Peter Bearman

Peter Shawn Bearman (born 1956)[1] is an American sociologist. He is Jonathan Cole Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University and the founding director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. He is widely-cited[2] in the fields of adolescent health, research design, structural analysis and social networks. In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[1] and a member of the National Academy of Sciences as of 2014.[3]

Career

He received his B.A. in sociology from Brown University in 1978, magna cum laude, and his M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) in sociology from Harvard University.[4]

After receiving his PhD, he was a lecturer at Harvard, followed by a move to the sociology department at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he moved from assistant professor to full professor by 1996, before moving to Columbia University in 1997. He was chair of the department of sociology from 2001-2005 and chair of the department of statistics from 2007-2008. Between 2002 and 2003, he was then a visiting professor at the University of Genoa, Italy, the University of Munich

In addition to being the founding director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, he is currently the director of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences and director of INCITE, Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics both at Columbia University. He was also the co-founding director Global Health Research Center in Central Asia.

He is General Editor of the journal Kinship, Networks, and History and is or has been on the editorial board of the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and Sociological Theory.

Major contributions

Bearman, along with J. Richard Udry, designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), currently the only nationally-representative study of adolescent sexuality in the United States, which has yielded over a thousand published research articles.

From these data, Bearman has published seminal articles on the sexual network, virginity pledges, same sex attraction, and adolescent suicidality. He is widely credited with bringing social network analysis methods to the demographic and population research community. He also introduced social network approaches to social sequence analysis through the concept of narrative networks.[5][6] Bearman currently directs the Robert Wood Johnson Program in population health at Columbia University. He has received major grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation, the American Legacy Foundation, the Office of Population Affairs National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, and the Rockefeller Foundation, totaling over $2,000,000 .

With co-authors Katherine Stovel, and James Moody, Bearman received the Roger V. Gould Prize in 2004 for his article “Chains of Affection: The Structure of Adolescent Romantic and Sexual Networks.” The editorial board of the American Journal of Sociology, selects one article published in the journal for a two-year priod. They award the prize to an article that is "empirically rigorous, theoretically grounded, and lucidly written."[7]

In 2007 Bearman was awarded the National Institute of Health (NIH) Director's Pioneer Award to investigated the social determinants of the autism epidemic.

Bearman is the author of Doormen (University of Chicago Press, 2005), an ethnographic study of doormen in New York City. Notable sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe reviews the book by stating that "Peter Bearman is more systematic and deeper in his connecting a defined body of fieldwork data and the ideas used to interpret it than Erving Goffman, his only real competitor for depth of theory about social interaction." Doormen also received a positive review by Judith Martin of the New York Times,[8] and by fellow sociologist Kieren Healy at Crooked Timber[9]

Publications

Books

Peer-reviewed articles

The most recent among his approximately 25 peer-reviewed articles are:

Popular articles

Major reports from his longitudinal studies

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved May 29, 2011.
  2. ↑ http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sfaRGkUAAAAJ&hl=en
  3. ↑ "News from the National Academy of Sciences". Retrieved Apr 29, 2014.
  4. ↑ "Peter Bearman CV". Columbia University. Retrieved May 29, 2011.
  5. ↑ Moody, James, Robert Faris, and Peter S. Bearman. 1999. “Blocking the future: New solutions for old problems in historical social science.” Social Science History 23, no. 4 (1999): 501-533.
  6. ↑ Bearman, Peter S., and Katherine Stovel. "Becoming a Nazi: A model for narrative networks." Poetics 27, no. 2 (2000): 69-90.
  7. ↑ "About the Gould Prize". Retrieved 17 July 2014.
  8. ↑ Martin, Judith. "'DOORMEN,' BY PETER BEARMAN All Visitors Must Be Announced". New York Times. New York Times. Retrieved 17 July 2014.
  9. ↑ http://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/30/doormen/

References