Editorial Note:
This blog feature was created by the Alpha Kappa Delta (AKD) Media Editor, Stephanie Wilson, in celebration of the second place winner in AKD’s 2024 undergraduate student paper competition, Cedar Bennett.
Each year AKD sponsors an undergraduate student paper competition. Winners are eligible to win cash prizes and travel money to attend the American Sociological Association annual conference. The first place winner received $250 and up to $1,000 in travel expenses to the 2024 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
Continue reading to learn more about Cedar Bennett’s winning paper!
Meet Cedar Bennett
Cedar Bennett recently graduated with her BA in Sociology and Psychology from Colorado College. Her senior capstone paper titled “Happier From Home: The Predicting Factors of Employee Well-Being in In-Person and Virtual Workspaces” earned her a second place prize in our 2024 Undergraduate Student Paper Competition.
To learn more about Cedar and her research, we reached out for a brief interview. Continue reading below to learn more about Cedar, her award-winning paper, and her experiences as a sociology student! You can also connect with Cedar on Instagram.
Can you briefly summarize your award-winning paper?
This paper details a survey research study conducted to compare the predictors of employee well-being across in-person and virtual workspaces, primarily focusing on white female employees. The findings suggest that virtual workspace employees have higher levels of well-being as compared to in-person, due to higher work-life balance and work autonomy. The research is grounded in past literature and theory, drawing from sociological and psychological backgrounds about well-being, whiteness, and gender in capitalist workplaces.
What motivated you to write on the topic of your paper?
I was looking to do a project that tied together my two disciplines of study: sociology and psychology. At the same time, I was in discussions with a business leadership consulting company, and was fascinated by their attempts to help clients support employee well-being in a system that inherently prioritizes productivity over well-being. So I began cultivating questions. Where does well-being come from? How do we find it in these systems of capitalism that define us by the work we do? How does all of this interact with the shifts we’ve seen from the COVID-19 pandemic, as workplaces have changed to incorporate virtual, hybrid, and in-person models? All of these questions, alongside reading a lot of theory, brought me to the study I ultimately conducted as my senior thesis project.
As a sociology student, what has been your favorite class and why?
My favorite class was Global Mental Health Policy. I was challenged to think about not only the systems we live in, and definitions of “health” that I’ve just accepted for my whole life, but I also about how this applies across the whole world. I learned a lot about other cultures and ways of thinking about wellness. As a sociology and psychology double major, I loved the chance to question the grounds that psychology as a discipline stands on, and the way it has been rooted in power and privilege. Then, I got to apply those questions to my own life, and my own school, and look at the way we conceptualize wellness. I think about things I learned in this class nearly everyday, and this class defined how I did my sociology senior thesis as well as my other psychology senior thesis.
What have been your biggest “aha” moments while studying sociology?
I feel like this comes back to my very first class I took in college. I took “Thinking Sociologically” which was a class I didn’t expect to change the trajectory of my life. Everything just clicked. Recognizing patterns in history, examining people through society and individual levels, and reading the different theorists take on it all, it all made so much sense and fascinated me. My first aha moment had to be there, as a freshman, sitting in my first class, realizing in the most broad sense, “Oh my god, THIS is why things are the way that they are.” It’s quite general, but my first aha moment was the recognition that where we are today, as a society and as an individual in how I think, comes from a rich history of socialization and battles for power.
If you had to choose one concept, theory, or idea from sociology that has had the biggest impact on how you view the world around you, what would it be and why?
This is a hard question, but I think the one I think about the most is basic socialization and social construction. Everything that we do, we learned for a reason, and comes with some social purpose that has been defined for us by generations before us. Everything we see and interact with is socially constructed, and given meaning based on who had the power to give it meaning.
When I’m annoyed about going to work on a Monday morning, I think about how capitalism is socially constructed, and our values for money and productivity are created by those who most benefit, so if all of us just decided to stop going to work, systems would fall. I still go to work. But I do think about it. When I get a whiff of my stinky armpits, I think about how I’ve been socialized to think that this smell is gross and needs fixing, and how the cosmetics industry makes money off of me trying not to smell bad. I still go put on deodorant. But I do think about it. There’s a million more examples, because with everything I do, I see sociology. It’s everywhere.