Faculty affiliated with the Population Studies Center are among the world's most distinguished researchers. This area of study includes the core subjects of fertility, mortality, and migration in human populations as well as family, labor force, race, ethnicity, gender, and social change. Geographic emphasis: Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

Economic sociology puts economic processes in a larger social context. It examines the production and exchange of goods and services from the viewpoint of the social relationships in which economic activities are embedded, the social conditions for economic change, and the effects of these arrangements upon social inequality and well-being.

Family-Gender Studies combines interests from sociology and Demography and has strong links with the Women's Studies Program. Faculty and students investigate the social, economic, cultural, and gender components in the social institutions from the family to corporations to politics.

Medical Sociology explores how social, cultural, psychological, and historical factors affect health, illness, and medicine in America and a number of other societies. Several sociology faculty have joint appointments in the School of Medicine or the School of Nursing.

Sociology of Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in Urban Society considers the interplay of race, ethnicity and inequality in contemporary and historical cities, and how immigration influences these dynamic interrelationships.