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Numbers drive urban sociologist
Sociologist Robert Wagmiller works with databases instead of human subjects to study urban issues. Photo: NANCY J. PARISI
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“I’ve always been interested in finding the answer to tricky puzzles. So it’s about poverty, but it’s also about finding better methodological ways to do things.”
Robert Wagmiller is a sociologist who believes in the power of numbers to describe the world around us, to verify or debunk our theories about the way things work.
An associate professor who joined UB in 2003, Wagmiller has studied urban issues, including poverty, male joblessness, residential segregation and child development. He works with databases instead of human subjects. From data sets holding thousands of figures, he identifies patterns, discovers truths.
Wagmiller began studying sociology as an undergraduate at Miami University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in the field in 1991. He then enrolled at the University of Maryland-College Park, where he concentrated on theory as a master’s student.
At that point, “I realized I needed some sort of check and procedure to rein my thoughts in, and statistics gives you a way to find out if you’re right and wrong. It was interesting to look at theory, but I also felt a need to test whether these ideas were right in some sort of systematic way.”
Drawn to quantitative sociology, he applied for and was accepted to the University of Chicago’s PhD program. Soon after finishing his coursework, he joined Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty as a research associate.
With colleagues there, he studied such subjects as the effects of poverty on children, exploring how the timing, duration and sequencing of poverty in kids’ lives influenced their development. He became interested in issues affecting poor, urban communities—in part because the subject matter was compelling, and in part because the problems were complex.
“I’ve always been interested in finding the answer to tricky puzzles. So it’s about poverty, but it’s also about finding better methodological ways to do things,” Wagmiller says. “With regard to poverty and children’s development, many people have looked at the cumulative exposure. But the timing, duration and sequencing—whether your family goes from being poor to non-poor or non-poor to poor—these factors can all have different effects.”
Wagmiller’s investigations into poverty at Columbia led him to choose male joblessness as the topic of his dissertation, which he completed while working at the research center. Using numerical models, he examined historical changes in the concentration of jobless men in different kinds of neighborhoods across metropolitan areas in the U.S.
What he found was that, contrary to what many people assume, employment levels in poor neighborhoods with heavy minority populations were close to that in white, working-class neighborhoods in the early 1970s. He has continued publishing on the issue as a faculty member at UB, discovering that the concentration of male joblessness in poor communities escalated in the 1990s, a period associated with a decline in the concentration of poverty in cities.
Another surprising discovery on a different issue: Wagmiller believed that when single mothers married, their children’s academic achievement would rise over time, with the poorest children benefiting the most from the additional income a second parent would bring. However, when he and colleagues ran the numbers, they found that the only kids whose school performance improved significantly were those whose mothers had gone to college.
“If a high school dropout got married, it had almost no effect on their kids’ achievement, even though their incomes went up,” Wagmiller says. “I was surprised that that was the way it worked out.
“Part of the reason I’ve been drawn to quantitative sociology is that it gives you a set of methods to try and test your ideas about the world,” he says. “When I entered Maryland as a graduate student, I wanted to change the world. You think that somehow, through sociology, you can reduce inequalities and discrimination. Certainly, my research has focused on those kinds of issues, but you also realize, I think, as you become more professional, that there’s something to be said about a more detached analysis in which you try to just understand the way the world works.”
Through the years, organizations including the Spencer Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, National Institute of Child Health and Development, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have funded Wagmiller’s work on poverty and urban and family issues.
After spending about a decade studying those issues, Wagmiller now is planning to expand his research into a new area: examining competitiveness and what causes private corporations to ascend.
Though he’d like to focus on organizations, the first project he has in mind on the topic of competitiveness deals with individuals. It’s a bit of an eclectic project, one that looks at how sports car racing has transitioned from a sport with few rules to one that has become highly technical, with regulations for everything from the type of tires allowed to the size of the nozzle that puts gas in cars during pit stops.
“Who were the groups pushing to make things more regulated and what was the cause of going from this populist, lowly organized activity into this highly regulated environment? And how does that affect the field of competition? Formerly, two guys with some welding equipment and a garage and a little bit of money could compete for real,” Wagmiller says. “I want to look at how regulations have affected the ability of smaller players to compete.”
And while Wagmiller loves data, he says his study of racing will incorporate historical research: “Stories to go with the numbers, I think, will make things more fun.”
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