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3/4/2009

Rice sociologist wins career enhancement award

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

Rice sociologist Jenifer Bratter wants to know whether multiracial families experience the same level of racial segregation that single-race families experience.

	JENIFER BRATTER

A Woodrow Wilson Foundation award that she just received will allow her to pursue that research interest in the next academic year.

Bratter, assistant professor of sociology and associate director for the Center of Race, Religion and Urban Life (CORRUL), plans to use the stipend and research account to work on a project with Michael Emerson, the Allyn and Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology and director of CORRUL, on the geography of multiracial families in neighborhoods across the United States. The project is titled "Fluid Identity, Segregated Lives: Residential Segregation and Multiracial Families."

The proposal includes an appeal to the U.S. Census Bureau for access to confidential files on respondents' racial categories, which will then be matched against respondents' locations. This will provide a "level of specificity that no other research has attained in this area," Bratter explained.

Nationwide, an estimated 7 percent of all couples are composed of two racially distinctive partners, Bratter said. That figure varies across the country, with more than 10 percent in California and Texas to considerably lower numbers in states like Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi.

Bratter plans to explore the geographic distribution of these multiracial families to find out if they tend to reside in predominantly white, black or other neighborhoods. She also hopes to offer a forecast of where the trend is headed.

The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Career Enhancement Award for Junior Faculty is "a great opportunity to get the project off the ground," Bratter said.

The award is designed for faculty members in their third year of a tenure-track appointment. It offers what Bratter described as "room to begin what could be considered a post-dissertation research project aimed at getting tenure and career enhancement through investigating a new area." The award is given each year to 20 junior scholars nationally from a range of disciplines (social sciences, natural sciences, humanities and engineering).

Bratter will begin her leave in June.