James Witte

James Witte is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Director of the Institute for Immigration Research (IIR). Witte, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991, has been a professor at Clemson University and Northwestern University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carolina Population Center and a lecturer in sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Dr. Witte has written numerous articles that have appeared in journals such as The European Sociological Review, Population and Development Review and Sociological Methods and Research.  He has also published three books, Labor Force Integration and Marital Choice, the Internet and Social Inequality and The Normal Bar.  The Normal Bar, co-authored with Chrisanna Northrup and Pepper Schwartz, was released in 2013 and made the New York Times bestseller list. Dr. Witte came to Mason in the fall of 2009 to take over leadership of CSSR.  Since then CSSR has grown in the amount and range of funded research it conducts. Major projects have included the privately funded Institute for Immigration Research, the National Science Foundation funded Digital Archive Project, and the University Partnership with the University of Karachi funded by the U.S. State Department.

Current Research

Witte's ongoing research includes the analysis of Twitter data on immigration and the Digital Archive Project in partnership with the American Sociological Association.  The latter is funded by the National Science Foundation and entails the digitization of twenty years of manuscripts and reviews from the American Sociological Review and the organization of document metadata into a research archive for the analysis of the production of sociological knowledge.  As part of his work with the IIR, Dr. Witte designed and implemented a survey of immigrant professionals in six American cities.  Results from this study were published in a widely disseminated report, Steps to Success: Integrating Immigrant Professionals in the United States, co-authored with Amanda Bergson-Shilcock from the National Skills Coalition.  Data from this survey of immigrant professionals formed the basis for a federally funded project from the Corporation for National and Community Service, with Drs. Best, Dale and Davis as co-investigators.

Dissertations Supervised

Marissa Kiss, Baseball: The (Inter) National Pastime (2020)

Melissa Cidade, Defining Bullying: A Split-Ballot Survey Experiment (2017)

Jean Boucher, Culture, Carbon, and Climate Change: A Class Analysis of Climate Change Belief, Lifestyle Lock-In, and Personal Carbon Footprints (2016)

Olivia Majesky Blackmon, Underrepresented Minority Students in Four Urban School Districts: a Study of Technology Usage and Student Academic Performance in Math Grades Four and Eight (2015)