 | This article is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor's personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic.(May 2009) |
Charles B. Nam was born in Lynbrook, New York on March 25, 1926, and currently resides in Tallahassee, Florida. He was a professor of Sociology for 31 years with one of his most important contributions being the Nam-Powers Index measuring occupational status.
Charles Nam attended an Army Specialized Training Program at Harvard University in 1944, completed his Bachelor of Arts in Applied Statistics at New York University in 1950 and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for both his Master's degree in Sociology (1957) as well as his Ph.D (1959).
Charles Nam began his professional career at the Census Bureau in 1950. For more than three years, he was employed in the International Population Statistics Section, assisting subject matter specialists in the social statistics field. Following his time at the US Bureau of the Census, Charles Nam work for the US Air Force Human Resource Research Institute as an assistant project director on demographic studies of officers and airmen, leaving this position to attend graduate school. While pursuing his master's degree and PhD he was a research assistant on various demographic research projects at the University of North Carolina Institute for Research in Social Science, returning to the Census (1957) prior to completing his doctorate in sociology (1960).
At the US Bureau of the Census (1957–1964) Nam was chief of the Education Statistics Section (1957–1961), helping to plan the 1960 census, preparing Current Population reports, and helping to train foreign students in census techniques. Later (1962–1964), Nam was the Chief of the Education and Social Stratification Branch where he was responsible for education, stratification and other social data. During this time he also was the project director for a study matching death certificates to census records.
Leaving the US Bureau of the Census in 1964, Nam began his 31-year academic career at Florida State University. During the course of his academic career, he chaired the Department of Sociology and founded the Population and Manpower Research Center (which later became the Center for the Study of Population and even later became the Center for Demography and Population Health). He directed the center for its first 14 years and was Associate Center Director again for the early 1990s.
Nam is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books. He wrote Education of the American Population with John Folger in 1967, and The Socioeconomic Approach to Status Measurement with Mary Powers in 1983. He co-wrote two handbooks on immigration (International Handbook of Internal Migration with David F. Sly and William Serow in 1990 and Handbook of International Migration with William Serow, David Sly and Robert Weller in 1990). Living and Dying in the USA: Health, Behavioral and Social Forces of Adult Mortality (2002) was his last academic book written in English. Most recently, he published The Golden Door, an historical novel (2006).
One of his most important contributions was his work on the Nam-Powers Index, which was developed in the 1950s and expanded upon by Nam and several colleagues (specifically Mary Powers, E. Walter Terrie and Monica Boyd) over the years (see Nam and Boyd 2004 for details). The Nam-Powers index was created to estimate the living conditions of a typical person in a particular occupation. This work was highlighted in several of Charles Nam's publications and has been adopted by sociologists as one of the key measures of socioeconomic status (typically measured by education, income and occupation).
Over the course of his academic career his research was funded by more than a dozen different agencies, totaling more than a million dollars in grant funding from agencies like the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the US Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation, among others. Charles Nam has also published extensively, with nearly two dozen articles in the demography and sociology of education, another near-dozen in social stratification, another 17 in general demography and more than two dozen focusing on mortality. These publications have been included in some of the most prestigious journals in his field:
Demography, [1] [2] [3] [4] American Sociological Review, Social Forces, [5] Population Research and Policy Review, [6] [7] Population and Environment, [8] [9] Social Biology, [10] and Social Science & Medicine. One of his articles was highlighted in a commemorative issue of Social Biology as one of their thirty most frequently cited articles in the journal's history (Sex Predetermination: Its Impact on Fertility, with Gerald Markle).
Beyond publishing and conducting funded research, Nam also had major editorial roles at Sociology of Education, Demography, Population and Environment, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Population Research and Policy Review, and Social Biology. He was President of the Population Association of America (1979) and the Southern Sociological Society (1981–1982). He was founder and chair of the American Sociological Association's Section on Sociology of Population (1976–1978). He was named a fellow of the American Statistical Association (1980), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2001) and the Southern Demographic Association (2001) (where he was also named Honorary President in 2007 for having been a founding member who never accepted the Presidency).
Social status is the relative level of social value a person is considered to possess. Such social value includes respect, honor, assumed competence, and deference. On one hand, social scientists view status as a "reward" for group members who treat others well and take initiative. This is one explanation for its apparent cross-cultural universality. On the other hand, while people with higher status experience a litany of benefits--such as greater health, admiration, resources, influence, and freedom--those with lower status experience poorer outcomes across all of those metrics.
In demography, demographic transition is a phenomenon and theory which refers to the historical shift from high birth rates and high death rates in societies with minimal technology, education and economic development, to low birth rates and low death rates in societies with advanced technology, education and economic development, as well as the stages between these two scenarios. In economic growth, the demographic transition has swept the world over the past two centuries, and the unprecedented population growth of the post-Malthusian period was reversed, reducing birth rates and population growth significantly in all regions of the world, and enabling economies to translate more of the gains of factor accumulation and technological progress into per capita income growth. The demographic transition strengthens economic growth process by three changes: (i) reduced dilution of capital and land stock, (ii) increased investment in human capital, and (iii) increased size of the labor force relative to the total population and changed age population distribution. Although this shift has occurred in many industrialized countries, the theory and model are frequently imprecise when applied to individual countries due to specific social, political and economic factors affecting particular populations.
