Filiz Garip

Assistant Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology

Filiz Garip received her Ph.D. in Sociology and M.S.E in Operations Research & Financial Engineering both from Princeton University. Her empirical research spans the substantive fields of migration, inequality, diffusion, social networks, economic sociology, and development. Her methodological approach is to develop and employ custom analysis techniques that can most effectively answer the substantive question at-hand. She primarily applies quantitative methods and analyzes large survey data, yet supplements the empirical results with insights from qualitative field observation. Besides flexibility with respect to different styles of analysis, her research is characterized by openness to multiple disciplinary viewpoints. Coming from an engineering background, she often combines different approaches, ideas or methods that are typically separated by disciplinary boundaries.

Filiz’s research questions typically focus on situations where individuals’ choices are affected by the choices of others around them, and consequently aggregate patterns cannot simply be extrapolated from isolated individual characteristics. Her first line of research deals with a puzzle in the Thai internal migration context: While migration to urban areas reaches mass levels in some sending communities, it lingers at low levels in other communities that are at first glance very similar. Filiz argues that this macro-level puzzle can be explained by individual level interactions within social networks that connect migrants to other community members. Specifically, the accumulation and distribution of social capital (defined as information or assistance provided by prior migrants that can facilitate migrating for potential migrants) can explain the divergent migration outcomes in sending communities.

The other two lines of research ask similar questions, and similarly attempt to understand puzzling aggregate patterns by identifying underlying individual level mechanisms. Her second line of work, in collaboration with Sara Curran, merges insights from gender studies and cumulative causation theory of migration, and finds that differential information-sharing patterns of men and women in rural Thailand lead to gender-specific cumulative migration patterns to urban areas. In January 2006, this project was awarded an NSF grant for additional data collection. Filiz’s third line of work, in collaboration with Paul DiMaggio, questions the variation in internet adoption rates of different socio-economic groups in the U.S., and combines economic theory on network externalities with diffusion models to provide an explanation.