What shapes our lives? Why do we become what we become? Is it by coincidence or is it written in the stars? Even as a young child, Maria Brandén could see signs of the latter in her native town, Gävle.
“There were children there who were from Gävle, their parents were from Gävle and their grandmother and grandfather were from Gävle. It was obvious to them that they would stay there and that they would have children quite early. Their future was set. My parents came from Luleå and Nordmaling and had moved to Gävle. It was obvious to me that I would also move somewhere else. The fact that everything is so connected has always interested me,” she says.
By chance
With that interest, it sounds obvious that Maria Brandén would become a sociologist, but that was not the case at all. The words “by chance” recur several times when she tells us what happened. How she slipped into different contexts as if by chance.
“An older cousin told me sociology was good to start with because it was easy. And it was really fun, but I did it totally by chance.”
But with a mother who was a medical doctor with a PhD and a father who was financial manager at Gävle municipality, one could argue that it was still quite natural – well, almost predictable – that Maria Brandén would attend university. On the other hand, she has a sister who instead became a musician, and at home there was no pressure to become anything in particular. Maria stayed in the academic environment and studied various subjects at Lund and Södertörn.
A researcher after all
After a few years she returned to sociology at Stockholm again. She first came into contact with research when working on her bachelor’s thesis, and was amazed that you could do something that fun for a living. But she did not dare believe that she would become a researcher herself, but perhaps a research assistant, at most. It was her supervisor who convinced her to go for a PhD instead. Again, Maria Brandén describes it as being pure chance, while noting that she had mostly tried to do what seemed fun. If you do, you will end up where you want to be sooner or later. That is her philosophy.
In 2014, she completed a PhD in sociological demography. Today she is a professor at Linköping University and director of the Institute for Analytical Sociology, which was recently appointed as a Centre of Excellence by the university. What was once so far away has become her everyday life.
A complicated reality
At the Institute for Analytical Sociology, IAS, researchers from different backgrounds, such as sociologists, economists, philosophers and statisticians, gather to study the mechanisms that shape society’s development. Using large-scale text data, population registers and data models, they can, for example, investigate causes and consequences linked to segregation and inequality. These issues are close at heart for Maria Brandén and she has devoted a lot of time to them. She has studied how people’s lives are affected by where they grow up, who they go to school with and who their neighbours are.
A study she has just begun examines whether immigrant parents' chances of getting a job are affected by whether their children go to school with children whose parents have jobs. In this, she can rely on something that colleagues in other countries are envious of: Statistics Sweden's uniquely comprehensive statistics on the inhabitants of Sweden. They give the researcher a bird’s eye view of society that would otherwise be difficult to obtain.
She is hoping that the patterns that emerge from the data models will provide insights that can inform politicians’ decisions on important issues. But reality is complicated, according to Maria Brandén.
“If you compare with certain models in physics, we often have a very low coefficient of determination when we develop our models. But that doesn’t mean that the model is bad. It’s just that there are so many other things that we don’t measure using that particular model that also matter.”
An alternative life?
So, what shapes our lives? Things that happen by chance? Or have most things been decided already? Can you imagine an alternative life in which Maria Brandén became something completely different from a researcher? And maybe even stayed in Gävle?
“No, I think being a researcher is the most fun job there is. If I hadn’t studied sociology, I might have wanted to study animals instead. Just thinking, working things out and talking to people who think about the same things. It’s such a luxury.”
