Listen to the interview

Corey M. Abramson, Max Besbris, James Chu, Priya Fielding-Singh, David B. Grusky, Jessica Halliday Hardie, Lisa Hummel, Theresa Rocha Beardall, Elizabeth Talbert, Shira Zilberstein are contributors to RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences double issue, “Building an Open Qualitative Science,” edited by Kathryn J. Edin (Princeton University), Corey D. Fields (Georgetown University), David B. Grusky (Stanford University), Jure Leskovec (Stanford University), Marybeth J. Mattingly (Federal Reserve Bank of Boston), Kristen Olson (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), and Charles Varner (Stanford University). This issue utilizes data from the American Voices Project, an experimental public-use platform for collecting qualitative data, to provide insight into the lives of Americans.

 Q. What is the American Voices Project? Why is it important to have a public-use platform for qualitative data?

Grusky: Great questions. Let me address each in turn. First, let's just ask the simple question, as you posed it: What is the American Voices Project? It's the country's first immersive interviewing study that's based on probability sampling. It's based on a large sample, it takes an omnibus form, and it's made available to all qualified researchers in secure facilities. That's a lot. Let me break that down a bit. There's really kind of five distinctive things about the AVP that I just rehearsed, but I'll go over them a little bit more in more detail.

So, first off, it's an immersive interview, by which I mean, the respondents are allowed to respond to a wide range of open-ended questions. Questions like: “Tell me the story of your life.” “Tell me about your family and friends.” “Tell me about your neighborhood.” “Tell me about your religion.” It tends to be an engaging, cathartic, and, I would say, authentic interview. In some cases, it’s sort of the antithesis of the typical survey interview, where it's kind of a forced data extraction exercise. So that's point one. Point two is that it's based on probability sampling. This ensures that whatever group the researcher would like to study, they will be able to access a representative sample of that group. Thirdly, it's based on a large sample; a sample of approximately 2,700 cases. This makes it possible for researchers to study small groups, hidden populations, and all manner of intersections between groups. The fourth point is that the AVP protocol takes, as I've noted, an omnibus form. So, it has queries across a wide range of life domains, including family, friends, work, health, neighborhood, religion, and on and on. And this makes it possible to gain a holistic understanding of people that that emerges as you learn more and more about their lives in a variety of domains. And then finally, the fifth distinctive feature of the AVP is that it's made available to all qualified researchers. Why? Because we want to reduce cost barriers to qualitative research, not only make it available to people who have long sabbaticals and have money provided to them. We want it to be available to a wider range of researchers because we want to allow for replication and accumulation. If you want to probe further on a preexisting study and learn more about what's happening, you can go back to the same data and learn more and build on the work of others. And because we want to honor the work and contributions of interviewees by supplementing the single use and throw away model. That model has delivered wonderfully and is high value, but we want to complement that model with another model that honors respondents by saying, “We're going to use your data over and over again because you've so generously provided.” So, those are the distinctive features of the AVP.

Let me turn to your next question: Why is it important to have this public-use platform for qualitative data? And I think the key backdrop to that question, which is a really important question, is that qualitative research has taken off. The evidence on this is very clear. It's an increasingly prominent form of social science research. I think it's taking off for a pretty simple reason—it’s been an immensely productive research form. It's been responsible for some of the most fundamental findings in the field. Findings that we just never would have secured if we relied solely on an administrative or survey data, as valuable as of course they are. Because it's been so successful, it's time for brand differentiation. That's what successful methods do; they differentiate. We need to develop a new type of qualitative research, a type that doesn't substitute for the immensely productive existing form. You would never want to do that because it's been so productive. But you want to supplement it, to exploit the value of this approach by going beyond the conventional form that's based on researcher collected data that are treated as proprietary and typically destroyed after a single use.

