Main content start

Research highlights

An old-fashioned card filing catalog made of wood
Faculty Researcher: Jeremy Freese

In a 2025 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article, Jeremy Freese and colleagues revisit a long-standing concern in the social sciences: the file drawer problem. This term refers to the selective non-publication of studies with…

Sculptured Frieze on Stanford Memorial Arch
Faculty Researcher: Michelle Jackson

In a 2025 study published in Social Forces, Michelle Jackson and former Stanford PhD student Christof Brandtner examine how the language colleges use to describe themselves generates inequality in higher education. They introduce the concept of “…

Four colored microphones
Faculty Researcher: David Grusky

In a special issue of the Russell Sage Foundation Journal in 2024, David Grusky and collaborators make the case for a new national platform for real-time qualitative interviewing. Drawing on the American Voices Project—thousands of in-depth…

U.S. border wall
Faculty Researcher: Asad L. Asad

In an article published in Law & Society Review in 2025, Asad L. Asad and former Stanford PhD student Livia-Baer Bositis show that heavy immigration enforcement makes Latino U.S. citizens and noncitizens less likely to participate in everyday…

The Navigator Research Team
Faculty Researcher: Matthew Clair

In summer 2024, researchers at Stanford University collaborated with the Santa Clara County Public Defender to pilot an innovative “Systems Navigator” program developed by Professor Matthew Clair. Systems Navigators are nonlawyer advocates in a…

American Indian Reservation land in 1900
Faculty Researcher: C. Matthew Snipp

In a 2025 article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, C. Matthew Snipp and colleagues investigate the health consequences of the U.S. Dawes Act of 1887, which sought to assimilate American Indians by distributing…

Lots of small boxes filed on shelves
Faculty Researcher: Aliya Saperstein

In an article for Population and Development Review’s 50th anniversary issue, Aliya Saperstein challenges the long-standing assumption that demographic categories such as race, ethnicity, and gender are fixed throughout an individual’s…

Figure showing results from Voelkel et al. 2024
Faculty Researcher: Robb Willer

In a 2024 article in Science, Robb Willer, former PhD students Jan Voelkel and James Chu, and colleagues report the results of a large-scale experimental initiative that evaluated short, scalable interventions aimed at reducing anti‑democratic…

A building project in Shanghai, China
Faculty Researcher: Andrew G. Walder

Over the past four decades, China has transformed from a society with modest income differences and little private wealth into one of the most unequal countries in the world, rivaling the United States and Russia. In an article published in The…

The Statue of Liberty against a deep blue sky
Faculty Researcher: Tomás R. Jiménez

In a 2025 Ethnic and Racial Studies article, Stanford postdoctoral scholar Pei Palmgren, Tomás Jiménez, and colleagues analyze the U.S. refugee co-sponsorship model, where community volunteers partner with resettlement agencies to help newcomers…