Experts Corner

"I would love to see a more lab-based approach to research that includes everyone, from post-baccalaureate, [to] graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, [and] faculty working collaboratively on a project basis." - Dr. Amy Langenkamp

January 30, 2025

Dear Section Members,

We're excited to launch a new addition to our website: the Experts Corner! In this new feature, our newsletter editor, Karin Yndestad, will interview Sociologists of Education to learn more about their research trajectories and where they see the future of the field.

Our first interview features Dr. Amy Langenkamp from the University of Notre Dame's Center for Research on Educational Opportunity (CREO). Dr. Langenkamp tells Karin how she became interested in schools' capacity to serve immigrant students and explains why she has embraced qualitative and quantitative methods since her earliest days as a graduate student. Then, Dr. Langenkamp talks about the value of what she calls 'wraparound data,' the need for team approaches, and how researchers could use AI for data analysis.

Thanks to Karin and Dr. Langenkamp for getting things rolling on this feature.

Simone Ispa-Landa

Experts Corner

Karin: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me as part of our first Expert’s Corner. I'm wondering if you can start by sharing a little bit about your work, the kinds of topics or questions that you're interested in, and the methods that you use to explore them.

Amy Langenkamp: I would consider myself firmly a sociologist of education. Much of my work has been on transitions between institutions such as the transition to high school and the transition to college. I've used some life course sociology to inform theoretically what it means to make these sorts of transitions.

During my career I’ve also studied the intersection between immigration and education. Before I went to graduate school, I was a fourth grade teacher in a bilingual school. That piqued my sociological imagination around issues of language acquisition and how schools handle the influx of an immigrant population. That was where I began with the master’s thesis; later, I investigated Latino/a students’ transition to college during postsecondary expansion for that population.

In terms of methods, I tend to fluctuate back and forth between quantitative and qualitative. My master's thesis was a qualitative project and I have to admit, I did not pay close enough attention to the statistics classes that I took! Because of the questions I was asking, I ended up using quantitative methods for my dissertation. So there's a life lesson in there somewhere—even if you consider yourself a qualitative scholar, quantitative literacy is very important in the field of sociology.

Beginning with my dissertation, my early career really vacillated between different types of methodologies. My dissertation focused on the transition to high school using quantitative methods and nationally-representative data, which then led me to a lot of qualitative questions: wanting to know more about the mechanisms [involved] in the patterns I was seeing in the data. My next project was on the transition to college, but it was more qualitative, where I interviewed students about their experiences, which led me to more quantitative questions about what it looked like on a national level. Mostly, I think that the research question that you have should drive the method that you use.

Karin: Thanks so much for sharing. I think it's especially helpful to hear about the experience of going back and forth between methods to get at the answers to the questions that you're most interested in. What methodological or data advances are you thinking about that might change the study of education in the coming years?

Amy Langenkamp: Thinking ahead in terms of data and methodological issues, one of the best strides forward for the field of sociology of education would be increasing data capacity. Take the connection of data sources between school administrative data, for example, and other sources. When an analyst gets access to administrative data, what other data sources might help us understand the patterns between student characteristics and achievement? An obvious additional data source that we might think about adding would be information about neighborhoods, and looking at where kids are living compared to where they're going to school. It used to be that those two things were pretty well-connected, or overlapping, and now that's not necessarily the case. And so [we need] to think about the ecological contexts of both schools and neighborhoods.

One thing I've been thinking about a lot in my own work recently is the reliance on free or reduced-price lunch eligibility as an indicator of socioeconomic status. If you're using school administrative data, then I think it's a good start, but it's not really even approaching the abundance of information that we could get if we had student addresses and family income in addition to the administrative data.

But also [we need] more holistic approaches to studying education in terms of the data that we might get. For example, take the issue of chronic absenteeism in schools. That problem extends far beyond what is happening in schools, right? The causes of it aren't necessarily totally related to the school; there are potentially elements of family stability, parental employment, and transportation. Collecting data more holistically and thinking through these different realms is an important advance that I think sociologists of education need to make when thinking through something as seemingly straightforward as student achievement.