Reinhard Bendix was a German-American sociologist.
Social stratification refers to a society's categorization of its people into groups based on socioeconomic factors like wealth, income, race, education, ethnicity, gender, occupation, social status, or derived power. As such, stratification is the relative social position of persons within a social group, category, geographic region, or social unit.
Ansley Johnson Coale, was one of America's foremost demographers. A native to Baltimore, Maryland, he earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1939, his Master of Arts in 1941, and his Ph.D. in 1947, all at Princeton University. A long-term director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton, Coale was especially influential for his work on the demographic transition and for his leadership of the European Fertility Project.
Douglas Steven Massey is an American sociologist. Massey is currently a professor of Sociology at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and is an adjunct professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
The human sex ratio is the ratio of males to females in a population in the context of anthropology and demography. In humans, the natural sex ratio at birth is slightly biased towards the male sex. It is estimated to be about 1.05 or 1.06 or within a narrow range from 1.03 to 1.06 males per female.
Demographic economics or population economics is the application of economic analysis to demography, the study of human populations, including size, growth, density, distribution, and vital statistics.
Sara McLanahan was an American sociologist. She is known for her work on the family as a major institution in the American stratification system. Her early work examined the consequences of divorce and remarriage for parents and children, and her later work focused on families formed by unmarried parents. She was interested in the effects of family structure on social inequality and the roles that public policies can play in addressing the needs of families and children.
Philip N. Cohen is an American sociologist. He is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and director of SocArXiv, an open archive of the social sciences.
Thomas McKeown (1912–1988) was a British physician, epidemiologist and historian of medicine. Largely based on demographic data from England and Wales, McKeown argued that the population growth since the late eighteenth century was due to improving economic conditions, i.e. better nutrition, rather than to better hygiene, public health measures and improved medicine. This became known as the "McKeown thesis".
Cumulative inequality theory or cumulative disadvantage theory is the systematic explanation of how inequalities develop. The theory was initially developed by Merton in 1988, who studied the sciences and prestige. He believed that recognition from peers, and from published research in the scientific field created cumulative advantage or also Matthew effect that led to the receipt of resources that facilitated research projects. The theory expanded in four decades to include the idea that some people have more disadvantages than advantages which influence the quality of life of societies, cohorts, and individuals. The theory is principally a social scientific explanation of phenomena but with links to biological and health factors, personal adjustment, and well-being. A central premise is that "social systems generate inequality, which is manifested over the life course via demographic and developmental processes." Cumulative inequality and cumulative advantage/disadvantage (CAD) are two different but interrelated theories. Cumulative inequality has drawn from various theoretical traditions, including CAD.
Paula S. England, is an American sociologist and Dean of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research has focused on gender inequality in the labor market, the family, and sexuality. She has also studied class differences in contraception and nonmarital births.
Michael Hout is a Professor of Sociology at New York University. His contributions to sociology include using demographic methods to study social change in inequality, religion, and politics. His current work used the General Social Survey (GSS) to estimate the social standing of occupations introduced into the census classification since 1990. He digitized all occupational information in the GSS (1972–2014) and coded it all to the 2010 standard. Other recent projects used the GSS panel to study Americans' changing perceptions of class, religion, and happiness. In 2006, Mike and Claude Fischer published Century of Difference, a book on twentieth-century social and cultural trends in the United States. Other books include Truth about Conservative Christians with Andrew Greeley, Following in Father's Footsteps: Social Mobility in Ireland, and Inequality by Design
Stephen Lawrence Morgan is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Education at the Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences and Johns Hopkins School of Education. A quantitative methodologist, he is known for his contributions to quantitative methods in sociology as applied to research on schools, particularly in models for educational attainment, improving the study of causal relationships, and his empirical research focusing on social inequality and education in the United States.
Irene Barnes Taeuber was an American demographer who worked for the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, where she edited the journal Population Index from 1936 to 1954. Her scholarly work is credited with helping to establish the science of demography.
Eran Shor is an Israeli-Canadian sociologist and a Professor of Sociology. He is the William Dawson Scholar at McGill University. His research interests include the causes and effects of political conflict and violence, ethnicity and nationalism, the sociology of health, and the media coverage of women and ethnic minorities. He focuses on the relationship between states’ counterterrorist policies and their respect for human rights and civil liberties. His research methods include computational analysis of big data, cross-national regression analysis and meta-analyses, as well as in-depth qualitative methods and content analysis.
Jennie E. Brand is an American sociologist and social statistician. She studies stratification, social inequality, education, social demography, disruptive events, and quantitative methods, including causal inference. Brand is currently Professor of Sociology and Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she directs the California Center for Population Research and co-directs the Center for Social Statistics.
Frank Lancaster Jones is an Australian sociologist specialising in social inequality, social stratification, social mobility, and national identity. He was Head of the Department of Sociology in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University (1972–2001) and has been the editor (1970–1972) and a co-editor (1990–1993) of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 1974. During his career he played a pioneering role in the establishment and development of sociology in Australia.
Juho Härkönen is a Finnish academic, currently professor of sociology in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Other | |
