Stuart Michaels

Stuart Michaels

Stuart Michaels

Stuart Michaels is a Senior Research Scientist at the Academic Research Centers of NORC at the University of Chicago and associated with both the Ogburn-Stouffer Center for the Study of Social Organizations and the Population Research Center.

Michaels has extensive experience in the design and analysis of surveys of sexuality dating to the late 1980s. His research focuses on conceptual and methodological problems in the study of sexuality in surveys with a primary substantive focus on same-sex behavior and identity. As a researcher and the project director of the The National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS) from 1988-1994, he helped design and oversee all aspects of this first national representative population-based survey devoted primarily to studying sexual behavior of U.S. adults. He is a co-author of the The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the U.S. (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, and Michaels 1994) and the primary author of the methodology chapters and the chapter on homosexuality.

Subsequent to his work on the NHSLS and its follow-up, the Chicago Health and Social Life Survey (CHSLS), he spent four years working with the research team in France doing cross-national comparisons of the U.S. survey and its French counterpart. Upon his return to Chicago in 2001, he was assistant director of the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago until 2010, when he returned to NORC. He is currently working on the Men's Assessment of Social Support and Risk Networks, a study of African-American high-risk men who have sex with men in Chicago and helping to develop projects on issues related to health and sexuality including the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project.

His areas of expertise are survey design and methodology, gender and sexuality, sexual identity, and health. His expertise includes the design, management, and analysis of population surveys on gender, health, and sexuality.