简介

I am a sociologist who incorporates substantive, theoretical, and methodological work from several social science disciplines and fields into my teaching and research about social aspects of food, eating, and nutrition. Substantively, my research focuses on the social causes and consequences of obesity, especially marriage and body weight; food choice processes; eating relationships and commensality; family meals; and food systems. Theoretically, I teach and use a variety of perspectives, and my theoretical work focuses on conceptualizing social relationship trajectories, social selection and social causation, and how physical factors are related with social factors. Methodologically, I use quantitative and qualitative techniques, and my methodological work focuses upon assessing qualitative sample extensiveness, developing category content elicitation methods, and constructing ways to assess eating partners. BA 1972 - Bucknell University (Biology) MA 1974 - University of Pennsylvania (Sociology) MPH 1983 - Johns Hopkins University (Behavioral Science, Nutrition, and Epidemiology) PhD 1978 - University of Pennsylvania (Sociology)