Research

• How do everyday individuals construe or define "status"? How do they judge who has status (or not)?

  • Past research has commonly investigated status taking a top-down approach (i.e., using researchers' preconceived notions of status). In these projects, I leverage a bottom-up approach to probe how everyday people organically, naturally define what status is and how they judge others' status. I use rigorous qualitative and quantitative research designs and employ rigorous statistical analyses (e.g., NLP, multi-level modeling) to investigate.

Fang, W.M., and Zayas, V. (in prep). 

• Do perceptions of status change across social interaction partners? 

  • Some literature suggests that perceptions of status are anchored to the perceiver and thus, stable and relatively immutable across social interaction partners; meanwhile, other theories suggest that perceptions of status would fluctuate depend on who the interaction partner. Using the Social Relations Model, this work ultimately provides insight into how perceptions of status are formed within a dyadic social interaction, providing critical groundwork for future research.

Fang, W.M., and Zayas, V. (in prep). 

• How are differences in well-being between low- and high-SES students' related to their social networks?

  • Across the United States, low-socioeconomic status (SES) students disproportionately report poorer well-being. Some literature suggests that social connections can mitigate these "well-being gaps." Building on past research, this work reveals that one's subjective perception of social connection (e.g., the number of friend nominations) plays a critical role in these gaps, even beyond how many peers perceive them to be a friend (e.g., incoming friend nominations). Leveraging social network approaches, I provide insight to researchers and practitioners on efforts to improve student well-being. 

Fang, W. M., Courtney, A., Jackson, M. O., & Zaki, J. (2025). Differences in perceived social connection help explain SES-based gaps in well-being. Social Networks, 82, 55-64.

Courtney, A. L., Baltiansky, D., Fang, W. M., Roshanaei, M., Aybas, Y. C., Samuels, N. A., ... & Zaki, J. (2024). Social microclimates and well-being. Emotion, 24(3), 836.