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James Bachmeier
Temple University
Visiting Scholar
2021 to 2022
Bachmeier and Jennifer Van Hook will co-author a book about whether the U.S. can successfully integrate diverse waves of newcomers. They will incorporate findings from a previous RSF-funded project in which they used census data to track immigrant integration based on educational attainment and other outcomes across three generations.
Delia S. Baldassarri
Princeton University
Visiting Scholar
2011 to 2012
Baldassarri will write a book that accounts for trends in American public opinion over the last forty years and relates changes in political preferences to the social identities and networks in which individuals are embedded. She will explain how people deal with conflicting political views and polarized social networks, as well as assess whether the increased partisanship has moved the United States further away from the ideal of political pluralism and favored the systematic under-representation of certain groups.
Ingrid Banks
University of California, Santa Barbara
Visiting Scholar
2008 to 2009
Ingrid Banks, Associate Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will complete a paper on contemporary manifestations of racial segregation and integration in black beauty salons. Banks’ preliminary data suggests that while black salon owners would welcome a more integrated clientele, segregation persists. Yet segregation in such black-owned private businesses is not viewed as a significant social problem – in stark contrast to how segregation is viewed in public sector settings such as schools and workplaces.
Ingrid Banks
University of California, Santa Barbara
Visiting Scholar
2004 to 2005
Ingrid Banks, Assistant Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will analyze ethnographic data from five U.S. cities to write a book looking at black-owned beauty salons. While a great deal of research has examined black-white cultural contact in work settings where the races are compelled to interact, this work will focus on an area that is less well-documented: interaction in black-dominated settings that whites choose to enter. Banks' early results indicate that blacks welcome integration of these primarily homogenous environments.
Maya Bar-Hillel
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Visiting Scholar
2008 to 2009
Maya Bar-Hillel, Professor (retired), The Center for the Study of Rationality at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, will write a book about rationality paradoxes and how they have influenced the development of decision theory. This will be the first comprehensive anthology of rationality paradoxes and will be accessible to a well-educated lay audience. Bar-Hillel plans to present a range of paradoxes and discuss how they’ve prompted influential conceptual developments in philosophy, economics, statistics, and psychology.
Carolyn Barnes
University of Chicago
Visiting Scholar
2023 to 2024
Barnes will draw on interviews with 180 workers and 400 beneficiaries of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and Medicaid to investigate barriers to accessing, maintaining, and using social safety net programs. She will also explore how the COVID-19 pandemic affected access to these programs.
Robert Barsky
University of Michigan
Visiting Scholar
2005 to 2006
Robert Barsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan, will examine the meaning and role of consumer confidence measures to determine whether sudden, unexplained shifts in consumer sentiment influence spending patterns and business cycles. He will look at why certain demographic groups display lower confidence in the future of the economy than others and will develop new survey questions to better gauge consumer attitudes.
Robert H. Bates
Harvard University
Visiting Scholar
2008 to 2009
Robert H. Bates, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University, will write a book on the politics and economics of development in Africa during the second half of the twentieth century. Bates will draw on research he has conducted in 26 African countries, and will anchor his findings in both political and economic theory. The book will center on the idea of development as structural change – the movement from an agrarian to industrial economy, as well as the shift from a society based on families and villages to one based upon towns and cities.
Rosemary Batt
Cornell University
Visiting Scholar
2001 to 2002
Rosemary Batt, assistant professor of human resources at the Industrial and Labor Relations School, Cornell University, will write a book on the quality of jobs and advancement opportunities for low-skilled service and sales workers in the telecommunications industry. While the popular press often depicts these jobs as low-paying, dead-end positions, much of the management literature heralds them as high-skilled opportunities leading to advancement in the new information economy.
Roy F. Baumeister
Florida State University
Visiting Scholar
2013 to 2014
Baumeister and Kathleen D. Vohs will undertake two separate projects: one which will summarize and integrate the research literature on the “strength model” of self-control; and a second that will investigate the psychological and subjective meaning of money by examining how thought processes, values, and decision-making change when money is involved.
