Robert Kaufman

Professor & Chair

Download my vita.

I usually describe myself as half a sociologist and half an applied statistician, although the sociologist predominates with a broad interest in social stratification and inequality. This duality dates back to my undergraduate days at Oberlin College where I was a double major in sociology and math but took more hours in sociology than I could count towards my degree. My substantive research primarily focuses on economic structure and labor market inequality, especially with respect to race-ethnicity and gender.

For example, I study how job segregation and devaluation processes create and reproduce race and gender inequalities in job rewards. But I have also dabbled over the years in other realms of race-ethnic inequality, including research on wealth, home equity, residential segregation, traffic stops and treatment by police, and most recently on media portrayals of crime. In terms of my interests in applied statistics and quantitative methodology, my research has usually been explicitly tied to particular substantive questions such as how to estimate "tolerable" segregation, the use of cluster analysis to define economic segments, or the use of multiplicity sampling of workers to create a representative sample of work organizations. But some, like my current work on evaluating different methods for correcting for heteroskedasticity using Monte Carlo simulations, is motivated by more abstract statistical issues.

recent publications

Campbell, Lori A. and Robert L. Kaufman. 2006. "Racial Differences in Household Wealth: Beyond Black and White." Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 24: 131-152.

Krivo, Lauren J. and Robert L. Kaufman. 2004. "Housing and Wealth Inequality: Racial-Ethnic Differences in Home Equity in the United States." Demography 41: 585-605.

Lundman, Richard J. and Robert L. Kaufman. 2003. "Driving While Black and Male: Driver Race and Gender and Traffic Stops by Police in the Contacts Between Police and Public 1999 National Survey." Criminology 41: 601-626.

Kaufman, Robert L. 2002. "Assessing Alternative Perspectives on Race and Sex Employment Segregation." American Sociological Review 67:547-572.

For more publications from Temple sociologists, see our newsletter!