Juan Onésimo Sandoval

Assistant Professor of Sociology
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research
Northwestern University
Ph.D., Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, 2002
j-sandoval@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Juan Onésimo Sandoval’s primary research interests cover spatial econometrics and demography, poverty and social welfare, urban sociology and planning, race relations, and transportation policy. He joined Northwestern’s sociology department in 2002.

Sandoval is currently working on three research projects: transportation for vulnerable populations; neighborhood diversity and residential differentiation; and pan-ethnic diversity. He has organized his work to examine the social, economic, and cultural life of the metropolis and to analyze the processes of building and maintaining systems of racial domination and differentiation. His research projects are unified by an underlying theoretical concern with differentiation, stratification, and the recognition of social, cultural, and symbolic capital, as well as by a methodological pluralism. The projects are designed to foster a dialogue for a new urban sociology that captures the diversity of social life, social suffering, racial harmony and discord, and urban experience.

He has received research support from the Public Policy Institute of California and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Current Research

Transportation for Vulnerable Populations. This transportation research contributes to a field Sandoval calls The Sociology of Mobility. He believes this area of research offers a rich theoretical and analytical lens into the process of structural inequality and how institutions create new processes that may lock individuals into patterns of inequality. He has shown, for example, how a simple change in auto ownership impacted a woman’s outcome of becoming and staying employed. He is also working on research that examines car ownership rates among women on welfare. Sandoval is also testing the Poverty of Time hypothesis that TANF women that were finding employment were spending more time commuting because they lived in poor transit neighborhoods and because they were required to take the first job available even if it was not near their home. Finally, Sandoval is working on a project, Aging in Place, examining transportation patterns of the elderly. In it, he is exploring a concept he calls the “culture of entitlement,” which describes seniors who have never or rarely used public transit in their childhood or as an adult. The question that motivated this research is, what happens to these individuals once they loose their ability to drive? Many of the current policy discussions regarding transportation for seniors assume that seniors want public transit. With the emergence of the baby boomers, we now have, for the first time, seniors who were raised in the suburbs, lived in the suburbs, and will retire in suburbs.

Neighborhood Diversity and Residential Differentiation. Drawing from the scholarship of Taeuber, Duncan, Theil, White, Massey, and Jargowsky, this research examines trends of residential settlement patterns. This project is designed to explore the elementary forms of residential differentiation with a dual emphasis on the variations of racial and economic neighborhood diversity. By building on two Theil indices, multi-group segregation and income diversity, the project aims to provide answers to the following key questions: Where are the stable racially diverse neighborhoods? Why are these neighborhoods stable? Can policies foster racially diverse neighborhoods? Why do cities with diverse populations have highly segregated neighborhoods? How is immigration impacting neighborhood differentiation? Are racially diverse neighborhoods, economically diverse? Do cities with high racial segregation scores have high income inequality scores?

Pan-Ethnic Diversity. Sandoval’s research interest in pan-ethnic diversity began with his research on neighborhood diversity, with a particular focus on Asian and Latino populations. Given the growing influence of these categories, diversity within the Asian and Latino categories merits greater investigation by scholars concerned with neighborhood change and the impact that recent immigrants have on neighborhood change and stability. This study, which builds on past research on immigrant enclaves, will investigate the pan-ethnic characteristics of Asian and Latino enclaves in 2000. This project hopes to answer these underlying questions: How ethnically and economically diverse are Asian and Latino enclaves? If pan-ethnic Asian and Latino enclaves exist, where are they located? How does recent immigration impact the intradiversity of Latino and Asian neighborhoods?

Selected Publications

Sandoval, J. O. 2004. Work and welfare participation in a post welfare-to-work era. Equal Opportunities International 23:179-198.

Sandoval, J. O. 2002. A social crisis on the horizon: Welfare reform in an economic downturn. Berkeley Planning Journal 16.

Cervero, R., J. O. Sandoval, and J, Landis. 2002. Transportation as a stimulus of welfare-to-work: private versus public mobility. Journal of Planning Education and Research 22:50-63.

Sandoval, J. O., H. P. Johnson, and S. M. Tafoya. 2002. Who’s your neighbor? residential segregation and diversity in California. California Counts 4(1): 1-18.