Terresa Eun

Research

My research sits at the intersection of health and social inequality. As a sociologist and social demographer, I study how social determinants of health shape and are shaped by structural inequalities, particularly by race, class, and gender. Specifically, my work considers how psychosocial factors like perceptions, social interactions, and discretion reflect and reinforce health disparities. My research projects to date span three theoretical areas: the role of perceptions in shaping reality, the deconstruction of conceptual categories to reveal empirical heterogeneity, and discretion in decision-making processes. Empirically, I use various datasets on health and inequality in the United States, most notably on the lived experience and distribution of physical pain. Methodologically, I allow my research questions to guide my research strategies. As a result, my scholarship is methodologically diverse, integrating quantitative, computational, and qualitative approaches. To date, I have published eight papers at the intersection of social science and medicine in peer-reviewed journals and have several manuscripts in progress.

In my dissertation, I investigate psychosocial factors that create pain, using pain as a site to investigate how internal and external perceptions of social status and health ultimately affect our health. The dominant biopsychosocial framework for understanding pain posits that it is multidimensional and created by the confluence of biological, psychological, and social factors. Unfortunately, however, unlike the term “biopsychosocial” implies, our understanding of pain has in practice been disproportionately biological or physiological, with comparatively little understanding of the psychological and especially social or sociological factors of pain. My dissertation seeks to fill this gap, addressing the role of mental health in the translation of pain stimuli into the lived experience of pain; using pain as a case study to understand how perceptions and internalizations of socioeconomic status, however divorced they are from reality, have real consequences for our health; and using interpersonal conflicts to understand how and why people (de)legitimize pain, how structural inequalities are mobilized in the (de)legitimation of pain, and how this interactively shapes the pain experience.

Teaching

I believe in education as an engine of equality and mobility, and I am dedicated to making educational environments more welcoming of all backgrounds. My approach to teaching is student-centered, focusing on active learning, and I strive to foster a learning environment where students reflect deeply on key theories and debates in sociology, think rigorously about social science research, and use a sociological lens to critically examine our shared understandings of health and medicine. To this end, I have designed and taught multiple courses at Stanford, including an undergraduate course on the sociology of health, two courses on independent research for senior undergraduates, and a PhD-level course on pedagogy. Through the two courses on independent research, I also successfully advised nine seniors on their first original research projects in fulfillment of their capstone graduation requirement, providing students with extensive individualized feedback and support. In addition, I have served as a teaching assistant for seven quarters, including for two quarters of graduate-level statistics for PhD students. For my teaching, I received the Cilker Award for Outstanding Teaching. In addition to my work at Stanford, over the past six years, I have designed and taught eight social science and humanities courses at Bay Area jails for incarcerated students.