Mario Luis Small is a sociologist who has done numerous research on urban neighborhoods, inequality, urban poverty and many others. Luis Small's research interests are in the fields of urban poverty, personal networks, qualitative and mixed methods, epistemology. He now works at Harvard University as the Grafstein Family Professor of Sociology. He is currently working on a study looking at the experience of low income mothers in three different high poverty areas.
Biography
He received a B.A. In 1996 from Carleton College, a M.A. in 1998 and a PH.D in 2001 from Harvard University. Currently, Small is studying why poor neighborhoods are different in different places and how people get help in these communities. As well as conducting this research, he also is working on a book on how people are able to express their worries to not well known people. Mario Small has received many awards, majority pertaining to his writings. He is the only person to win the C. Wright Mills Best book Award twice, in 2005 and 2010. The books that won these awards are Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio in 2005 and Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life in 2010. He also got an honorable mention these years for a Mirra Komarovsky Best Book Award.
Books
Small, Mario L. 2017. Someone To Talk To. New York: Oxford University Press. Small, Mario L. 2009. Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life, New York: Oxford University Press Small, Mario L. 2004. Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Awards and honors, research Mario Luis Small has won multiple Awards in Honors and research, He has been granted an award for Best Book of 2009, C. Wright Mills Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems and 2010, Best Book of 2004, C. Wright Mills Award, SSSP 2005. Mario Luis small a few honorable mentions including,Honorable Mention, Best Book Award, Sociology of Culture Section, ASA 2005,and Honorable Mention, Mirra Komarovsky Best Book Award, ESS 2005. Mario has also been granted Elias Boudinot Bicentennial Preceptorship, Princeton University 2005. Teaching Mario Luis Small was granted for his accomplishments in Awards and teaching, obtaining Outstanding Faculty Advisor Award, Princeton University, Department of Sociology 2006., Advisor to recipient of Brown Thesis Prize, Sara Holloway, Princeton U., Department of Sociology 2006. Mario Luis Small has greatly contributed to teaching and research at princeton university.
Contributions to sociology
Small has published books and numerous articles on urban poverty, personal networks, and the relationship between qualitative and quantitative social science methods. His books Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio and Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life, both received the C. Wright Mills Award for Best Book, among other honors. Small is currently writing a book on the evolution of social support networks among graduate students and studying the formal and informal systems of support among low-income mothers in New York, Chicago, and Huston. He has shown that poor neighborhoods in commonly-studied cities such as Chicago are not representative of ghettos everywhere, that how people understand and make sense of their neighborhood shapes how it affects them, and that local organizations in poor neighborhoods often broker connections to both people and organizations. Small has also demonstrated that people’s social capital—including how many people they know and how much they trust others—depends on the organizations in which they are embedded. His work on methods has shown that many practices used to make qualitative research more scientific are ineffective. Small is currently working to understand why ghettos differ from city to city and how people decide whom to turn to when seeking support.
