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Department of Sociology

Honors Program

HONORS IN SOCIOLOGY

The Honors Program offers top-performing majors in sociology the opportunity to pursue intensive work through an independent research project. Students interested in pursuing honors should contact the Director of the Sociology Honors Program, Professor Laura Carpenter, for more information.

ELIGIBILITY

To qualify for the Sociology Honors Program, you must:

  • Be a sociology major in your junior or senior year
  • Have a minimum GPA in sociology of 3.6
  • Have a minimum GPA of 3.6 overall
  • Complete SOC 2102: Introduction to Social Research, or equivalent (ideally before SOC 4981A, but may be taken concurrently)
  • Complete SOC 2100: Statistics for Social Scientists, or equivalent (ideally before SOC 4981A, but may be taken concurrently)
  • Be recommended for the program by one or more sociology faculty members

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS

In addition to completing all the requirements of the sociology major, students in the Honors Program must also complete the following additional requirements:

  • Statistics. The Honors Program requires SOC 2100 or an equivalent statistics course. This will be counted toward the 12 total hours in the elective requirement.
  • Honors Research Seminar. Students must successfully complete two semesters of SOC 4981 (Honors Research). The first (fall) semester of SOC 4981 is a 3-credit-hour seminar in which students develop the literature review and research plan for the honors thesis. In the second (spring) semester of SOC 4981, also for 3 credit hours, students must complete data collection, data analysis, and write-up of results of the thesis. Students who begin the Honors Program as juniors may elect to take a third or fourth semester of SOC 4981 during their senior year, in order to extend and revise the project (for instance, for publication). Students who begin the honors track in their senior year may also take an additional 3 credit hours of 4981 in the spring semester.
  • Thesis review and revision. To earn honors in sociology, students must successfully complete a peer review-style revision of their honors thesis, under the supervision of their Thesis Advisor, Thesis Reader, and Honors Director.  They must also present their thesis project at the Thesis Showcase in April, before graduation. The thesis review and revision typically occurs at the end of the second semester of the senior year.

HONORS PROFILES

Yifan (Linda) Wang ’26

Parental leave is often presented as a straightforward workplace benefit, yet taking leave continues to carry social and professional risks.  Linda Wang wanted to find out whether evaluations of leave-takers differ depending on the employee’s gender, the length of leave, and respondents’ own background and attitudes.  For her honors thesis, she conducted a survey-based experiment in which 200 US-born respondents read different versions of a vignette about a worker just returned from parental leave.  Linda’s analysis revealed that men who take parental leave are evaluated more negatively than women, whereas leave length does not significantly affect evaluations.  Participants who hold more egalitarian gender attitudes were less likely to stigmatize leave-takers, and stigmatization was based more on perceptions of weakness than of femininity broadly.  Overall, her research shows how inequality at work is reproduced through organizational structures as well as gendered interpretations of caregiving and “ideal” workers. 

Brandon Heeseung Yang ’25

Why are cosmetic procedures more prevalent in South Korea than in the United States?  Brandon Yang hypothesized that comparatively stricter beauty standards and lower prices in South Korea would explain the difference.  He began his honors thesis research by fielding a comparative vignette survey presenting two different cost structures for the same procedure.  Cost had little impact on decision-making for residents of either country; however, Korean participants were less interested in free procedures, more likely to choose procedures regardless of price, and more attuned to the social benefits of cosmetic work than their US counterparts.  Semi-structured interviews with 10 Korean Americans indicated that cosmetic procedures in Korea are often driven by a heightened emphasis on physical appearance and intense pressure to look “naturally” beautiful. 

Catherine (Cate) Allen ’24

Hospitals are closing at rapid rates in rural areas, especially in the U.S. South, affecting the health and lives of rural Americans.  To shed light on this relatively understudied issue, Cate Allen examined the relationship between hospital closures and premature mortality in rural counties in six Southern states.  She began by constructing her own original county-level dataset, using multiple publicly-available sources.  Through multivariate statistical analyses of these data, she found that hospital closures had the largest effect on premature mortality rates in the most geographically isolated counties.  Cate hopes future scholars will build on her thesis research by examining hospital closures and mortality risk in other regions of the United States and by investigating whether hospital closures are felt more acutely by marginalized social groups.