Frank D. Bean
University of California, Irvine
Visiting Scholar
2002 to 2003
Frank Bean, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, will analyze census data used in a Foundation-supported study of racial identification. According to data released last spring, 2.4 percent of the U.S. population identified itself as multiracial in the 2000 census - the first to allow Americans to select "one or more races" to indicate their racial identification.
Monica Bell
Yale University
Visiting Scholar
2021 to 2022
Bell will work on a book about efforts to reform U.S. law and policy on race and class marginalization. Drawing in part on interview data from a participatory study of black youth, she concludes that policymakers often miss an important challenge confronting lawmakers in poor communities of color: legal estrangement, or the process through which institutions perpetuate the idea that marginalized groups do not fully share in all the rights and freedoms that flow to other Americans.
Seyla Benhabib
Harvard University
Visiting Scholar
2000 to 2001
Seyla Benhabib, professor of government at Harvard University, will draw upon political philosophy, jurisprudence, and contemporary social theory to investigate how immigration, naturalization, and citizenship practices can be made compatible with the human rights commitments of liberal democracies. A nation's sovereignty is defined by its borders, but a commitment to human rights is, by definition, borderless.
Pamela R. Bennett
Queens College, City University of New York
Visiting Scholar
2012 to 2013
Bennett and Amy Lutz will write a book that examines the different ways parents approach their children’s education. They will explore the sources of variation in parenting styles across class, race/ethnicity, and immigrant generations. They will draw on survey data, in-depth qualitative interviews, and academic data to analyze dynamics within families, schools, neighborhoods and to better understand the roots of social behavior.
Adam Berinsky
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Visiting Scholar
2023 to 2024
Berinsky will explore how a person’s mode of perceiving, thinking, and problem solving relates to belief in misinformation. He will conduct experiments to develop behavioral interventions that encourage the use of deliberative and analytical thinking when engaging with information online.
Annette D. Bernhardt
National Employment Law Project
Visiting Scholar
2011 to 2012
Bernhardt will write a series of articles based on findings from the RSF-funded "Unregulated Work Survey" on the violation of minimum wage, overtime, and other laws by employers. She will analyze the prevalence of workplace violations in several overlooked areas of the low-wage labor market, including unregulated, nonstandard, and informal jobs. Bernhardt will examine the causes of variation in workplace violations across industries and the underreporting of undocumented low-wage workers in government surveys.
Max Besbris
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Visiting Scholar
2020 to 2021
Drawing on an RSF-funded longitudinal study of flooded households in a suburban town severely affected by Hurricane Harvey, Besbris will work on a book examining how the victims of climate-related disasters decide whether or not to return to their homes, how to reinvest in their property, and the sources of financial and social support they receive during recovery. His focus is on middle-class households and how their past residential stability affects their perceptions of risk.
Saurabh Bhargava
Carnegie Mellon University
Visiting Scholar
2016 to 2017
Bhargava will study the factors which shape individual behavior in two areas of policy importance—the choice of health insurance and job searches among the unemployed. He will explore how consumers navigate increasingly complex health plan options and how policymakers can encourage financially sensible plan choices. He will also investigate the extent to which job seekers deviate from optimal job search behavior and how unemployment policies can be redesigned to better reflect the psychological impacts of job loss.
Suzanne M. Bianchi
University of California, Los Angeles
Visiting Scholar
2010 to 2011
Bianchi is part of an interdisciplinary working group (with Judith Seltzer and Joseph Hotz), which will assess three primary pathways through which families may transmit advantage or disadvantage to subsequent generations: genes and biology, economic resources and skills, and social ties and family obligations. Suzanne Bianchi and Judith Seltzer will complete their book, Family Relationships Across the Generations.
Amy Binder
University of California, San Diego
Visiting Scholar
2005 to 2006
Amy Binder, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, will explore the ways in which not-for-profit groups act as intermediaries to help needy individuals locate and access social services. She will focus on a transitional housing facility in Colorado and write a book on the ways the facility betters the lives of its clients by connecting them to educational resources.