FSU Interdisciplinary Social Science Assistant Teaching Professor Maria Cristina Ramos, Ph.D., was awarded the Outstanding Recent Contribution Award from the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Social Psychology Section.
Her first-author article, titled “Identity Networks as a New Frontier: Conceptualizing, Mapping, and Analyzing Identity Structures and Their Impact on Well-Being,” offers a cohesive approach to addressing sociology’s fragmented efforts to conceptualize, measure, and examine identity structures as networks. In this article, Dr. Ramos takes a network-based approach to capture identity structures.
The award committee praised this paper for showing, in a fresh and rigorous way, how our different identities, such as parent, friend, or professional, work together or get in each other’s way in daily life. They noted that it not only updates classic ideas about the benefits and challenges of having multiple identities but also provides a clear and cogent measure of how those identities influence one another and shape well-being.
The American Sociological Association’s Social Psychology Section consists of over 600 scholars whose interests include self-conceptions and identity, social cognition, the shaping of emotions by culture and social structure, the creation of meaning and the negotiation of social order in everyday life, small group dynamics, and the psychological consequences of inequality.
“This project brings together identity theory and network analysis to show how the connections between our identities—like parent, worker, or friend—shape well-being. It offers a new methodological approach to studying the self by bridging theories of identity and social structure,” said Dr. Ramos. “I’m especially honored to bring this kind of scholarship into FSU’s broader mission of integrating research and teaching on pressing issues.”
A networks-based approach to studying identities represents a person’s different identities, such as parent, friend, or scientist, as dots (nodes) and the ways they support or conflict with each other as lines (ties) between them. By examining all identities and their connections together, researchers can see the overall shape of people’s identities, identify patterns such as tight integration, separate subgroups, or dominance by certain identities, and link these patterns to important outcomes such as well-being. This method makes two key advances: it connects processes within individuals to larger social patterns, and it expands the scope of analysis from a few identities at a time to the full set of identities people hold.
Dr. Ramos joined the college’s faculty in 2022, bringing expertise in computational social science that she has applied to both undergraduate and graduate education. She developed a specialization in this area for Interdisciplinary Social Science majors and founded the Graduate Certificate in Digital Applied Social Science. Through both programs, students gain hands on experience with innovative computational tools, such as natural language processing and AI, to address social science questions. Before coming to FSU, she earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Duke University.
The award was presented at the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) annual conference in Chicago in August 2025.
To learn more about the American Sociological Association Section on Social Psychology, visit socialpsychologyasasection.com.
For more information about Dr. Ramos and her research interests, visit https://cosspp.fsu.edu/iss/faculty/maria-ramos-flor/. For more information on the Interdisciplinary Social Science program, visit cosspp.fsu.edu/iss.