With this new public-use form, we're able to put on steroids what I think is the fundamental advantage of qualitative work, and that's its capacity for discovery. So let me talk about that a bit. The survey form, just think about it. What does it do? It requires survey designers to know in advance the right questions to ask. Sometimes they don't know the right questions. They're not omniscient. That's asking a lot of anyone. And it's especially difficult to know the right questions in advance in our current time period, when we're in this poly-crisis moment. We're seeing crises of governance, distributional crises, climate disasters, on and on. And these crises can bring on rapid changes in sentiments, all matter of adaptations, and lots of unpredictable responses that we need to monitor in real time. And that, in turn, requires methods that allow us to discover what maybe survey designers just don't anticipate or predict. And the fact of the matter is that our social scientists haven't been all that successful when it comes to anticipating and understanding crisis. So, we need a new tool. The AVP is one that can allow us to do a better job of that. So, the first reason why discovery is needed is because we're living in a moment rife with crises, and they can bring about changes that are hard to predict in advance. So, we need to be able to discover what's happening.

But there's a second reason why discovery is needed. And that's that people are inscrutable, ineffable creatures. They always have been, and they continue to be. The survey conceit is that to understand these inscrutable, ineffable creatures, we just need to ask them questions. And they’ll provide us answers to those questions. This assumes they know the answers that we often don't know ourselves or aren’t willing to reveal ourselves in a direct survey response. That's where the omnibus interview comes in. It's a method for revealing ourselves without requiring that we know ourselves. So, how's that happen? We reveal ourselves by the intonation in our voices, by the themes that unwittingly escape and emerge as we discuss a range of topics, by the emotions that are surfaced in an immersive interview, by the choices that we make in deciding how to respond to a set of open-ended questions. So, what's revealed, in other words, by an immersive interview is the so called “dark matter” of the social world. That's not just a claim. It used to be just something that qualitative researchers would say, and it sounded plausible. There’s now actually a lot of evidence out there, bona fide evidence, that immersive interviews are far more powerful than survey data in uncovering the dark matter of social life. It's recently been shown in a paper by Joon Sung Park, Michael Bernstein, and others, that analysts can predict what a person will do in the future by analyzing the dark matter of AVP immersive interviews. If, by contrast, they're only given access to survey questions, they can't do as good of a job of understanding what people will do in the future. You provide researchers with an immersive interview, and it's possible to predict, quite successfully, what people will do in the future. That is evidence that there's dark matter there. What people have long been saying it's indeed the case. So, the upshot is that immersive interviews allow for discovery because they're a window—a powerful window—into the dark matter of social life, and the AVP is an important tool for accessing that dark matter.

Q. What are “intersectional burdens?” How do they impact someone’s attempts to access state benefits?

Rocha Beardall: Thank you so much for that question. In this work, we define the concept of intersectional burdens as a way to describe how people's social location—their race, their class, their gender, their immigration status, ability and a multitude of other intersecting identities—shapes the way individuals experience and navigate public systems. And this concept and term builds on research about administrative burdens, the fantastic work that's already been done on them, which focuses on the learning, psychological and compliance costs of engaging with the state. But we found this idea of intersectional burdens by reading through many, many, many interviews in the AVP data. What we found, specifically, is that administrative burdens are not experienced equally—they're compounded by existing systems of inequality that cannot be captured in the costs associated with administrative burdens. We chose specifically to focus on women because women are more likely to interact with public institutions, whether it's applying for housing or managing healthcare for the family or securing food assistance for extended family or community. Often, due to gendered expectations around caregiving and family responsibilities, women are at the front lines of interacting with the state and thus experiencing administrative burdens.

So, how do these burdens impact people's ability to access state benefits? As you might imagine, in a lot of ways. We began to see through the data that administrative systems weren't just hard to navigate. They were often experienced by women as being punitive, and even harmful, for people at the intersections of multiple marginalized identities. In this article, we structure our findings around three central themes. There are a lot of pressure points or pinpoints where these multiple marginalized identities are compounded, but we focused on three. The first is the conditionality of access to public benefits. The second is the convoluted process of trying to access affordable health care. And third is the carcerality of subsidized housing systems. We found women with marginalized identities, especially women of color, those with disabilities, and those with undocumented status or prior criminal legal system contact, faced compounding barriers that shaped not just what services they could access, but how they were treated.

