Sebastian Schnettler

Research interests: Sebastian Schnettler, Fellow of the Center for Research on Inequality and the Life Course (CIQLE) Previously worked as research assistant in the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) and the German Center for Gerontology (DZA), and as teaching assistant at Free University Berlin where he taught an undergraduate course on social structure for 2.5 years. In a one-year traineeship he also gained experience as a consultant and researcher for non-profit organizations and industry associations in Washington, DC.

His primary interests are in life course sociology, social inequality, biosociology, network analysis, survey methodology, and social mechanisms. For his Master’s thesis he compared the social support networks of childless individuals with those of parents, drawing on data from the first wave of the German Aging Study, a dataset on the situation of the German population aged 40 to 85. He has since continued working on this topic and is currently writing a paper that looks at the situation of the childless in more detail and also incorporates data from the second wave of the same study. Sebastian is writing his dissertation on differential parental treatment, focussing particularly on the causes of why parents would treat their children differently. For this project he uses data from the genetic sample of the Adolescent Health Study and compares parent-offspring dyads within and across families to test biological, economic, and sociological hypotheses on the parental motivations to invest differentially in their children.

Selected recent publications:

Schnettler, S. (2009): “A structured overview of 50 years of small-world research.” Social Networks. doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2008.12.004.

Schnettler, S. (2009): “A small world on feet of clay? A comparison of empirical small-world studies against best-practice criteria.” Social Networks doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2008.12.005.

Schnettler, S. (2008): “Ohne Kinder alt werden. Die sozialen Unterstützungsbeziehungen von Kinderlosen und Eltern in Deutschland."
[“Aging without children. The social support relations of the childless and parents in Germany.”] Saarbrücken: VDM.

Additional Information:
E-mail:	sebastian.schnettler (at) yale.edu
Vita:	vitaSchnettler.pdf