Job Searching & Professional Networking Survey Project

A collaborative research study with Dyana Valentine & Dan Fink

Exploratory internet research yeilds an enormous amount of advice on job searching, career development, and professional networking. Much of this advice focuses on how people can use social media (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, CareerBuilder.com, industry blogs, etc.) to get jobs, advance their careers, and develop their professional networks. Though these tips are ubiquitous, it is unclear whether any of this advice is actually effective. Accordingly, we seek to explore the following questions: What strategies (online and IRL) have successfully yielded new clients, jobs, projects, or sources of income? Under what circumstances do these efforts succeed or falter? At the core, these are questions of efficacy. In practice, how have real people made and maintained successful connections?

Status: Data collection is complete and data analysis is in progress.

Exercise & Fitness in a US Commercial Gym

UCLA dissertation research

Given the importance of health, exercise, and fitness in contemporary America, and the increasing numbers of individuals using commercial gyms as means to address these needs, it is crucial to assess gym members’ experiences in these social spaces. This study utilizes participant observation, in-depth interviews, and qualitative content analyses of gym media to examine how exercise is experienced in a mainstream commercial gym. The study finds that exercise is experienced instrumentally: members cooperate to create and sustain an exercise definition of the situation; they conceptualize fitness in functional terms (as a means to enhance comfort in ordinary, everyday activities); and they experience exercise as a productive activity that contains elements of both obligation and recreation. Despite tending to favor functional understandings of fitness over representational, appearance-based ones, some members reveal discursive evidence of anti-fat prejudices. The study also finds greater gender similarities than predicted, with both male and female gym members reporting comfort and satisfaction in this gym environment.

To read a chapter about what "fitness" means to gym members, click here.

To read a chapter about fitness as obligation or recreation, click here.