There are a few key examples of the way that intersectional burdens emerge in the data. The first individual I'd like to bring into the conversation from the data is Jean, a Black woman with a criminal record. She describes her public housing unit as a jail cell. In many ways, she felt surveilled. She was constantly anxious about eviction. And the layout of the apartment itself, the cinder block walls, no outdoor access, and the constant reminders from the manager of what she was and was not allowed to do and where she was and was not allowed to be, evoked memories of incarceration for her. And there was Mirelia and undocumented Latinx mother. She told us, through the data, through her stories with the AVP, that essentially, undocumented folks cannot commit any mistakes at all. And because they can't commit any mistakes at all, it becomes really difficult to access, want to access, and feel safe trying to get health care coverage for her and her family.

The stories from these two women and the other 59 women in the data, really reveal that intersectional burdens are not just about red tape, or the copious amounts of paperwork individuals need to file, or the lines that they wait in to get access to state services. All of that is real and all of that matters. But really, at the heart of it, intersectional burdens are produced by this interaction between an individual's personal identity and the institutional design. So, through the institutional design, we begin to see that burdens are multiplicative, they're not additive. And these burdens are reinforcing inequality through layers of harm that are often invisible to policymakers, caseworkers, and sometimes even to us as academics if what we're looking at is the costs associated with administrative burdens alone and not how one's identity both shapes their ability to see and be seen by the state itself.

Q. What were some of the strategies that low-income renters used to avoid further housing insecurity during the first few months of the pandemic? Did these strategies have any pitfalls?

Besbris: What we found in our research is that the strategies that low-income renters use to mitigate housing insecurity weren't all that different during the COVID-19 pandemic than what past research has found. These same kinds of renters used strategies that they use in normal times. Largely, what we found is that people were relying on their social networks. They're relying on close friends, on family, on coworkers, anyone who can provide even a little bit of help, the here and there, to help make sure that people are housed and housed in somewhat safe or stable environments.

We found two differences during the COVID-19 pandemic. One is that there were a bevy of aid sources that became available from the federal government and state governments that people took advantage of. These were not only housing focused. And we found is that people were using money that they got in increased unemployment or increased food stamps to balance their household budgets overall. And that allowed them to get ahead on their rent—or at least stay on top of their rent payments—and buy things for their homes that they weren't normally able to. So, it wasn't just direct housing policies, but more social welfare and social safety net cash assistance that helped people during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And the second thing we found—that was unusual, I think, given the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic—is that landlords were a little bit more willing to negotiate with their tenants to help them out. This wasn't ubiquitous. It's not that all of the renters that we interviewed were able to make new deals with their landlords or with their property managers. But some people did say that they got a little bit more leeway and a little bit more slack and that the situation was so grave and so ubiquitous that some landlords recognize the strain that their tenants were experiencing.

So, while this reliance on social networks wasn't necessarily novel, these new policies that were meant to bolster household finances overall were very helpful, and in some cases the flexibility that landlords were willing to give their tenants given the unprecedentedness of the situation also ended up being very helpful for some low-income tenants.

Q. How did mother’s parenting and caregiving experiences vary by socioeconomic status during the pandemic?

Fielding-Singh: In our paper, we drew on in-depth interviews conducted with 130 mothers across the U.S. during the pandemic to explore exactly that question: What was it like to be a mom during such an unprecedented and uncertain time? And how did mothers’ resources and employment situations shape their experiences? Our study was inspired by mounting research already showing that, during the pandemic, the hard work of caregiving fell disproportionately to mothers, often at the expense of their own wellbeing, both personally and professionally. But at the time of our study, there was far less work looking at how these experiences might differ across society, and how the disruptions brought on by the pandemic might have disrupted or reinforced how they parented their kids. To look at this, we drew on data from the American Voices Project, a large-scale mixed-method study that collected data from people, including moms, across race, income, and age throughout the country on how they were making ends meet. We used a cross section of the data that was collected early in the pandemic, when school and childcare closures were widespread. This allowed us to look at how mothers across the country had to reorganize their complicated routines and parenting strategies to best meet their kids’ needs.

