How does bus transit affect the school lives of urban children? What factors encourage landlords to rent to people exiting homelessness? How is China’s aging population testing the bonds of filial piety?
These are just a few of the important questions in the crosshairs of sociologists at Johns Hopkins, where for decades researchers have pushed the field forward through pioneering work in urban inequality, international demography, and global sociology.
“Nobody can come up with any good solutions until we understand the problem,” says Professor Andrew Perrin, chair of the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins. Now, with new hires and a surge of momentum, Perrin says the department is expanding its reach and drawing attention across the discipline. From Baltimore to Beijing, the following snapshots highlight a few of the discoveries Hopkins sociologists are making, offering new evidence about how societies function and adapt.
The bus stop barrier
The journey to high school in Baltimore is rarely simple. Because Baltimore City Public Schools assigns students through an open-enrollment process—no one is guaranteed a neighborhood high school—long and unpredictable commutes are almost built into the system.
“You have kids who want to be in school, who are doing everything right,” says Associate Professor Julia Burdick-Will. “But the transportation system makes it harder for them to succeed.”
Burdick-Will’s latest study, “Changing Buses,” examines how Baltimore’s 2017 bus network overhaul, known as BaltimoreLink, reshaped students’ commutes while their home and school locations remained fixed. The shift gave her and co-author Marc Stein a rare chance to explore how transit changes affect school life.
40%
of students whose bus rides required a transfer were more likely to change schools midyear
What they found is that a single bus transfer could tip the balance. Students whose new routes required one were almost 40% more likely to switch schools midyear, and they missed about two extra days of class annually. By contrast, total commute time made no measurable difference. “Transfers introduce uncertainty,” Burdick-Will explains. “If one bus is late, you miss the second. That stress shows up in attendance and in school stability.”
This project extends a decade of Burdick-Will’s research tracing the hidden tolls of school commuting. A 2019 paper linked students’ exposure to crime on the walk to bus stops with higher absenteeism. In 2024, her work showed that a required transfer also makes students more likely to be tardy.
The common thread is that open-enrollment districts like Baltimore can’t fully deliver on the promise of school choice without also delivering reliable transportation. “We tend to think of education and transit separately,” Burdick-Will says. “But for students, they are intertwined every single day.”
A living record of Baltimore
When Associate Professor Michael Bader took the helm of the Johns Hopkins 21st Century Cities Initiative (21CC) in 2022, he wanted a project that would still matter decades from now.
“We wanted research that would give community leaders, government, and businesses real information about Baltimore residents,” Bader says. “At the same time, it had to create opportunities for Hopkins researchers to work together.”
The result was the Baltimore Area Survey (BAS), launched in 2023. Each year it polls city and county residents about daily life—neighborhoods, health, schools, transportation, food access—and how experiences vary by race, class, and geography. Roughly 1,500 respond online, with findings released in a public annual report, “A Portrait of Baltimore.”
Legislators in Annapolis have cited BAS numbers in transportation debates, including those around the long-delayed light rail Red Line. The city’s Office of Sustainability has drawn on data to guide neighborhood planning.
The findings have been revealing. For example, the first survey showed food insecurity at three times the national average, hitting hardest in Black households. “We ran the numbers three or four times before we believed it,” Bader says. By 2024 the rate had eased, but still doubled the national level, with CBS News covering the issue.
Ultimately, Bader hopes the survey will stand as an enduring record. “One of our dreams is to be able to say, here’s how residents have thought about these issues over decades.”
We wanted research that would give community leaders, government, and businesses real information about Baltimore residents.”
—Michael Bader
The other side of the lease
Illustration by Grace Toscano
For landlords considering whether to rent to someone exiting homelessness, the risks often loom larger than the rewards. “From their perspective, tenants from this population can raise a lot of red flags,” says Associate Research Professor Meredith Greif. “They want tenants who pay reliably and behave predictably.”
Greif’s research shows how that calculus shifts when landlords have institutional support in housing recently homeless tenants. One Baltimore supportive housing program goes beyond standard housing rent-subsidy models by offering not only subsidies but also a caseworker: a trained social worker who stays in touch with landlords and troubleshoots any crises.
“It gave landlords a safety net,” Greif says. “Instead of being on their own, they had someone with expertise they could call.”
For her ongoing research study, “Conditional Inclusion: Landlords as Gatekeepers of Supportive Housing,” Greif interviewed 40 Baltimore landlords who participated in the program. One surprising finding was that formal medical diagnoses, rather than deterring landlords, often reassured them. A label like schizophrenia or depression, Greif explains, gave “diagnostic legibility,” reframing behaviors that might otherwise be seen as irresponsibility.
Broader lessons
The study also adds nuance to the stereotype of landlords as purely profit-driven. Some described moral or even spiritual motivations. One told Greif, “I found my calling. It’s about helping people, and this is my way of giving back.” Others pointed to their own past experiences with homelessness, or a desire to support fellow veterans.
