Susan Cotts Watkins

Initially, Malawians were convinced that all would die of AIDS, and were skeptical about the attempts of the government and international organizations to reduce new HIV infections. Over the subsequent years, this began to change as conversational partners advised each other to be careful to select their sexual partners with care. By 2017, men and women speaking about AIDS in their social networks acknowledged that times had changed, and the number of new HIV infections had steeply declined.

In 2017, Watkins published A Fraught Embrace with Ann Swidler. The book detailed the relationship between philanthropists, beneficiaries, and brokers in the fight against AIDS in Africa. Watkins found that virtually all work in the fight against AIDS relied on brokers, who act as intermediaries between western altruists and local villagers. Watkins and Swidler found that conflicts between these three groups often confounded efforts to fight AIDS. They argued that instead altruists could accomplish more good, not by seeking to transform African lives but by helping Africans achieve their own goals.

A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa. 2017. Princeton University Press (with A. Swidler).

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship 2009

The first round of the survey had provided a great deal of data about the composition and structure of the social networks in which rural Malawians talked about AIDS. It had not however, learned much about the content of the social interactions—what people said to each other, rather than to interviewers, about AIDS or their strategies for avoiding infection and death—and even less about the wider everyday interactions that shaped responses to the epidemic. Thus, the researchers improvised by commissioning 10 high school graduates, both men and women, who had worked for the survey to be participant observers during their daily routines. They were to pay attention to what their peers said about the AIDS epidemic in their informal social networks, and to write the conversation word for word in a private space. If they overheard anything concerning AIDS, they were to make mental notes of what people said and did, and then write their recollections word-for-word that evening or soon thereafter. The notebooks were sent to the researchers. In 2007, Watkins invited a colleague, Adam Ashforth, an ethnographer, to collaborate on the Project.

Irene Taeuber Award for “exceptionally sound and innovative research”, Population Association of America, 2005

Steering Committee, Mellon Foundation Southern African HIV/AIDS Node, 2001–2005

In 1999 Watkins instituted The Malawi Journals Project as a complement to a longitudinal survey that she was conducting in rural Malawi. At that time, Malawians were suffering and dying from a major AIDS epidemic. After the first round of the survey, she found evidence of social desirability bias. For example, when survey interviewers asked men under age 35 how many sexual partners they had, the typical response was that they had only one sexual partner, their wife. In this context, having only one partner was unusual. In many of the conversations, the men explained that having only one sexual partner was like eating the same meal every day.

More than 1,000 journals have been written since 1999, each usually covering several different conversation. Since there are frequently several people conversing, the reader can overhear, at second hand, several thousand people. Twenty-two journalists (9 females, 13 males) have contributed to the corpus of texts, with three (two males, one female) contributing very frequently, 13 frequently, and six only occasionally. The diarists wrote in English, a language learned in school, and used parentheses or carets (< >) to set off their explanatory comments or untranslatable expressions in the local language.

Gifford Distinguished Scholar Lecture, University of California-Davis, 1999

In 1998, Watkins began research on The Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health. The study's goal was to investigate the multiple influences that contribute to HIV risks in sexual partnerships; the variety of ways in which people manage risk within and outside of marriage and other sexual relationships; the possible effects of HIV prevention policies and programs; and the mechanisms through which poor rural individuals, families, households, and communities cope with the impacts of high AIDS-related morbidity and mortality. The study found a number of factors that contributed to the spread of HIV/AIDS in Malawi. Among those factors was the high rate of sexual encounters among youth, and a general unwillingness to follow HIV prevention methods.

In 1994, Watkins began research on the Kenya Diffusion and Ideational Change Project, a study on the role of social networks on changing attitudes and behavior regarding family size, family planning, and HIV/AIDS in Kenya. The study found that perceived risks, as well as preferred methods of protection against HIV-infection, depend in general on the prevailing perceptions and favored protective methods within personal communication networks. Risk-perceptions of women were found to be shaped by strong relationships and cohesive network structures, while male's risk perception depended more on the number of risk-perceivers in their communication networks. The research was conducted through the form of focus groups and semi-structured interviews.

Sociological Research Association, Elected Member 1994.

First Annual Otis Dudley Duncan Award for distinguished scholarship in social demography, awarded by the Sociology of Population Section of the American Sociological Association, for From Provinces to Nations, 1992.

Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, award for research leave 1992–93.

Hewlett Foundation Graduate Training Grant, 1992–1997, $750,000.

Research Foundation awards, University of Pennsylvania, 1989, 1991.

American Council of Learned Societies, award for research leave 1988–89.

Visiting Fellow, Australia Family Project, Australian National University, June–August 1988.

The Decline of Fertility in Europe. Editor. 1986. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press (with Ansley J. Coale).

Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J. 1984–85.

Visiting Fellow, Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University, August‑ September 1984.

Yale Junior Faculty Fellowship, awarded for academic leave, 1981‑82.

Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, highest honor of the Graduate School of Princeton University, 1978‑79.

A native of the United States, Susan C. Watkins graduated with high honors from Swarthmore College in 1956. After child-raising, she returned to academia, receiving a PhD from Princeton University in 1980 for her dissertation on Variation and Persistence in Age Patterns of Marriage in Europe, 1870–1960, for which she received the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, the highest honor of the Graduate School at Princeton University, 1978–79. Following three years as an assistant professor at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania invited her to join its Department of Sociology and the Population Studies Center. There, she was an assistant professor (1979–1982), an associate professor (1986–1995), and a full professor until she became professor emerita in 2007. During that time, she mentored more than 100 graduate students. In 2009 she was awarded the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She was a member of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, 1984-1985 and was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, CA, 1992–1993. Her research has covered multiple fields, drawing particularly on the fields of demography, sociology, and anthropology. She was on the board of the Population Association of America in 2001–2003. In 2005, she received the Irene Taeuber Award of the Population Association of America, for "exceptionally sound and innovative research." In 1992 the Sociology of Population Section of the American Sociological Association awarded her the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for distinguished scholarship in social demography for her book From Provinces to Nations She is currently a visiting scholar at the California Center for Population Research at the University of California-Los Angeles.

Susan Cotts Watkins (born October 26, 1938) is an American demographer. She has been a professor at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania. She is now professor emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has focused on the impact of social networks on cultural change in the demography of the U.S., Western Europe, and Africa.

From Provinces Into Nations: The Demographic Integration of Western Europe, 1870-1960. 1991. Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press.