Division of Social Studies Events

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Facts Do Care About Your Feelings: Subjective Socioeconomic Status and Pain Over the Life Course

Terresa Eun, PhD Candidate in Sociology, Stanford University

Monday, December 1, 2025
5 pm

Olin Humanities, Room 102
Pain is rising in the United States and globally—an alarming trend with wide-reaching implications given that pain serves as a “barometer” for population health and well-being. These increases are not evenly distributed: pain reflects and exacerbates existing inequalities, including by socioeconomic status. While literature has established socioeconomic inequalities in pain trends, little is known about how perceptions of socioeconomic status, rather than objective or relative access to resources, contribute to these inequalities. Such distinctions matter given that internalizations of status do not necessarily align with material conditions yet can affect our health through various psychosocial mechanisms. Using Health and Retirement Study panel data from 2004 to 2018, I use conditional, quadratic growth models to find that feeling worse off—regardless of one’s socioeconomic reality—is associated with worse health. Perceptions of lower SES and perceived declines in status are significantly associated with more pain, even after accounting for objective and relative SES. These results demonstrate that subjective socioeconomic status matters for health beyond access to resources, underscoring the importance of perceptions in shaping health realities and highlighting subjective SES as an underexplored mechanism explaining the persistence of health inequalities.Sponsored by: Dean of the College; Sociology Program.

For more information, call 845-758-6822.

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More American Than Whom? Race, Status, and National Identity

Victoria Asbury-Kimmel, PhD
Faculty Fellow/Assistant Professor, New York University

Thursday, December 4, 2025
5 pm

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
This talk examines how Black, Latino, and Asian Americans define what it means to be “truly American” and how these definitions relate to perceptions of racial group position in the national hierarchy. Using data from the Truly American Project (TrAP) 2 survey—a nationally representative sample of 3,000 respondents across the three groups—the study uses a ranking-based measure of Americanness to uncover patterned differences in how groups prioritize ascriptive traits such as nativity and long-term residence and credal traits such as hard work, lawfulness, and paying taxes. The analysis shows that these priorities reflect groups’ demographic profiles and perceived strengths: Black respondents elevate nativity, while Latino and Asian respondents emphasize credal qualities. These definitions correspond to distinct views of the national hierarchy, with each group locating itself differently relative to Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians. Additional analyses demonstrate that emphasizing specific traits shifts perceptions of relative Americanness in systematic ways. Together, the findings reveal that national identity is not a shared consensus but a contested symbolic arena in which groups advance status claims that shape intergroup relations.Sponsored by: Dean of the College; Sociology Program.

For more information, call 845-758-6822.

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Class as Power Relations: Understanding Changes in the American Class Structure from the 2000s to the 2020s

Di Zhou, PhD Candidate in Sociology, New York University

Monday, December 8, 2025
5 pm

Olin Humanities, Room 102
As a key concept of social inequality, class is often defined by income, education, or occupational prestige. However, an important but frequently overlooked dimension of class is workplace power relations. Viewing class as power relations can help explain how inequality is generated and experienced by workers, and how factors such as new technologies and politics reshape power dynamics at work. This study introduces a innovative framework for examining class as power relations using novel text data and computational methods powered by Large Language Models. I map the American class structure from 2002 to 2020 and find a significant expansion of “contradictory class locations” (including managers, professionals, and supervisors) alongside a simultaneous contraction of the working class. Surprisingly, more than half of this change results from the addition of supervisory tasks to traditionally working- class jobs, without a corresponding increase in workers’ income. The study reveals previously unrecognized shifts in supervisory work in American workplaces and raises critical questions about how the content and social meaning of supervisory work may have changed from real empowerment to an added burden.Sponsored by: Dean of the College; Sociology Program.

For more information, call 845-758-6822.