Congratulations to PhD Candidate Soli Dubash on his publication “The Sociocognitive Origins of Personal Mastery” in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Together with co-author Gordon Brett, Dubash examines the relationship between cognitive processing and mastery while drawing on scholarship on dual-process cognition, mastery, and intersectionality. Using survey data from a diverse student sample, the authors hypothesize that deliberative thinking styles are correlated with a greater sense of control over one’s life. Regression results suggest a positive statistical relationship between deliberate cognitive dispositions and personal mastery, though this result varies across intersections of social positions.
Soli Dubash is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology. Soli's dissertation focuses on understanding and modelling how social networks and the contexts in which they are enacted shape, and are shaped by, health across the life course. He is particularly interested in examining how our health changes when our relationships change, how our relationships change as our health changes, and how network change contributes to inequality. Soli's research agenda integrates quantitative, computational, and survey methodology to study health and stress processes, social network dynamics, culture, and life course inequalities. His scholarly agenda is dedicated to producing research that (1) can help people make evidence-based decisions about their health and their community members’; (2) holds practical implications for policy design and targeted interventions; and (3) clearly presents results in ways which are publicly accessible, can inform future research design, and facilitate meta-analyses. Soli strongly values open science principles and transparent research practices. By doing so, he aims to both make people aware of the possible effects of their personal ties to influence their health, behaviour, and well-being (and vice versa); and, to allow readers to reach their own decisions as to how he came to these results and their consequences.