Michael J. Shanahan
Associate Professor & Associate Chair
Sociology, UNC-Chapel Hill
CB 3210, Hamilton Hall
Chapel Hill, NC, 27599-3210
919 962 1007; fax 919 962 7568
I am interested in theories and methods of life course sociology, which is concerned with how people’s biographies reflect social forces through time. This area of study has become especially engaging with the advent of molecular genetic studies of human behavior, the focus of my research.
Specific genes are known to alter the likelihood of specific behaviors. For example, a gene might be associated with the likelihood to engage in impulsive behaviors. Clearly, a totally impulsive person would function poorly in most modern social settings, including the family and close relationships, the school, the workplace, the health care system, the criminal justice system, and so on.
But genetic influences on behaviors like impulsivity depend on social circumstances. Imagine two people who have an equally high genetic propensity for impulsive behavior. Yet perhaps one person grows up in a permissive family and the other person grows up in an authoritative family. These two people may well differ in their levels of impulsive behavior and, ultimately, how well they function in adult settings. Of course, life is more than family; the difficulty is capturing the multidimensional, temporal complexities of people’s experiences. Life course sociology provides a superb toolkit with which to conceptualize and measure the social experiences that “interplay” with genetic factors.
Drawing on these general ideas, I study how specific genes and people’s social experiences combine through time to shape their lives. Given the complexity of the problem, I like methods that are well-suited to reveal high levels of interaction (e.g., combinatorics and latent class/mixture models).