Talbert: What we found was that mothers had a lot in common when it came to facing the pandemic. No matter their background, they faced the same unprecedented disruptions and stressors. First, all mothers shared worries about the health and safety of themselves and their loved ones, especially as widespread deaths were reported on the news and experienced in their own communities. Second, lockdowns resulted in this profound sense of isolation because moms didn't have consistent access to family, friends, schools, and other social supports. Third, systematic financial stressors were really intense, and parents faced tough choices between working and staying healthy. Fourth, and importantly, all the mothers in our sample wanted to do the best for their kids with whatever resources they had.

At the same time, mothers’ socioeconomic positions and job situations really shaped their experiences. Less well-off mothers often talked about struggling with fewer in-person supports from family and friends. They often continued to work in person and worried about the financial fallout of being laid off. And they felt stressed about the challenge of scarcer financial resources. In contrast, more well-off mothers rarely mentioned financial stressors. Instead, they spoke about the collision of work and family as uniquely disruptive to them and hard to juggle. For example, Jennifer explained that she felt like she was burning the candle at both ends, while still feeling like a failure as a worker and as a mother. She told us, “You know that you need to do more, but you just physically can't do any more than what you're doing.”

Hummel: We saw the same kind of class divide when it came to parenting styles. Indeed, a central novel contribution of our study was showing how incredibly durable class parenting approaches are, even in a crisis. We know, from past research, that parents of different social classes often take different approaches to their children's development. Economically privileged parents do more concerted cultivation—a more hands on, structured approach with enrollment and activities and enrichment programs. In contrast, less privileged parents tend to follow the accomplishment of natural growth approach, with less intensive oversight and more unstructured time. We found that these class parenting styles persisted in the pandemic, albeit adapted to new constraints.

Employed, less well-off mothers were less likely to be able to work from home, and thus relied more on community, family, and the kids themselves to supervise online learning and daily activities. In contrast, more well-off moms had the resources and ability to work from home, and that allowed a more hands-on approach to development, including clubs and activities, often over Zoom. Interestingly, because natural growth was actually more compatible with the limits of pandemic parenting—while concerted cultivation was not—it was often economically privileged mothers who felt the most stressed, anxious, and frustrated trying to meet their own standards of parenting in the midst of everything going on. That doesn't mean that less privileged moms didn't also struggle. They certainly did. It's just that the constraints and challenges of caregiving in a pandemic were more compatible with a natural growth approach to parenting.

Fielding-Singh: Ultimately, whether it was highly precarious finances or hard to meet parenting ideals, mothers from across the socioeconomic spectrum faced new challenges during the pandemic. And while the pandemic may now start to feel like a distant memory, mothers today still live in its shadow and continue to face challenges balancing work and family in the absence of affordable and widespread supports. Our findings speak to that urgency. If we want mothers, from all backgrounds, to have the resources to care for and raise their children, we need to reframe carework as a public responsibility rather than a private undertaking.

Q. What is pain and how do Americans make sense of it?

Abramson: This is a difficult question. Often pain is defined as an unpleasant, sensory, and emotional experience, but it's certainly not just that. In the U.S., we sometimes think of this as a medical issue—it’s likened to experiences of tissue damage. But it's also cognitive, emotional, social, and deeply personal. And who is in pain at any given time reflects where we live, the type of work we do, even how we think about the world.

I think there are three points that are really necessary to understand. First, as the saying goes, “Everybody hurts sometimes.” But a lot of Americans are in pain a lot of the time. Pain is a chronic issue for roughly one in four Americans. And tens of millions live with pain so severe that it limits their ability to work and navigate daily life. Second, the cost of this is staggering, not just on the individual level, but socially. Chronic pain drains an estimated more than $550 billion a year in health bills, lost productivity, and wages. Third, how we manage pain, including how we as a society navigate questions of who suffers stigma, addiction and punishment, reveals a lot about the way our world is organized.

