Research Summary:Katherine Stovel is Associate Professor Sociology at the University of Washington and an affiliate of the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences. Stovel's major research interests are in the areas of economic sociology and the structure of sexuality; her empirical work builds from the union of two methodological approaches: sequence analysis and network models.
Organizational Dynamics and Careers: For the past several years, Stovel's work has explored how organizational and institutional dynamics affect workers over the course of their careers. While it has long been recognized that organizational constraints limit career outcomes for workers, modeling the precise nature of these relationships has proven difficult in part because of the intersection of multiple temporal processes across a variety of relevant structures. Stovel address these issues most directly in an on-going project that examines the dual emergence of modern institutions and modern career structures. This work focuses on the history of Lloyds Bank, one of the five major banking houses in England, and has resulted in several publications (Stovel, Savage, and Bearman 1996; Savage, Stovel, and Bearman 2001; Stovel and Savage 2006).
Sequential Structures: Though substantively distant from her work on organizational dynamics, some of Stovel's other work adopts similar methodology to develop models of empirically regular sequential patterns in a variety of domains. With Marc Bolan, Stovel has demonstrated the utility of whole-sequence strategies for understanding the structure of place change in the US (Stovel & Bolan 2004). This paper links the methodological approaches developed in Stovel's earlier work to an important topic in social demography, and sets the stage for subsequent analyses of how residential trajectories intersect with economic stratification. A paper on the sequential nature of lynching (Stovel 2001) focuses on how cultural phenomena are encoded into regular sequences in historical time.
Network Structures: While Stovel's primary research questions lead to a focus on models of temporal or dynamic processes, she continues to be deeply influenced by network models of social structure, an interest that is responsible for her on-going relationship with the Add Health Study, a multi-million dollar, nationally representative study of adolescent health. While Stovel's commitment to studying adolescent health is long-standing (see Timko, Stovel, et. al, 1995; 1992a 1992b 1992c), the Add Health Study is particularly exciting because its unusual design and sampling structure emphasizes the important role of social context in the development of adolescents (see Bearman, Moody, Stovel, and Thalji 2000 for an overview).
One of the strengths of the Add Health study is that it contains rich social and sexual network data from large numbers of adolescents who attend the same school. With her colleagues, Stovel exploits these data to document the structure of a complete sexual and romantic network amongst interacting adolescents residing in a mid-sized mid-western town (Bearman, Moody and Stovel 2004).
Recent Publications:- Stovel, K., (Forthcoming), The Social Dynamics of Matching Processes, The Handbook of Analytic Sociology, Hedstrom, P.; Bearman, P., Cambridge University Press.
- Stovel, K.; Kreager, D. A.; Moreno, M., (2008), The Social Dimensions of Adolescent Sexuality, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Holmes, K. K.; Sparling, F.; Walter, M.; Stamm, E., McGraw Hill, New York.
- Shafii, T.; Stovel, K.; Holmes, K., (2007), Association Between Condom Use at Sexual Debut and Subsequent Sexual Trajectories: A Longitudinal Study Using Biomarkers, American Journal of Public Health, 97: 6, 1090.
- Stovel, K.; Savage, M., (2006), Mergers and Mobility: Organizational Growth and the Origins of Career Migration at Lloyds Bank, American Journal of Sociology, 111: 4, 1080.
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Ph.D. 1999, University of North Carolina. Social networks, career structures, adolescent health.
