William Petersen (August 3, 1912 – June 10, 2004) was an American sociologist and demographer.[1]
Life
Petersen was born in
Jersey City, New Jersey on August 3, 1912.[2] He gained a PhD from
Columbia University in 1954. He taught in the Sociology Department at the
University of California at Berkeley from 1953 to 1956 and 1959 to 1966. He created the term "
model minority" to describe his thesis that
Japanese American success posed challenges to simple discrimination-based accounts of group socioeconomic differences. From 1966 to 1967, Petersen was professor of sociology at
Boston College, and from 1967 to 1978 he was the Robert Lazarus Professor of Social Demography at
Ohio State University. He co-authored Dictionary of Demography: Biographies with his wife, Rene, in 1985.[1]
Petersen died on June 10, 2004, at the age of 91.[3]
Works
Planned Migration: The Social Determinants of the Dutch-Canadian Movement, 1955.
(ed.) American Social Patterns: Studies of Race Relations, Popular Heroes, Voting, Union Democracy and Government Bureaucracy, 1956
Population, 1961. Second edition, 1969. Third edition, 1975.
(ed.) The realities of world communism, 1963
(ed. with David Matza) Social controversy, 1963
The Politics of Population, 1964
'Success Story: Japanese-American Style', New York Times Magazine, 9 January 1966, pp.20ff