To hear what these numbers mean, we analyzed more than 1,500 in-depth interviews collected as part of the American Voices Project between 2019 and 2021 using a secure machine learning system designed to understand how people made sense of pain. Our approach paired computational natural language processing technologies with semantic network building that identified patterns and concepts associated with pain and a deep reading of all of this to see how people made sense of pain in the contexts in their daily lives. We found that there were currents that run through the stories, as well as important differences.

First, pain was something that was widespread, even though, “Are you in pain?” was not a direct question that was asked. This supports claims about the prevalence and epidemic of pain in a study that wasn't specifically looking for it, which is an important thing to note. Pain was also an aspect of everyday life that came up as people were describing what it means to live in America at the time of their interview. One manual worker, Juan, noted that every day he wakes up, “Trying to shake off the lower back pain.” That was a big part of what it meant to get up and go to work.

Second, how we manage pain wasn't just seen as a medical issue, but a marker of character across the spectrum. It’s not simply medical. There were differences by gender. For instance, women often would say things like, “I'm not a pill taker,” and then go on to describe how that was because they put their family first. The distinction was really about valuing others. Men would also exercise this type of distinction, but through stoicism. As one person who worked in a manual occupation noted, “I just tie it up and go.” So, again, how people confronted pain was seen as a marker of who they were and how they interpreted others.

Third, this had huge implications for navigating medicine, which also was a site where there were differences by gender. Women repeatedly reported—something that's been noted in other studies and documented elsewhere—that they feel their pain is discounted or ignored. And men and women and people from all walks of life talked about how medication was moral, how opioids were stigmatized, and how they had challenges navigating healthcare systems.

So, what are the implications? What could we do? First, it's important to understand pain, not just as a number, but as a challenge that shapes everyday life in various forms as well as work and leisure. This is something that I think there's room to improve clinical training in terms of understanding how people talk about, think, experience and convey pain within that setting. Second, there was a lot of support for non-opioid, non-stigmatizing options, but little in the way of people knowing how to navigate or secure that. And third, large quality data sets like the American Voices Project allow us to look at broad patterns to identify hidden populations and identify issues and understand them in different ways before they come up on surveys. In the end, what we found is that pain stories often connect biology to biography, health, and historical times, and who listened or powered through revealed many aspects of American life, both shared and disparate. And we found that pain was a particularly important issue, not just for understanding human suffering, but for understanding life in America.

Q. What are “agentic moments”? How do people use them when they talk about their lives?

Zilberstein: When people talk about their lives, they don't just recount events, they interpret and make sense of them, often by telling stories. These stories reflect who someone is and who they want to be. One powerful aspect of how people recount their lives is what we call “agentic moments.” Agentic moments are instances in which people describe themselves as taking action, making decisions, or exerting control—even in situations that are difficult, uncertain, or limited in choice and resources. These moments allow people to present themselves as capable and intentional actors, even when they're navigating serious constraints.

In our research, we analyzed narratives of agency and constraint, or what we also call “passivity,” in the American Voices Project interviews. We found that across socioeconomic, racial, and gender lines, people use agentic moments to craft a sense of self that is active, able to impact their life circumstances and life worlds, and morally worthy. These moments were often not grand narratives of transformation. More often, they were small but meaningful moments when someone described themselves as able to endure, to forge a path toward their goals, or to act in a deliberate way.

