• John deRoche (Chairperson)        Associate Professor of Sociology
• Office: B-265
• Phone and voicemail: (902) 563-1253
• Fax: (902) 562-0119
• E-mail: jdr@uccb.ns.ca

     John grew up in various parts of rural Nova Scotia and Cape Breton. After sampling nearly every program and discipline at St. F.X. (except business!), he settled on a joint honours in psych and sociology.  After the BA in 1968, he joined the small but steady stream of Canadians who opted for sociology graduate work at Washington U. in St. Louis. (MA and PhD programs in soc were new and rare in Canada then!) As he prepared to come to Cape Breton for dissertation fieldwork in 1972, he was offered what would become a full-time teaching job at Xavier College (now UCCB).

     Specialty Areas: social inequality, industrial sociology, social theory, qualitative and quantitative research methods, applied social research.

     Community Service: John has belonged to various community associations, most recently including the Cape Breton Italian Cultural Association, and years ago the board of the fondly remembered Cape Co-op bookstore and pub, linked to the old downtown campus.  Most of his community service, though, has been through volunteering his skills as a researcher.  As for the professional community, he has been President of the Atlantic Association of Sociologists and Anthropologists, and twice was main organizer for its annual conference, when it convened at UCCB.  He recently was President of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, and is now a sociology adjudicator for the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme through which the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada chooses book manuscripts for financial assistance in publishing.

      Research: John has retained an interest in his early work on interview studies of men's life on the job in the Cape Breton coal mines of years past, and women's life on the job in mining households.  He has also done survey research on ideology and self-image of employed and unemployed workers in Industrial Cape Breton, a survey of UCCB students' counseling resources and needs, and an interpretive analysis of sociocultural themes in popular TV.  Most recently, he has been doing applied research with workers and clients in local public-service organizations.  He especially enjoys the research projects in which he partners with his favorite colleague from anthropology, Connie deRoche.