Alexander Adames

Hi, I’m Alexander, and I am a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University.

I am on the 2024-2025 academic job market and open to meeting at ASA or virtually.

I am a sociologist and social demographer working at the intersections of social stratification, social mobility, and education with a focus on racial and class inequality. In 2023, I received my PhD in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, where I was an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Pre-doctoral fellow and also received as Master’s in Statistics and Data Science from The Wharton School.

My research agenda has largely focused on racial stratification and educational stratification.  Two intellectual themes that span both projects are 1) within-group variation and 2) life course development.

Most research on racial and educational stratification focuses on between-group disparities for umbrella categories of both race (e.g., Black vs White) and education (e.g., college graduate vs high school graduate). While these approaches are illuminating and socio-politically consequential, they necessarily obscure how we make distinctions in everyday interactions, which often shape the interpretation of membership within umbrella categories. Thus, my research considers how finer-grained distinctions within racial (e.g., lighter-skin vs darker-skin) and educational (e.g., for-profit vs non-profit college) groups are related to social and economic disparities. In taking this approach when the data allow it, we can obtain a more representative model of social processes.

The other thread that permeates my work is the life course approach. Present-day gaps in social and economic outcomes between individuals are necessarily causally descendant from prior events at distinct stages of their lives. Therefore, through an iterative process tying present outcomes to current and past life conditions, disparities evolve both in shape and the extent to which they are influenced by different aspects of an individual’s life. In turn, analyses that focus on specific ages or segments of the life course may miss important fluctuations in both the shape of inequality as well as its predictors at different points in time. Accordingly, in most of my research, I investigate the development of racial and educational economic disparities over the life course as much of this research (especially that related to wealth inequality) has focused on cross-sectional analyses.

While these two aforementioned threads describe my approach to the study of racial and educational stratification, to learn more about the dimensions of stratification that I investigate, please visit my webpage.

Beyond my research, I am also passionate about disseminating social science research and methods in ways that are accessible to students from a variety of academic backgrounds. In line with this commitment, I co-founded (w/ Prof. Xi Song) a working group on quantitative methodology for graduate students in the Department of Sociology at Penn. The group aims to fill in gaps in methodological training by introducing students to quantitative methods not typically taught in the standard quantitative methods sequence, including novel advancements as well as methods more popular in other social sciences. In addition, I maintain an extensive list of social science podcasts that can be used for class assignments or to keep up with the latest research across the social sciences. Finally, as a product of undergraduate summer research programs (i.e., University of Michigan SROP and CDC CUPS), I maintain a growing list of available social science research experiences for undergraduates across the United States. In the future, I hope to participate as a faculty mentor for students in such programs.

Outside of academia, I enjoy reading mid-20th century/post-WWII literary fiction and non-fiction, Middle Eastern cuisine, board games, and podcasts.

If you wish to contact me, then my email address is “adames” followed by the symbol for “at” and then by “princeton.edu.”