Sandra Jones

Areas of Expertise

Developmental Psychology; Psychology of Women; Feminist Interpretive Research; Narrative Analysis

Email: sjones@brandeis.edu

Current Project

On leave for the 2008-2009 Academic Year.

Biography

Sandra Jones is a developmental psychologist. Her two major professional areas of interest are the sociocultural contexts of self and identity with particular emphasis on the intersection of gender, social class, and race/ethnicity and interpretive research, in particular, narrative analysis, grounded theory, and performative social science.  

Sandy taught a graduate seminar on psychology of women and undergraduate courses on gender roles and human development at Boston College and the University of Massachusetts Boston.  During 1999-2001, she was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Wellesley Center for Research on Women.  Her work exploring women’s subjectivities, the experience of upward mobility in the lives of first-generation college graduates, and feminist interpretive research has been published in psychology and sociology journals and books.  

Sandy’s interest in qualitative research is informed by her former career in human factors at Digital Equipment Corporation. In addition to conducting research, she taught phenomenological interviewing and inductive analysis to Digital employees and customers in the US, England, and Ireland.  Her work in industry has been published in the Communications of the ACM, ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, and books.  

Education

Ph.D., Boston College

Ed.M., Harvard University

B.A., Clark University

Representative Publications

Jones, Sandra.  “Class Tensions Within Families: Maintaining Relationships Across Differences.”  Psychotherapy With Women: Exploring Diverse Contexts and Identities.  Eds. M. Mirkin, K. Suyemoto, and B. Okun.  New York: Guilford Press, 2005.

Jones, Sandra.  “A Place Where I Belong: Working-class Women’s Pursuit of Higher Education.”  Race, Gender & Class 11.3 (2004).

Links

Becoming an Educated Person: Narratives of Female Professors from the Working Class