IAS Research Programs

The Institute for Analytical sociology has received large and long-term financial support from several European and Swedish research councils.

Picture of Peter Hedström

Peter Hedström, Professor of Analytical sociology and Founder of IAS

This generous funding has enabled the researchers at IAS to focus fully on developing the foundations of analytical sociology and to use the tools of analytical sociology and computational social science to analyze several pressing social issues of the day such as the increasing ethnic segregation of Swedish society. Below follows brief descriptions of each of these programs.

Analytical Sociology: Theoretical Developments and Empirical Research

The research at IAS has been supported by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. This is an ambitious research program with two complementary objectives: (1) To make a substantial theoretical and methodological contribution to the further development of analytical sociology. (2) To study in great detail the mechanisms and processes that explain the segregation of Swedish residential areas along ethnic and socio-economic lines using the tools of analytical sociology.

Time period: 2013-2018.
Principal investigator: Peter Hedström

SIMSEG - Interdisciplinary Research on School Segregation

Research at IAS has been supported by generous funding from the Swedish Research Council to conduct research on the causes and consequences of school segregation. The SIMSEG research program is one node in the national SIMSAM network which uses Swedish register data to analyze important social and medical issues. The SIMSEG program uses a combination of advanced statistical analyses of Swedish register data and large-scale agent-based simulations in order to better understand the processes through which large numbers of individuals, in interaction with one another, bring about school environments that are segregated along various dimensions.

Publications

Time period: 2014-2019
Principal investigator: Peter Hedström

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond logo

Segregation: Micro Mechanisms and Macro-level Dynamics

Research at IAS has been supported by a large grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. The research program is concerned with developing theoretical and methodological tools as well as conducting empirical research in order to better understand the ethnic and gender segregation of Swedish workplaces. The workplace is an important social domain because people spend a considerable part of their time there, workplaces shape individuals' identities, and the workplace is an important site for the allocation of economic resources. The research program is focused on detailing the dynamic processes through that bring about segregated workplaces.

Time period: 2013-2018
Principal investigator: Peter Hedström

Professorship from the Swedish Research Council for Advancing Analytical Sociology

In 2014 Peter Hedström received a personal professorship, a so-called Rådsprofessur, from the Swedish Research Council. This professorship provides generous funding for a 10-year research program that seeks to substantially advance the theoretical and methodological foundations of analytical sociology. The research program seeks to develop theories and methods that will allow sociologists to address considerably more complex issues in a scientifically defensible manner than has been possible in the past. The combination of a clearly articulated explanatory strategy that systematically seeks to link micro and macro processes to one another, access to large population-based data bases, and the use of modern computational tools are the core ingredients of the research program.

Time period: 2014-2024
Principal investigator: Peter Hedström

Research areas

Buildings illustrating a segregated Mexico city

Segregation Dynamics

Examining how different ethnic, economic, and gender groups become segregated across urban spaces, schools, and firms, and the consequences of this segregation for those affected.

Cultural Dynamics

Formulating and testing theories of peer influence among interconnected consumers of culture i.e. songs, books, movies, etc. to understand the emergence of hits, the establishment of new artists and genres, and cultural change more generally.

Organizational Dynamics

Investigating how new organizations and industries are created and evolve, how labor market dynamics affect workforce segregation across organizations, and computational approaches to group and organizational decision-making.

Computational Text Analysis

Computational analysis offers new ways to derive meaning from text. We use large corpora of text as social sensors to measure what people feel, think, and talk about, which allows us to track the emergence of shared social understandings.

Social Network Analysis

Developing and applying novel methods to examine the formation of social ties and the consequences of these ties for patterns of segregation, inequality, polarization and social change.

About IAS

Illustration of people surrounded by data

The Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS)

IAS conduct cutting-edge research on important social, political and cultural matters. The research is sociological - in its original and broadly conceived meaning.