, scientific? By what criteria does it meet or fail to meet the standards of scientific evidence? Does this matter? What are the roles of induction and deduction in qualitative research? Do case studies effectively verify hypotheses, or only generate them? Do case studies have a small-n problem? Is such work generalizable? Are Mill's comparative methods appropriate for social scientists? Graduate students only. Students must have taken at least two courses in graduate-level statistics or quantitative social science analysis. Small. Spring.
40153. GSS and the European Social Survey. The course is an introduction to the NORC General Social Survey (GSS) and the European Social Survey (ESS) along with brief coverage of other current long range surveys. Students pursue individual projects after they become familiar with the data. Davis. Spring.
50003. Sociology of the State. Many modern nation states tax nearly half of the people's income. A nation state develops relationships with other states and takes charge of territorial defense. It monopolizes the use of violence within a territory. It also regulates many aspects of our lives from education, working, marriage, retirement, redistribution of wealth to daily activities such as parking, driving and garbage disposal. State power is, therefore, the principal dimension of political power. This course introduces theories of states with a comparative-historical perspective. It is organized around several empirical issues, including the origin and development of pre-modern state forms, the rise of nation states, state and economic development, state and social change, state-society relations and states in the post-industrial world. The course provides an overview on the cutting-edge research in the field. It is also intended to guide those who are interested in political sociology or macro-comparative sociology to develop empirical projects with the state as an important dimension. Zhao. Winter.
50004. Seminar: Proposal Writing. This seminar is designed for students who are preparing their proposals for the PhD. The seminar aims to help students to organize their proposals around interesting and researchable questions and to create an effective research program to answer those questions. It covers such issues as general research design, choice of methodology, bibliographical research, and proposal writing. The class will function as a true seminar, with each student expected to present his or her proposal and to comment carefully on those of other students. Clemens. Spring.
50007. Seminar: Social Stratification. The goal of this advanced seminar is to identify, review, and critique selected historical and contemporary approaches to stratification and inequality. The emphasis will be on innovative theoretical perspectives, their relationship to classic traditions, and their insights into longstanding and emerging forms of inequality. Readings will be eclectic, spanning levels of analyses and sub-disciplinary borders. For example, we will explore current social psychological research on the emergence of power and prestige orders in small groups and occupational communities, contemporary studies linking the social organization of schools to inequality, and current research on the various forms of human, social and cultural capital in generating inequality. Laumann. Winter.
50016. Paper Writing Seminar. A course in which students develop their existing research towards published papers. In a crowded job market, universities increasingly look to publication as a minimum condition of hiring. To that end, the seminar tries to accelerate the task of publishing. Students may use the seminar to help finish M.A. papers, to complete Ph.D. proposals, and to polish conference papers. Parish. Spring.
50023. Organizations and Environments. This course introduces students to contemporary theory and research on how the distribution and structure of resources in the environment affect organizations and, conversely, on how organizations interact to shape the structure of organizational environments. In addition to covering the major sociological approaches to this topic (organizational ecology, institutional theory, resource dependence, and transaction cost economics), we will survey recent advances in theory and research that extend and combine these approaches in interesting ways. We will have two primary concerns. The first will be to understand the social mechanisms at the core of each perspective. Second, we will evaluate the quality of empirical support for the different perspectives and discuss means of strengthening both arguments and evidence. We have selected research covering a variety of interesting empirical phenomena, including financial institutions, technological innovation and commercialization, mergers and acquisitions, career processes, voluntary organizations, and public policy. Students should draw two benefits from the course. First, students will develop the skills needed to critique current organizational theory and research. Second, the course will aid students in identifying promising areas for future research and designing effective means of addressing them. Phillips. Autumn.
50056. Seminar: Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. Two Approaches in the Social-Scientific Study of Religion. Max Weber is perhaps the one undisputed classical figure in the discipline of sociology today. His reputation is to a large extent based on his historical and comparative studies of the "economic ethics" of the world religions and on the formulation of a systematic approach based on these studies (in "Economy and Society"). Whereas in Weber's time his colleague and friend Ernst Troeltsch was as well-known as Weber, his name has since been almost forgotten outside Protestant theology. But his writings deserve a new study, partly as an extension of, but partly also as an alternative to Weber's work. It helps to understand Weber better and to get beyond some limitations of his work to include Troeltsch in the canon of classical attempts for an historico-sociological study of religion. Joas. Autumn.
50057. War and Peace in the History of Social Thought. It has often been remarked that the discipline of sociology has tended to ignore the importance of wars for social processes, both in the sense of the causes for wars and of the long-term consequences of wars for individual action and social structures. This ignorance has to do with assumptions about the peaceful character of industrial societies and the pacifying consequences of modernization. This course will try to discuss such assumptions by giving an overview (based on primary texts) of social thinking about war from Thomas Hobbes to the present. We will deal with 1) the classical forerunners of the professional social sciences (Hobbes to Kant); 2) the long peace of the 19th century as it is reflected in early sociology and Marxism; 3) classical sociology and the First World War; 4) sociological analyses in the era of the Second World War; 5) the Cold War and 6) the present. Required reading: Hans Joas, War and Modernity. Cambridge 2003 (Polity Press/Blackwell USA). Joas. Autumn.
50060. Secularization? The class confronts theories of secularization with actual developments of church-state relations. Each student has to select and present a particular case. Cases discussed in class will range from North Africa to East Asia and Europe. Riesebrodt, Zeghal. Autumn.