Still, participation was often conditional. Small-scale landlords, with fewer resources, were especially likely to withdraw from the program after negative experiences, unable to absorb setbacks that larger operators could shoulder.
The research points to a broader policy lesson: Supportive housing programs are most effective when they reduce landlords’ sense of risk. Greif argues that caseworkers should become part of more housing interventions. “It’s not just about the tenant,” she says. “Addressing the landlord’s burdens must be part of the equation, too.”
The survey that knows America best
Stephen L. Morgan first encountered the General Social Survey (GSS) as a Harvard freshman in 1990, poring over its data for a class paper. Today, he helps decide what questions it asks. Since 1972, the GSS has traced Americans’ shifting views on cultural values, politics, religion, family, work, health, and more. Conducted every two years by the research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, the GSS is regarded as the gold standard of social science, underpinning more than 32,000 scholarly papers and fueling headlines on everything from the rise of nonreligious Americans to changing views on marijuana, abortion, and free expression.
“It’s a great open-science data source that anyone can use,” says Morgan, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Education.
As a principal investigator of the GSS since 2016, Morgan helps shape the survey’s content and translate its results. Behind the scenes, he and colleagues wrestle with how to update without disrupting decades of continuity.
Finding that balance can be tricky. Wording must evolve—for instance, changing “Muslim clergyman” to “Islamic religious leader.” And new questions keep the GSS responsive to the times. In 2024, the survey’s researchers collaborated with the American National Election Studies to capture voter attitudes before and after the presidential campaign.
Findings from the GSS often reveal the contours of America’s deepest divides. Trust in scientists, once steady, fell after COVID-19. Support for marijuana legalization, long on the rise, may now be slipping. And for decades, support for legal abortion barely budged—until the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. “All of a sudden, that’s alive again,” Morgan says.
For Morgan, the survey’s endurance is clearest in the classroom, where he sees his own students dig into the data. “They’re doing their own analyses and drawing conclusions.”
It’s a great open-science data source that anyone can use.”
—Stephen Morgan
Studying the ‘why’ of mobility
Photo Source: Adobe Stock
In large swaths of the U.S., poor white children are less likely to climb the income ladder than their parents were a generation ago. At the same time, poor Black children, long shut out of opportunity, have seen their odds of advancement improve. Stefanie DeLuca, who directs the Johns Hopkins Poverty and Inequality Research Lab (PIRL), is leading a multi-site study to uncover why.
Working with economist Raj Chetty and Harvard’s Opportunity Insights, DeLuca and her team are analyzing two cohorts of Americans, born in 1978 and 1992, in counties outside St. Louis and Memphis. Drawing on more than 30 million anonymized tax and census records, DeLuca’s collaborators at Harvard uncovered an unexpected driver of mobility: children who grew up surrounded by employed adults—neighbors, friends’ parents, coaches—were far more likely to move up the ladder, even when their own parents struggled.
For DeLuca, James Coleman Professor of Sociology and Social Policy, those numbers raised deeper questions. “Big data can show us the pattern,” she says. “But if we want to understand how community ties actually shape mobility, we need to know how they work on the ground.”
Big data can show us the pattern. But if we want to understand how community ties actually shape mobility, we need to know how they work on the ground.”
—Stefanie DeLuca
Her lab at Hopkins is working to supply the “how” through qualitative research. For more than 18 months, a team of PIRL research staff and undergraduates joined DeLuca in knocking on doors in the Memphis and St. Louis areas, systematically tracking down people from old yearbooks, and conducting interviews that sometimes stretched over five hours. The resulting life histories revealed vivid memories of the neighbors, pastors, grandparents, and other adults who shaped their outlooks. “That recall shows how deeply formative these community ties are,” DeLuca says.
By grounding the research in small towns and ruraladjacent counties, DeLuca hopes to expand national conversations. “In a country that focuses so much on individual success and meritocracy, we forget that we don’t do this alone,” DeLuca says. “That part of our lives, the role of community, doesn’t get emphasized enough.”
The intersection of slavery and financial markets
Lloyd’s, Marine Insurance, and slavery
When Assistant Professor Alexandre White dug into the Lloyd’s of London archives for insurance records on slave ships, he found something he wasn’t anticipating: a blueprint for how financial markets could turn human life and death into profit.
That connection now anchors his forthcoming book, Markets for Souls: Necrofinance, Slavery, and the City of London, which argues that the tools once used to underwrite the transatlantic slave trade share a lineage with today’s health insurance markets that profit from death.
That idea crystallized as White co-led “Underwriting Souls,” a project funded by the Mellon Foundation that digitized thousands of pages of records from Lloyd’s, the world’s oldest insurance market. The resulting online archive, underwritingsouls.org, makes public for the first time how insurance practices quietly enabled slavery’s expansion.
