The Sociology Reporter | Summer 2026

Happy first week of classes! We had a busy fall and spring semester, and a productive summer of planning for the new academic year, and we’re excited to get started. We are delighted to welcome our new students, and a new faculty member to the Sociology family. Thank you to our students, faculty, and staff – keep up the good work!

– Dr. Eve Veliz-Moran, Department Chair

Trip to Tijuana

Over Easter Break in April, the GST 371 class successfully completed their global service learning experience with Eduardo & his team in Mexico with Esperanza International . A week spent hoping and learning from each other. A week full of laughter and love. A week spent imagining a better future for all of us.

A huge shoutout to Dr. Kara Cebulko and Maddie Harris for their leadership and facilitation, and a special recognition to Bianca Rego, their fearless student leader. Also, thank you to Christina Roca 21′ who inspires us everyday to build stronger communities, and to Esperanza for their tireless work.

Chanelle Pichardo ’27

“This summer, for my independent research project, I wanted to examine how young adults in America come to understand their sense of self and belonging through everyday social environments, whether that be family and peer relationships, schools, or community spaces. My interest in this question was sparked by my prior interest in immigrant young adults and the nuanced, complex experiences they navigate through different life transitions. Based on my prior knowledge and research, immigrant young adults often navigate this sense of belonging and identity alongside additional layers, such as balancing family and cultural expectations, language, and generational differences, that can shape their sense of home differently than their non-immigrant peers. For the research itself, I wanted to see what the statistics could reveal in relation to this question.

To investigate this, I used data from Add Health (the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health), a nationally representative longitudinal study that has followed essentially the same cohort of people through repeated interviews from childhood into adulthood, running for more than 30 years since it began in 1994. The study examines how respondents develop over time based on factors like their relationships and environments. For the focus of this research, I decided to use Wave III, which captured respondents during their transition into young adulthood, ages 18-26, a period I felt would be most relevant to my interest.

Over the course of the summer, under the guidance of Dr. Miller, I learned to navigate ICPSR, which stores data such as the Add Health study. After reviewing the codebooks and interview questions, I selected the variables that I felt were best fit and was most interested in. Using R, I selected and recoded a set of independent/predictor variables from the Add Health Wave III dataset, including ones like Hispanic origin, race, family ancestry, language spoken at home, U.S. birth and citizenship status, household size, current living arrangement, parental status, and number of addresses lived at. I used these independent variables to examine their relationship with my dependent variable, which was whether respondents felt more influenced by their friends or by their family. Using the raw variables from the Add Health codebook (obtained through ICPSR), I renamed and recoded them in R, preparing them for either bivariate or multivariate regression models to help determine the relationship these chosen variables had with my selected outcome variable. While I was not able to fully analyze the data I coded this summer, my next steps this semester are to continue this research and analyze the data, running the regression models to examine these relationships and gather information for my research question.”