Notably, we found that narratives of agency and passivity are not opposites that negate each other. In fact, they often appear together in the same story. People frequently describe their lives as a mix of moments when they felt overwhelmed or defeated and also moments when they found a way to act. One example comes from a woman we call Melissa. She described the hardship of living through an incident of domestic violence. In one part of the interview, she recalled being physically abused while her toddler daughter watched, helpless to intervene. The moment was narrated with a strong sense of passivity, in which Melissa felt unable to affect her circumstances or protect those around her. But later, Melissa shifted focus. She described how she advocates for her children at school, confronting teachers and the principal when necessary. She said, “they know my voice,” emphasizing how her persistence and determination had an impact on school leadership. Even though she didn't hold formal power in the school hierarchy, she crafted a story in which she was an agent. This time, she was someone who could protect and guide her children's future and influence those around her.

These kinds of shifts are what we call narrative moves. People use them to reframe their experiences and emphasize their capacity to act. Sometimes that means shifting scales. For example, focusing on smaller, manageable parts of a larger problem. Other times, it means highlighting different types of agency such as planning, enduring, deciding, or resisting, depending on what a situation may allow. In short, agentic moments help people make sense of their lives in ways that reflect their values, assert their dignity and maintain an active sense of self as the protagonist of one's own life. These moments occur even when individuals are navigating extremely challenging circumstances that are often thought to constrain people by eliminating their choices or agency.

Q. What are some of the ways Americans express judgement about one another? Do these judgements vary among Americans?

Chu: Thanks for your interest in our work. Before getting to your question directly, let me briefly take a detour to explain why Seungwon and I found the question of how Americans judge so interesting and important. 

People express moral judgments about others regularly. You might praise your spouse for being caring or denigrate a neighbor who is being selfish. Our goal was to understand who people judge, by what standards, and from there, try to identify groups of people who share in how they express moral judgments. The question of how people share in patterns of moral judgment is very important to study because it reveals salient social boundaries. If the highly educated tends to praise others primarily in terms of their competence, and all the others who also do so tend to be better educated, this tells us that education is a key dividing line in moral socialization. Do Republicans and Democrats default to using different moral standards to express judgments in everyday life? If so, this would affirm recent concerns that political divisions are so deep that people rely on different moral logics within each party.  

What we did to answer these kinds of questions was to catalog every instance where a random sample of Americans express judgments in a semi-structured interview about their lives. We then inductively grouped these judgments according to who was being judged and the standard that was being deployed. Some of our findings were exactly what you would expect. The two most prevalent standards for praising others were competence and prosociality (or warmth), followed by empathy and diligence. We find that Americans draw on a diverse range of standards to denigrate others, including that they are violent, lack self-control, dishonest, or unfair. 

What we did next was to see how people cluster together in who and by what standards they judge. Do people cluster together in specific patterns of praising and denigrating others? Who are these people, in terms of their demographics? We find that, above all, gender is a key dividing line in how Americans judge. Reflecting how they are themselves stereotyped, American women tend to praise others for prosociality rather than competence; they deploy negative judgments—often against men—for violence and dishonesty. As a sad sidenote, these judgments were often in the context of abusive behaviors from their family members or partners. Men, on the other hand, are more inclined to praise competence and criticize a lack of self-control. This gender divide suggests that men and women not only experience different social realities but also internalize and express different moral expectations. 

Although gender is the strongest predictor of the moral logics people draw upon, other demographic factors, like race and political identity, also matter depending on the context. For example, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to highlight prosociality when praising individuals. Meanwhile, Black Americans are more likely to denigrate others—and primarily institutions like law enforcement—for violence, disorderliness, and incompetence, perhaps reflecting experiences police violence.  

I think it’s worth noting, in summary, that we would know that gender, race, and politics are important social categories in America even without doing this work. But what we do learn is that the socialization and life experiences of people in this group are qualitatively so different as to constitute a distinctive way of expressing moral judgment. We find, for instance, no such difference along various indicators of socioeconomic status. In other words, you could think of our work as an opening foray to identifying different moral logics or worlds that American inhabit, as based on new method that identifies shared patterns of judgment in how Americans narrate their day to day lives in an interview. 

Q. How do people with and without college degrees speak about family differently? In what ways are how they speak about family similar?

