Sociology and Human Interests: Measuring a Cognitive Structure of Sociology.

In this paper, I view the research interests of sociologists as forming a cognitive structure of sociology. This research probes quantitative and qualitative aspects of research interests among American sociologists. Using a sample of sociology faculty members at Research I universities, I investigate some factors that influence the total number of research interests an American sociologist may have, and the number of interests that correspond with specialty areas provided by American Sociological Association (ASA, in the rest of this article). Such factors include individual attributes like academic rank, gender, and group attributes like departmental prestige. Because some faculty members in the sample share a department, the data structure contains variables both of individual level and group level. Both total number of interests and ASA-type interests have only non-negative integer values, so Poisson regression and Zero-Truncated Poisson are applied to the analysis of effects of the factors. Adopting clusters of sociologists' interests developed by James Ennis (1992), I also investigate if sociologists of different groups (academic rank, gender) have different research interestsâ?”this is more of qualitative aspects of research interests, I use chi-square tests to the independence of groups and clusters. I find that the research interests of male and female sociologists are not significantly different in number or in content areas that are measured by Ennis's interest clusters (1992). Full professors have fewer total number of research interests. Along with associate professors, they also have fewer number of ASA specialty-type research interests. Departmental prestige does not significantly influence the total number of interests, but it positively influences the number of ASA specialty-type interests. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]