Scott Feld

About

Scott Feld is a Professor of Sociology at Purdue University, with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University obtained in 1976. His specialization includes social networks, individual and collective decision-making, and evaluation research. Dr. Feld has served as Assistant to Full Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1975 to 1991, and as Professor of Sociology at Louisiana State University from 1991 until 2004 before joining Purdue University in 2004. He has published over sixty articles, including twelve in the most prestigious journals in Sociology and Political Science. His ongoing research interests involve the causes and consequences of patterns in social networks, processes of individual and collective decision-making, and applications of sociology, most recently including innovations in marriage and divorce laws such as covenant marriage. He regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on social networks, research methods, and statistics.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Social psychology
• Public relations
• Computer network
• Ecology
• World Wide Web
• Medicine

Selected publications

• America as a "Christian Nation"? Understanding Religious Boundaries of National Identity in the United States

  Sociology of Religion · 2010-06-04 · 100 citations

  articleSenior author

  Though predominantly Christian since the time of its founding, the United States has become more religiously diverse in recent decades. Yet since the mid-1990s, the proportion of Americans who see their country as a “Christian nation” has reportedly increased. Though initially paradoxical, these trends are less mysterious if the idea of a “Christian America” (CA) is understood, not as a description of religious demography, but as a discursive practice that seeks to align the symbolic boundaries…

  PublisherDOI

• When a man hits a woman: moral evaluations and reporting violence to the police

  Aggressive Behavior · 2009-09-10 · 100 citations

  articleSenior author

  We use experimental data from a nationally representative sample to examine whether gender and the victim's relationship to the offender affect attitudes about the seriousness of the offense and whether the offense should be reported to the police. We find that respondents are particularly likely to condemn men's assaults on women, and to favor reporting them. The pattern appears to reflect both greater moral condemnation of men's assaults on women and the belief that the victims of these assaul…

  PublisherDOI

• Human social sensing is an untapped resource for computational social science

  Nature · 2021 · 98 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Do Positive Feelings Hurt? Disaggregating Positive and Negative Components of Intergenerational Ambivalence

  Journal of Marriage and the Family · 2015-01-14 · 77 citations

  article

  Ambivalence has become an important conceptual development in the study of parent-adult child relations, with evidence highlighting that intergenerational relationships are characterized by a mix of positive and negative components. Recent studies have shown that ambivalence has detrimental consequences for both parents' and adult children's psychological well-being. The underlying assumption of this line of research is that psychological distress results from holding simultaneous positive and n…

  PublisherDOI

• Escalation and Desistance from Wife Assault in Marriage

  2017-09-04 · 15 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Over half of American couples experience one or more incidents of assault between the partners during the course of a marriage. The rates of desistance and escalation among these couples can be compared with the rates among couples without intervention. The findings confirmed the hypothesis, which specified a high rate of desistance, even for husbands who had frequently used severe violence. Intervention might involve reduction of stress, provision of social and material support, and efforts to…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Bernard Grofman

  University of California, Irvine

  82 shared

• Nicholas R. Miller

  12 shared

• Guillermo Owen

  9 shared

• Guillermo Owen

  State University of New York

  9 shared

• Joel I. Grossman

  8 shared

• Natalie Masuoka

  6 shared

• Thomas L. Brunell

  4 shared

• William Koetzle

  3 shared

Education

• PhD, Sociology

  Johns Hopkins University

  1976

• BS, Mathematics

  Stony Brook University

  1970

Similar researchers at Purdue University

• Kenneth Ferraroh-62
• J. Jill Suitorh-45
• Joshua Doyleh-39