Professor Emeritus

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robert.kaufman@temple.edu PDF icon Download CV (123.17 KB) 760 Gladfelter Hall 1115 Polett Walk Philadelphia Pennsylvania 19122 Expertise Social stratification, Race-ethnic and gender inequality in labor markets, Race/ethnic differences in wealth, Quantitative methods and statistics

I usually describe myself as half a sociologist and half an applied statistician, although for most of my career the sociologist predominated with a broad interest in social stratification and inequality. This duality dates back to my undergraduate days at Oberlin College where I was a double major in sociology and math but took more hours in sociology than I could count towards my degree. My substantive research primarily focuses on economic structure and labor market inequality, especially with respect to race-ethnicity and gender.

For example, I study how job segregation and devaluation processes create and reproduce race and gender inequalities in job rewards. But I have also dabbled over the years in other realms of race-ethnic inequality, including research on wealth, home equity, residential segregation, traffic stops and treatment by police, and most recently on media portrayals of crime. In terms of my interests in applied statistics and quantitative methodology, my research has usually been explicitly tied to particular substantive questions such as how to estimate "tolerable" segregation, the use of cluster analysis to define economic segments, or the use of multiplicity sampling of workers to create a representative sample of work organizations. But some--like my recent work on detecting and correcting for heteroskedasticity or my current work on interpreting interaction effects in generalized linear models--is motivated by more abstract statistical issues.

Selected Publications

  • Kaufman, Robert L. 2013. Heteroskedasticity in Regression: Detection and Correction. Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences series, Volume 172. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  • Kaufman, Robert L. 2010. Race, Gender and the Labor Market: Inequalities at Work. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
  • Bjornstrom, Eileen E. S., Robert L. Kaufman, Ruth D. Peterson, and Michael D. Slater. 2010. "Race and Ethnic Representations of Lawbreakers and Victims in Crime News: A National Study of Television Coverage." Social Problems 57: 269-293.
  • Campbell, Lori A. and Robert L. Kaufman. 2006. "Racial Differences in Household Wealth: Beyond Black and White." Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 24: 131-152.
  • Krivo, Lauren J. and Robert L. Kaufman. 2004. "Housing and Wealth Inequality: Racial-Ethnic Differences in Home Equity in the United States." Demography 41: 585-605.

Courses Taught

  • Research Design and Methods
  • Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences
  • Categorical and Limited Dependent Variables