Collecting returns on deaths
The ledgers and “risk books” show enslaved Africans listed as “goods” alongside cargo such as wine or tobacco, often insured at £45 per head. Some policies went further, spelling out payouts if captives died during an insurrection. “The underwriters weren’t neutral financiers,” White notes. “They were ship owners, plantation owners, even former captains. Their expertise in enslavement itself became a form of financial knowledge.” Without such mechanisms, he concludes, “it would have been financially impossible to maintain slavery in the British Empire.”
What stood out to White was how closely those histories aligned with his previous research on epidemic response. In the late 2010s, the World Bank marketed “pandemic bonds” to investors, designed to release funds quickly during an outbreak. In practice, the bonds often failed to trigger, even during deadly epidemics such as Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Investors collected returns while victims died.
Then White saw this concept of “necrofinance” play out during COVID- 19 as well—when similar pandemic bonds did pay out, but only after long delays and in amounts too meager to matter. With Markets for Souls, he and co-author Pyar Seth aim to make these connections impossible to ignore.
Rewriting the family contract in China
In China, family bonds carry exceptional weight. For Professor Feinian Chen, these intergenerational ties offer a window into a society under constant renegotiation.
For centuries, filial piety—the expectation that children care for aging parents—set the rules in China. But seismic demographic shifts, from falling fertility to mass migration, have rewritten that contract. By 2050, more than one quarter of China’s population will be over 65, an unprecedented surge condensed into just three decades. The one-child policy, in place from 1979 to 2015, magnified the strain, leaving many families with a married couple responsible for both a young child and four aging parents, without siblings to share the elder care.
“Unlike Europe or the U.S., where declines of fertility and mortality stretched over a century, China compressed that process and accelerated the aging process for the population,” Chen says.
Chen has spent more than two decades tracing how these changes play out within families, drawing on massive longitudinal surveys. Where obligation once flowed one way, today parents of adult children often subsidize home purchases or take primary roles in child care, expecting later reciprocity. “It’s no longer simply, ‘You will take care of me,’” Chen says. “It’s, ‘I help you, you help me.’”
Her findings complicate assumptions about family care. One study showed that parents living with daughters reported greater happiness, defying the custom that placed sons at the center of elder care. Another found that multigenerational households offer only limited health benefits for rural elders. Chen’s work also highlights the power of social ties outside the household: Older adults who live alone but maintain close friendships report fewer depressive symptoms.
Chen sees a country adapting to old age without clear solutions, a challenge that other quickly aging societies will also face. As strong as the familial bonds remain, she cautions, “We can’t assume families have unlimited capacity to provide care. These linked lives create strength, but they also create strain.”
Big data can show us the pattern. But if we want to understand how community ties actually shape mobility, we need to know how they work on the ground.”
—Stefanie DeLuca
Rethinking who counts as a refugee
When Ukrainian refugees fled to Spain after Russia’s 2022 invasion, they were quickly funneled into programs for housing, language classes, and vocational training. That reception, says Ilil Benjamin, contrasted starkly with the experiences of Africans and Middle Easterners arriving under similar circumstances.
With Ukrainians, “their whiteness, religion, and political symbolism render them ‘deserving,’ while others are pushed aside,” says Benjamin, a senior lecturer who studies humanitarian aid and refugee policy. “There’s ample evidence they’ve received preferential treatment compared to refugees from other countries, especially non-white and non-Christian refugees.”
Benjamin says the disparity reflects deeper flaws in the global refugee system. The framework guiding refugee law—the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention—defines refugees as people fleeing across borders under threat of political persecution. That rubric excludes millions displaced by other crises like extreme poverty or climate disasters. “The Refugee Convention is from an antiquated era,” Benjamin says. “It classifies ‘refugees’ very narrowly.”
[With Ukrainians], their whiteness, religion, and political symbolism render them ‘deserving,’ while others are pushed aside.”
—Ilil Benjamin
That rigidity creates what Benjamin calls a “hierarchy of deservingness,” reinforced by states and aid workers alike. In earlier work with Physicians for Human Rights in Israel, she saw Eritreans and Sudanese prioritized for United Nations funding as presumed refugees, while West Africans were brushed aside as presumed economic migrants. “Even inside the aid world, people stereotype,” she says.
One central limitation, she argues, is the failure to recognize how political and economic needs are inseparable. “All refugees have economic needs, too,” she says—yet if they admit they came to find work or support their families, those words can cost them protection.
Her recent fieldwork in Spain underscored the paradox. Many Ukrainians, despite getting fast-tracked for aid, returned home within two years—not because conditions improved, but because jobs in Spain were scarce and wages low.
There are no easy fixes, but Benjamin says the first step is recognizing the arbitrary hierarchy that decides who counts as a “real” refugee and who does not. “When you look closely,” she says, “the categories don’t matchthe complexity of real-world displacement.”
