Ariel Azar, Ph.D.

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology and a Faculty Associate at the Center on Aging and the Life Course at Purdue University. My areas of interest for teaching and research include the sociology of health, life course research, political sociology, family sociology, and quantitative research methods.

My dissertation, Living Institutions: Welfare-State Exposures and Health over the Life Course, investigates how institutional arrangements shape health inequalities throughout the life course. I use an institutional and life course framework to explore how exposure to diverse institutional contexts across cohorts and territories at different stages of life can explain the health disparities observed in various populations today.

Most institutional research on health disparities has viewed institutions as static, uniform entities to which all individuals are equally exposed at a single point in time. However, a life course perspective allows for incorporating institutional change as a critical factor in explaining health inequalities, accounting for how exposure to evolving policies and welfare structures at different life stages shapes health trajectories.

I am currently exploring how institutional exposures to family policies, pension systems, and welfare-state arrangements influence health and well-being over the life course. One of my ongoing projects examines how intergenerational financial transfers interact with policy contexts to shape mental health outcomes in later life. I also plan to collect retrospective data using survey techniques and state- and country-level data to further investigate health inequalities within and across populations.

On the side, I am a big fan of survey experiments that explore people's attitudes toward welfare states and policy interventions, examining how perceptions of fairness and deservingness shape public support for social policies.

I hold a Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and a B.A. and M.A. in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Please refer to my CV here if you'd like to learn more about my work.