Sociology Professor Co-Recipient of $150k National Science Foundation Grant

Jeffrey Dixon, associate professor of sociology at the College of the Holy Cross, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation as a co-principal investigator with project leader Andrew Fullerton, associate professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University, for a total of $148,857.

The project, titled “Collaborative Research: Worker Insecurity and the Institutionalization of Part-Time Work,” will investigate on a global scale people’s perception of job insecurity, particularly in part-time jobs. Dixon will analyze already-collected survey data and other existing data, such as official statistics, for more than 50 countries.

“When we start to look across countries, what we find in our data is that as the rates of part-time work increase, the average level of job insecurity decreases," said Dixon. "And this is not what we would expect. We would actually expect that as the rates increased, the average level of job insecurity should also increase. So why is that?”

Another purpose, Dixon said, “is to try to standardize some of that data on part-time workers that’s already out there. This is so researchers, students, or teachers in general, can have a data set with information on a number of different countries and their labor market characteristics. They could then use this information for research or teaching purposes.”

Dixon’s previous research on job insecurity has been published in The European Sociological Review and Research in the Sociology of Work. He has been a member of the faculty at Holy Cross since 2009, and holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in sociology from Indiana University Bloomington. He teaches seminars on the European Union and Turkey, as well as such core courses as The Sociological Perspective, Social Class and Power, and Logics of Inquiry.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering.