This award provides funds to continue a Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site at the Population Research Center in the University of Texas, Austin. Demography is a technical field within sociology in which minorities are under-represented. This under-representation may stem from weaknesses in the typical undergraduate curriculum, combined with the low enrollment of minority students at colleges with strong demography programs. The University of Texas at Austin supports a strong, active research program in minority group demography. This has had notable success in training minority demographers, especially Mexican-Americans. There has now been some spillover to the undergraduate program, with more undergraduates taking demography and seeking research assistantships. This REU site will strengthen these developments and extend them beyond the campus. The REU Site has three specific objectives: (1) to provide undergraduate sociology students with more intense technical demographic training than is currently available in most undergraduate sociology curricula; (2) to provide "hand-on" experience with faculty-led research teams conducting externally- funded projects on topics related to minority-group demography; (3) to encourage undergraduate participants to develop scholarly papers based on their summer research experience and to present them at a regional sociology meeting in March of the following year.
