Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences

Ezekiel Dixon-Román is an Assistant Professor of Social Policy in the School of Social Policy & Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the director of the Latino Social Service & Policy Initiative. He also has a secondary appointment in the Graduate School of Education and affiliations with the Center for Africana Studies and Latin American & Latino Studies program. In addition to his university affiliations he is also a member of the Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in K-12 Education and a member of the Research Advisory Committee for the American Educational Research Association. Dr. Dixon-Román’s overall research interests are in the sociology of education, cultural studies, and quantitative methods. He is primarily concerned with the reproduction of social differences in human learning and development. More specifically, he is interested in the cumulative/residual effects of inheritance on social differences in human learning and development, how knowledge is constructed and reproduced regarding these differences, as well as identifying the potential resources, practices and policies that may enable the mediation of these cumulative/residual effects. Questions guiding his research include: What is inheritance and how can critical social thought shed light on our understanding of inheritance? What are the various ways in which social differences are inherited? What are the various ways social inheritance has cumulative/residual effects on social differences in human learning and development? In what ways does the dominance of Modernist epistemologies undergird the methodologies that construct and produce dominant knowledge and social understanding of social differences in human learning and development? And, what are the resources, practices and policies that may enable the mediation of these cumulative/residual effects? Dr. Dixon-Román engages these questions from postmodern and post-structuralist perspectives, including the materialist analysis of culture and the social world. He is currently completing an edited volume with Edmund W. Gordon, Thinking About Education Comprehensively: Spaces of Educative Possibility and Their Implications for Public Policy, and working on a single-authored volume, Inheriting [Im]possibility.