Karin: Yeah, I love how those three points connect with one another, too. It's thinking about what other data we have on students, from other sources, and how that can help us move beyond some of the limits of administrative data. And then, as you said, thinking more holistically about the kinds of challenges that students or schools are facing, by bringing this new perspective that thinks about schools in the context of all these other variables.

Amy Langenkamp: That’s right. Communities can have social services that are “wraparound” social services. I kind of want to have wraparound data, where it's not just the schools, but we think about community resources, mental health and physical health, environmental hazards, exposure to trauma. If you think about what we know in terms of what affects students’ capacity to learn, all of those things come into play. And so it would be great to think about having data on all of those things.

I think there are some good examples of this, right? There are sociologists across the country collecting data and making it available to analysts. I can think of three examples: Matt Desmond with the Eviction Lab. Sean Reardon and the Educational Opportunity Project, and Ruth López Turley with the Kinder Institute. So, [that’s] just to name three sociologists who are really trying to not only increase the capacity of data, but to share the data. That's another key piece.

Karin: Absolutely. And I appreciate those examples as well. Any other thoughts that came to mind as you were thinking through the future of research on education?

Amy Langenkamp: Well, I have some other ideas that are more wishful thinking. Where I would like to see research [go].

The first is more of a team or lab approach to research. I think we are in an era where the stereotypical professor toiling in their office by themselves is not necessarily what we want to continue doing, with the kinds of resources and the capacity that we have. I would love to see a more lab approach to research that includes everyone, from post-baccalaureate, [to] graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, [and] faculty working collaboratively on a project basis. Once we increase data capacity, the issue becomes how you manage the data, how do you analyze all the data, etcetera. This could be true with qualitative data as well; there is a lot of potential to answer new questions with larger projects that collect rich longitudinal qualitative data. I think the team approach is really the way to go.

Sort of along those lines, I would like to see more use of AI in data analysis. Most of my exposure to AI as a faculty member has been about keeping students from cheating on their written assignments. But there is a lot of potential to use AI to code data, for example. And that frees up time to do what trained sociologists have the potential to really do well, which is data analysis. This is sort of this ideal world that I think of in terms of lots of different kinds of data. A team approach and then the focus really being on the analysis. As a graduate student I spent hours and hours and hours coding. And a computer can do that work now. So it would be great to focus your time on doing the things that only sociologists can do, which is the analysis, if that makes sense.

Karin: Yes, it does. So, what general social trends that we should be thinking about as we're imagining the future of studies in education?

Amy Langenkamp: Well, recently I have been very concerned about movement towards the privatization of public schools. I'm not sure everywhere is as extreme as in the state of Indiana, but in our state we are moving towards the proliferation of charter schools and public money going to private school attendance. Our voucher program in the state is the most comprehensive voucher program in the country. And it's almost universal, there's almost no income limit for vouchers. [There are] also all of these virtual public schools that are popping up. I think the largest high school in the state of Indiana is a virtual school.

Karin: Oh wow.

Amy Langenkamp: And these schools [are] almost totally unregulated, in terms of having to show any kind of achievement growth, or attendance requirements, or scores on tests. This is really changing the landscape of school districts, in terms of what we think of as a public school versus a private school. I think that has implications for going back to the history of sociology of education, which [thinks of] schooling as a public good. The privatization movement is challenging that fundamental idea about schools, that they are a public good. As sociologists of education, I think we really have to think about what consequences that has on the work that we do as well as what it means to be an educated citizen in our society. It brings up a lot of questions fundamental to the sociology of education, such as what is the purpose of schooling in our society? What is the goal of schools and how is the current system working towards or against those goals? How can we continue to serve and educate all children in such a fractured system? These are some of the bigger issues that I see for the future of our field.

Karin: That's a great point. I think there is this sort of taken-for-granted assumption about what it is that public schools do and what they look like. And so paying attention to these shifts in the types of public school offerings, or rather the privatization of formerly public offerings, is really interesting. Well, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on these big questions about the future of research and things to be thinking about. It was lovely to talk with you!