Dissertation Title: When Do Good Networks Fail?: Assessing the Impact of Immigrant Status, Gender and Action of Social Ties on the Socioeconomic Incorporation of First-Generation West Indians in New York City.
Chair: Nan Lin
Sancha earned her M.A. in Sociology and advanced to doctoral candidacy at Duke University in May, 2012. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from CUNY, Brooklyn College in June, 2009, with a B.A. in Political Science and a Minor in Law and Society. She was appointed as the 2013 National Liaison for Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS). She defines her scholarly contribution as bringing a critical lens to traditional questions explored in the sub-fields of Economic Sociology and Social Network Theory. Her research philosophy and practice is informed by perspectives from Social Capital Theory, Migration Theory and Black Feminist Critical Theory. Her research aims to, not only identify predictors of observable macro-level socioeconomic disparities, but to understand how micro-level preferences and tendencies in social interactions shaped by differential experiential constraints and advantages are reified or masked at the level of institutions or society. To explore this complex relationship between quantifiable and experienced inequality, she adopts a multi-method approach to social research, integrating field observation, interviews, and surveys. Sancha’s dissertation research asks whether and how characteristics of individuals such as immigrant status and gender significantly impact how one relates with others in one’s social network in ways that erase potential returns to one’s social capital-resources embedded in one’s social connections. She pursues these questions by focusing on the social relationships, social situations and post-migration adaptation experiences of 300 First-generation West-Indian immigrants in New York City within the context of a religious organization and the broader metropolis.
