Marco Gonzalez

Graduate Student in Sociology

Biographical Note

Marco J. Gonzalez is a fourth year graduate student in Sociology at Harvard University. He received a B.A. with High Honors from the University of California, Berkeley in May of 2000. After graduating, he worked for three years as a paralegal for an immigration and naturalization law firm in San Francisco, California, where he conducted extensive research examining the implementation and impact of various family and asylum-based immigration laws. His primary research interests lie at the intersection of the sociology of education, immigration, and network analysis.

In January of 2007, Marco will begin an appointment as a Junior Visiting Scholar at Oxford University’s Nuffield College. During his stay and as a collaborating investigator on the NSF funded Children of Immigrants in Schools project, he will conduct research examining how the structure and resource-composition of second and third generation West Indian and Asian Indian adolescents’ peer network influence their educational achievement. This research will serve as a point of comparison with his Master’s thesis, which investigates similar processes among second and third generation Chinese American and Mexican American adolescents.

Marco is also working on the following projects:

1. A study examining the relationship between students’ patterns of social interaction and their cultural proclivities. This project is based on data collected from students’ Facebook.com profiles and is being done in collaboration with Prof. Jason Kaufman and fellow graduate student Kevin Lewis.

2. A review piece that discusses how network methods can be used to better understand and test existing theories of ethnic minority underachievement in educaton.

3. A multi-methods study comparing the relationship between religiosity and political ideology in the United States and Canada. “Are American Evangelicals More Politically Conservative than Canadian Evangelicals, or Are There Simply More of Them in the US?: An Empirical Investigation Using Multiple Data Sources,” with Prof. Jason Kaufman and fellow graduate student Lydia Bean.

4. A quantitative project examining how multilingualism influences the structure and attitudinal composition of various second-generation immigrant groups’ peer-based networks. It is suggested that language diversity plays a critical role in fostering the development of more open and diverse social networks, while providing students the ability to successfully negotiate multiple social roles in the schools they attend.

03/12/2008

Research Interests

Education, Immigration, Culture, Social Networks

Contact

617-496-5794 (FAX)

563 William James Hall
33 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA 02138