Halliday Hardie: We know from prior research that social class has a big influence on how families are formed and operate in people's lives, with the largest division existing between those with and without a college degree. Adults with a college degree, for example, are more likely to marry and to stay married than those with less than a college degree. They also have children later in life and get married later in life than those without a college degree. And because people tend to marry others with similar levels of education, economic and social resources tend to accrue in large numbers to those with a college degree through marital family relations. And the same kind of process means that structural disadvantages can accrue through family connections as well.

Our research aims were to look at the ways that people talked about family in the American Voices Project interview data. We analyzed 1,396 interview transcripts using a topic modeling method—called discourse atom topic modeling—to identify latent themes. We combined this approach with qualitative coding of a sample of transcripts and traditional regression modeling with a combination of survey data and the themes that we generated from our topic modeling approach.

Our findings show that individuals without a college degree spend more of their interviews talking about family topics than those with a college degree, overall. We also found that college graduates spoke more about family topics related to holidays, tracing lineage, and transition moments than those without a college degree. Those without a college degree spoke more about family topics related to kinship, abuse, and conflict in older generations than those with a college degree. So, there were some differences in subtopics and then some subtopics did not differ at all by college degree.

However, we then wanted to look at the ways that family talk intersected with other institutions, such as health, work, and criminal justice, because in our sampling of interview transcripts, we saw that the institutions were often talked about together. So, when people talk about work, they might talk about a family member that had recommended them for that work. Or if they talk about health, they might be talking about a family member who helped them through some kind of illness. But when we use the topic modeling approach to look at these other institutions, and then regress family talk on the other topics, as well as on a college degree, we found that they didn't really explain the differences. So, while noncollege graduates spoke more about family and certain family topics than college graduates did, we did not find that family talk in the context of other kinds of institutions differed by education. The same kinds of interview topics were driving family talk, it was just that there was a greater degree of that family talk among noncollege graduates suggesting that family just occupies a larger space in their social world.

Corey M. Abramson is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Rice University. He is co-author of the article, “Inequality in the Origins and Experiences of Pain: What ‘Big (Qualitative) Data’ Reveal About Social Suffering in the United States.”

Max Besbris is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is co-author of the article, “Pandemic Housing: The Role of Landlords, Social Networks, and Social Policy in Mitigating Housing Insecurity During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” He is also co-author of RSF book Soaking the Middle Class, a former RSF visiting scholar, and an RSF research grant recipient.

James Chu is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University. He is co-author of the article, “How Americans Judge: A Topology of Moral Communities.”

Priya Fielding-Singh is a senior manager of research and education at the Sandberg Goldberg Bernthal Family Foundation. She is co-author of the article, “Caregiving in a Crisis: Mothers’ Parenting Experiences and the Persistence of Class-Based Parenting During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” She is also an RSF research grant recipient.

David B. Grusky is a professor of sociology at Stanford University. He is co-editor of this double issue of RSF. He is also co-editor of RSF volumes The Great Recession and The Declining Significance of Gender?, contributor to multiple RSF volumes, contributor to RSF journal issue “Using Administrative Data for Science and Policy,” and the recipient of multiple RSF research grants.

Jessica Halliday Hardie is a professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is co-author of the article, “Talk of Family: How Institutional Overlap Shapes Family-Related Discourse Across Social Class.”

 Lisa Hummel is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stanford University. She is co-author of the article, “Caregiving in a Crisis: Mothers’ Parenting Experiences and the Persistence of Class-Based Parenting During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

 Theresa Rocha Beardall is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington. She is co-author of the article, “Intersectional Burdens: How Social Location Shapes Interactions with the Administrative State.” 

Elizabeth Talbert is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Drake University. She is co-author of the article, “Caregiving in a Crisis: Mothers’ Parenting Experiences and the Persistence of Class-Based Parenting During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” She is also a contributor to RSF issue “Severe Deprivation in America” and an RSF research grant recipient.

Shira Zilberstein is a PhD candidate in sociology at Harvard University. She is co-author of the article, “The Self in Action: Narrating Agentic Moments.”