Research Interests

Education; Children & Youth; Health; Social Demography; Race, Class, & Gender
Comprehensive Exams: Education and Adolescence

Awards & Honors

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (2005)
Proposal: Adolescents’ Body Weight and Perception in the Social Context of Schools  -  $121,500

During the process of writing her NSF proposal, Anna received significant support from her advisor Chandra Muller and from talking with former recipients of the NSF GRF. In particular, six generous graduate students shared their successful research proposals and prior research statements with her. To continue this tradition, please feel free to read Anna's research proposal and prior research statement (however, please do not cite them without permission).

Research with AHAA

Anna's research investigates how education - through structuring peer relationships and offering opportunities to develop cognitive abilities - affects adolescent development, achievement, health and well being. She uses the social networks data or "local positions" to explore adolescent society in schools focusing on how and why adolescents learn, conform to, and sometimes internalize values or behaviors, particularly health behaviors, encountered in schools.

Mueller's Dissertation Research

Mueller’s dissertation focuses on the role of schools in body weight in adolescence and young adulthood. In the U.S., adolescents often experience pressure to conform to normative ideals that equate being thin with ideal femininity and being muscular with ideal masculinity. With her dissertation, Mueller investigates a key social context in adolescence – schools – in order to identify the role they play as a location for social comparisons of bodies and weight-control behaviors during adolescence and young adulthood. Mueller is interested in who within the school context serves as a salient target for social comparison and how these comparisons shape weight-control behaviors and how these social psychological processes differ for boys and girls. She also explores the emotional consequences of weight-related adolescent cultures in schools and their long term consequences to health and well being in early adulthood.  To investigate the role of schools in body weight, she uses longitudinal data, hierarchical-linear modeling, and a nationally-representative sample of adolescents in 78 public and private U.S. high schools from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

Additional Research

In addition to her work on adolescent body weight, Mueller is continuing her work with fellow sociology grad student Dara Shifrer and Drs. Muller and Raley, on gender equity in faculty salaries at UT. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods and administrative data and survey responses, they are analyzing how gender gaps emerge over the course of faculties’ careers. A key finding so far is that women are not rewarded for high productivity at the same rate as men, despite their understanding of what it takes to “make it” in the academic world. This research has already produced a research report for the University of Texas at Austin. Currently, Mueller and her collaborators are working on producing papers for publication in scholarly journals.

Publications

Mueller, Anna S., Jennifer Pearson, Chandra Muller, Kenneth Frank and Alyn Turner. Forthcoming. “Sizing Up Peers: Adolescent Girls’ Weight Control and Social Comparison in the School Context.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Crosnoe, Robert, Kenneth Frank, and Anna Strassmann Mueller. 2008. “Gender, Body Size, and Social Relations in American High Schools.” Social Forces 86(3): 1189-1216.

Frank, Kenneth A., Chandra Muller, Kathryn S. Schiller, Catherine Riegle-Crumb, Anna Strassmann Mueller, Robert Crosnoe, and Jennifer Pearson. 2008. “The Social Dynamics of Mathematics Coursetaking in High Schools.” American Journal of Sociology 113 (6): 1645-1696.

Book Chapters

Mueller, Anna Strassmann. Forthcoming. “Education” in the Concise Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Edited by George Ritzer. Blackwell Publishing.

Mueller, Anna S. 2009. “Body Image, Childhood and Adolescence” in the Encyclopedia of the Life Course and Human Development (Vol. 1) (58-62), Edited by Deborah Carr. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA.

Mueller, Anna Strassmann. 2007. “Extracurricular Activities” in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Edited by George Ritzer. Blackwell Publishing.

Mueller, Anna Strassmann and Chandra Muller. 2007. “Education” in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Edited by George Ritzer. Blackwell Publishing.

Research Reports

Mueller, Anna S., R. Kelly Raley and Chandra Muller. October 27, 2008. “Report on Gender Equity in Compensation at the University of Texas at Austin.” Prepared for the Gender Equity Task Force at the University of Texas at Austin, Co-Chairs J. Strother Moore and Gretchen Ritter, and included in the Final Report of the Gender Equity Task Force as Appendix 3. http://www.utexas.edu/news/attach/2008/3133_Gender_Equity_Report.pdf

Muller, Chandra, Jennifer Pearson, Catherine Riegle-Crumb, Jennifer Harris Requejo, Kenneth A. Frank, Kathryn S. Schiller, R. Kelly Raley, Amy G. Langenkamp, Sarah Crissey, Anna Strassmann Mueller, Rebecca Callahan, Lindsey Wilkinson, Samuel Field.  2007.  National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health: Wave III Education Data. Chapel Hill: Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Personal Information

In my spare time, I spend as much time outside as possible, generally horse-back riding on my Spanish Barb mare or hiking in the Texas Hill Country. I enjoy reading and am always making my way (although sometimes slowly) through a novel.

Links

Curriculum Vitae
Anna Strassmann Mueller's PRC Webpage