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 sociology of health, life course research, political sociology, immigration, gender and sexuality, 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 have used an institutional and life course framework to explore how exposure to dynamics and diverse institutional contexts across cohorts and territories at different stages of life can explain the health disparities we observe in different populations today. 

 Most institutional research on health disparities has seen institutions as unchanging unitary entities to which all individuals are equally exposed at a point in time. However, a life course perspective allows for incorporating institutional change as a critical factor in investigating health disparities, where exposure to changing institutions is measured at specific stages of life. 

I am currently exploring the way institutional exposures to specific policy areas shape the health of immigrants and LGBT people. In particular, I am working on a project examining the differences in LGBT-related health disparities between the U.S. and England.  I also plan to collect retrospective data using survey techniques and state- and country-level data to further explore health inequalities across these populations. 

On the side, I am a big fan of survey experiments that explore people's attitudes towards welfare states and minority groups to understand how attitudes are shaped when specific policy areas and recipients are considered. 

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.