Lingxin Hao (PhD, Sociology, 1990, University of Chicago) is Professor of Sociology at the Johns Hopkins University. 

Her areas of specialization include immigration, family and public policy, social inequality, sociology of education, and quantitative methods.  Her research tests hypotheses developed from sociological theories using advanced longitudinal analysis methods and large national survey datasets.

Dr. Hao is currently engaged in three research projects.

(1) The intra-generational mobility project investigates the impact of immigration on social mobility within a generation for both the foreign born and the native born.  The study examines whether variations in the immigrant share and immigrant racial and educational composition across metropolitan areas shape economic inequality and mobility, using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and the U.S. Census.  While most past research has used snapshot analyses of job displacement, this study employs a longitudinal analysis of job displacement and wage/income mobility.  The analytic methods address the multi-level feature of mobility and the full distributional feature of inequality, allowing a linkage between mobility and inequality.  The study will make substantive and methodological contributions to the literature on stratification, inequality, and immigration. 

(2) The inter-generational mobility project examines the role of public high schools in the upward mobility of students from disadvantaged backgrounds.  The central research question is: Do public high schools compensate for the out-of-school learning disadvantage faced by underprivileged students?  The overarching goal is to identify the specific structural and relational traits of public high schools that prepare disadvantaged students to ascend the social ladder.  Considering both short- and long-term impact of high school traits, the research addresses three issues: 1) the empirical feasibility of assessing whether certain high school traits help close, narrow, maintain, or expand SES gaps in academic achievement in high school and socioeconomic attainment in young adulthood; 2) strategies for estimating how high school traits reduce these gaps; and 3) the transitional pathways by which high school traits have a lasting impact on social mobility in young adulthood.  Because public school attributes can be affected by changes in policy, the evidence provided by this project will provide fresh knowledge and guiding principles for the research community, education policymakers, and practitioners alike.

(3) The immigration and health project studies the impact of immigration on population health.  It includes two subprojects, one on obesity and the other on workplace injuries.  The obesity project is grounded in theories of immigration, nutrition transition, and residential segregation.  The conceptual model considers two ways by which immigration may affect American obesity. First, immigration determines the obesity patterns among immigrants, which alters the population patterns.  Second, immigration may affect population obesity through reshaping residential racial segregation, a fundamental factor for group disparities.  To address these two relationships, the project uses 11 years of data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS 1995-2005), supplemented with the 1990 and 2000 Census data.  All analyses are separate for men and women.  The specific aims are to: 1) provide fresh descriptive trends related to immigration's impact on American obesity; 2) use quantile regression to test whether immigrants have an initial advantage in body composition and whether this advantage erodes over time; 3) use quantile regression decomposition to identify/determine the effect of the change in nativity composition of American population over time; and 4) explore causal inferences for the spillover of the black segregation effect on Hispanic immigrants' obesity and the effect of a decline in black-white segregation accompanied by an increase in Hispanic presence on blacks' obesity.  Results from this study will provide a first assessment of immigration's impact on American obesity in the past decade. The information will be timely and will contribute to policymakers’ efforts to curb the epidemic.  The workplace injury project is currently being developed.