Where are the quantitative researchers of color?

So Thursday and Friday I was down at UC Irvine, participating as a review panelist for the Sociology Section of the National Academy of Sciences Ford Foundation Fellowship awards.  The job of the 15 panelists was to find the most exemplary research proposals for pre-doctoral, dissertation and post-doctoral levels.  The Fellowships are designed to increase diversity in the academy, as well as teach and do research on diversity, and mentor diverse students.  Anyone is eligible to apply, and receive, the awards regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, save for that they must be US citizens.  So White students/faculty that are committed to furthering research on issues impacting disadvantaged communities, and committed to working with diverse students can get the award, just as Chicano, African-American, Native-American, or API students/faculty could.  And while the deliberations are confidential, and I cannot comment on the number or distribution of awards, one thing struck the panel as a whole which I can report:  where are the students/faculty of color doing quantitative work?

At the pre-doctoral level, which is aimed at students entering grad school (or in their first or second years of study) it was disheartening to me to see so few proposals looking at questions quantitatively.  And my worry is that we are segregating, intentionally or not, students of color into only one mode of thought:  qualitative.  No doubt this is part because often, the topics students of color want to study seem to lend themselves to qualitative analyses.  But I worry that we are not stimulating and expanding our student’s sociological imagination enough if they can’t think of ways to tackle the myriad of issues addressing minority/disadvantaged groups by using numbers to tell the story.

But I know that there is a second explanation, and it has to do with the pipeline of students of color who are strong in math skills that come to sociology.  I know that on some level I am an exception to the rule:  I was a math/science kid in high school, and even thought I was going to be a physicist when I got to University of Chicago as an undergrad.  My father, though now retired, was an electrical engineer, who taught math as a “hobby”, and pushed me to excel at math to the point of having me take HS math courses (which he taught) on the weekends when I was in middle school [as a side note it’s taken many years of maturation and numerous shots of tequila to realize that was done out of love, not a desire to destroy my social life—love you Papi!]  You don’t have to be in soc of ed to know that even in elite colleges, the number of minority students in STEM majors is low, and that is a result of poor preparation in high school, which is a result of poor training in middle school, etc.

And even for me, after four years of doing qualitative research as an undergrad at Chicago, it was HARD to change my worldview, and grapple with graduate stats courses at Stanford taught by David Grusky and Nancy Tuma.  It took lots of help and support from my friends and TAs, but I managed to get through.  And though I won’t be a quantitative God or Goddess like my cohort mates like Shelley Correll and Emilio Castilla, I’m still probably better than the average Sociologist.

But the point is, I made a VERY conscious decision to go to Stanford to learn quantitative methods, which is something I don't think most students of color do.  And as Richard Pitts at Vanderbilt pointed out, students of color, after 2-3 semesters of getting their ass-kicked in quantitative methods, probably want nothing to do with stats/quantitative methods again.  I think as a discipline, we need to start grappling with how we can prepare students of color so that they can work in the quantitative realm.  And let’s face facts, the major journals and funding streams are biased towards quantitative work.  By not pushing students to learn quantitative methods, and at the very least work in a mixed-methods manner, we are hurting them and ourselves in the realms of publication and grants.

But to be fair, perhaps the Ford Fellowship pool being heavily qualitative is OK too.  The flip side to my point above is that there is less space in journals, and fewer  funding opportunities, for qualitative researchers, Ford provides a safe space qualitative scholars.  A place where qualitative work isn’t just accepted it’s valued. 

Nevertheless, I still think if we want to make the discipline more diverse, and stronger, we need more quantitative voices that are diverse.