Ralph Chan

Featured on February 12, 2023

You asked, we answered! This week, we’re joined by social scientist Ralph Chan, a PhD student in sociology at the University of Vienna, Austria.

Ralph completed his Bachelor’s degree in sociology at the University of Vienna. His Bachelor’s thesis explored Japanese street fashion and asked whether this fashion trend leads to an alienation or an identification with the society. It was a sociological theoretical work that aimed to understand fashion from the perspective of social power relations and identity formation.

Later, Ralph graduated from his Master’s in Sociology at the same institution. His Master’s thesis dealt with the question of spatial and ethnic segregation in school classes. The data for his master’s thesis came from the project ‘Wege in die Zukunft‘, a longitudinal study on the social integration of young people in Vienna.

After obtaining his Master’s degree, Ralph worked as a research assistant and junior researcher in various national and international EU projects on education, youth, urban and social policy at different departments. He was also a freelance researcher at external research institutions.

He is currently working on his doctoral thesis on school-to-work and youth-to-adulthood transition from a sociological perspective. He explores the question of which factors influence young people’s decisions and why in the end they chose their educational path. In addition to his studies, he works as a programme officer for Erasmus+ Youth at the Austrian Agency for Education and Internationalization.