Brian
Powell is Professor and Co-Director of the Preparing Future Faculty program
at the Department of Sociology. Brian's research interests have focused on
family sociology, sociology of education, gender, and social psychology.
With grants from the National Science Foundation, American Education
Research Association, and the Spencer Foundation, Brian, along with Lala
Carr Steelman from the University of South Carolina, IU PhDs Robert Carini
and Simon Cheng and graduate student Laura Hamilton, is examining how
structural and compositional features of the family (e.g., parental age, one
vs. two-parent households, inter-racial composition, adoptive vs. biological
parents) influence parental social, intellectual and economic investments in
children. Brian was the Director of the Sociological Research Practicum,
“Constructing the Family,” in 2003 and 2006 and currently is collaborating
with IU PhD Katie Bolzendahl and graduate students Danielle Fettes, Claudia
Geist, Laura Hamilton, and Yasmiyn Irizarry on a series of projects that
explore Americans’ views regarding the family (e.g., views regarding
same-sex couples, division of household labor, and gender and custody).
Among these projects is a book tentatively titled, Family Counts: How
Americans Define Family. Recent publications have examined:
* similarities and differences in the experiences of children who live with
their same-sex parent and of their peers who live with an opposite sex
parent (American Sociological Review, 1997, with IU PhD Doug Downey)
*factors shaping children's perceptions and evaluations of parental roles (Social
Psychology Quarterly 1997, with IU PhDs Melissa Milkie and Robin Simon)
* the applicability of recent claims about the effects of birth order on
innovative thinking in the contemporary United States (American
Sociological Review, 1999, with IU PhD Jeremy Freese and Lala Carr
Steelman)
*the extent to which sociobiological explanations add to or detract from
sociological understandings of parental investments (American Journal of
Sociology, 1999, with Jeremy Freese)
*how race and ethnicity are treated in sociological social psychology (Social
Psychology Quarterly, 2000, with Lala Carr Steelman, fellow IU professor
Pamela Braboy Jackson, and IU PhD Matt Hunt).
*the role of political generations in shaping feminist self-identification (American
Sociological Review, 2003 ,with Jeremy Freese and IU PhD Jason
Schnittker)
*challenges that sociologists face when studying “atypical” families (Journal
of Marriage and Family, 2005, with Simon Cheng)
*the extent to which emotional management at work and at home is
structurally and situationally determined (Social Psychology Quarterly,
2006, with former IU post-doctoral fellow Kathryn Lively)
*how parental age is linked to the conferral of advantages and disadvantages
to children (Social Forces, 2006, with Lala Carr Steelman and Robert
Carini).
*whether biracial families differ from monoracial families in their
investments in their children (American Journal of Sociology, 2007,
with Simon Cheng)
*the extent to which parental biological ties are (or are not) critical to
children’s wellbeing (American Sociological Review, 2007, with Laura
Hamilton and Simon Cheng)
*the relative influence of schools and families on children’s obesity (American
Journal of Public Health, 2007, with Doug Downey and Paul von Hippel).
In his free time, Brian enjoys cooking, going to movies and plays, and
playing with his two cockatoos, Albert and Victoria.
