Helen B. Marrow is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tufts University, with affiliations in American Studies, Latino Studies, Latin American Studies and the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. Helen’s research interests include immigration, race and ethnicity, social class, health,and inequality and social policy. She is the author of New Destination Dreaming: Immigration, Race, and Legal Status in the Rural American South and has published in journals including the American Sociological Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Perspectives on Politics. Today we discuss her tripartite methodological design for studying immigrant/native relations as well as her experience conducting collaborative, interdisciplinary research. For more information, visit the project website.
“One of the things we have learned, and we have incorporated into our survey and interview data, is that a lot of the fierce debates about whether more contact between groups reduces prejudice and produces positive outcomes or whether it leads to greater feelings of threat and more negative outcomes, has to do with the fact that the different disciplines are operationalizing and measuring contact differently. Psychologists think about contact as direct, face-to-face contact. But often in sociology and political science, we are thinking about contact at a broader and more macro level.”
– Helen B. Marrow –