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News Release

Last modified: Tuesday, April 6, 2010

J. Scott Long

Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor, Sociology
Department of Sociology
Department of Statistics
College of Arts and Sciences
University Graduate School
Indiana University Bloomington
Appointed to IU faculty, 1989
B.A., Juniata College, 1973
M.A., Cornell University, 1975
Ph.D., Cornell University, 1977

"Professor Long is widely considered one of the outstanding sociologists and methodologists working today, both in the U.S. and worldwide." --Myron P. Gutmann, Head of the Directorate for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, National Science Foundation

"Scott Long is an extraordinary scholar, mentor, and teacher who has made, and continues to make, fundamental theoretical and methodological contributions to the social sciences," writes Eliza K. Pavalko, Allen D. and Polly S. Grimshaw Professor of Sociology and chair of the sociology department at IU. "His contributions improve the foundations of our research and help us understand the barriers and opportunities that shape our careers."

Long began his sociology research in the 1970s with an ambitious dissertation that involved collecting longitudinal data on a cohort of biochemists who earned their doctorates in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This resulted in "a string of groundbreaking papers on the structure and dynamics of the scientific career," notes Lowell Hargens, professor of sociology at the University of Washington.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, Long focused increasingly on sex differences in academic careers. In 1994 he chaired a Congressionally mandated committee of the National Academy of Sciences commissioned to compare the career outcomes of men and women earning Ph.D.'s in science and engineering over the past 25 years. This seven-year project resulted in his book From Scarcity to Visibility: Gender Differences in the Careers of Doctoral Scientists and Engineers, 2001.

While producing outstanding research in the sociology of science, Long has worked to adapt existing statistical methods and develop new methods to address methodological problems at the core of quantitative research in the social sciences. In 1983 he published two books, Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Covariance Structure Analysis, that systematized the literature on models with measurement error. His 1997 book, Regression Models for Categorical and Limited Dependent Variables, is the definitive work on this topic. It was followed with a co-authored volume, Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata. Together these books have more than 5,000 citations in Google Scholar with the accompanying software downloaded more than 20,000 times last year. Myron P. Gutmann, head of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation, calls Long's latest book, The Workflow of Data Analysis Using Stata (2009), "a groundbreaking and amazingly successful work that systematically codifies his decades of experience at managing data, and provides other researchers with a unique roadmap for how the research process works, and why it is important."

Long has received numerous honors for his research contributions, including the 2007-2008 Women, Science, and Technology Distinguished Award from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Memorial Award for Distinguished Contributions to Sociological Methodology. His collaborative work on health with IU Distinguished Professor Bernice Pescosolido was honored with the 2009 Friedson Award from the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.

Long has been an elected member of the Sociological Research Association since 1989 and has served on editorial boards of the top substantive and methodological journals in the field, including the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Sociological Methodology, and Sociological Methods and Research. He also served as editor of Sociological Methods and Research, the leading sociological research methods journal.

He has served in administrative posts at IU Bloomington, including six years as chair of the Department of Sociology and a subsequent year as acting chair. He was associate vice provost for research for the campus from 2007 to 2009. Long also wrote the proposal and chaired several committees that led to the creation of the Department of Statistics in 2006.

Long's published work is among the most widely read and cited in the discipline. He has published 51 papers, many in the top two journals in sociology, and published or edited nine books. Online resources credit him with thousands of citations.

In recent years he has brought his methodological insights and innovations to the study of health and sexuality, work that Pavalko says "extends his extraordinary skill at finding and adapting methods to match the complexities of real-life data that is often encountered in the social sciences."

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