Isabel Raabe is an SNF Ambizione-Grant holder at the Department of Sociology. She is working on school classroom compositions and their effects on social dynamics and educational outcomes. Previously, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Chair of Social Theory and Quantitative methods. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Oxford in 2018, for which she submitted a thesis entitled “Social Aspects of Educational Inequality”, supervised by Jan O. Jonsson. She worked at the Social Networks Lab at ETH Zürich as a predoctoral researcher from 2016 to 2018, where she was involved in a research project on the social integration of Swiss bachelor students (Swiss StudentLife).  

In her research, she is interested in how individuals shape and interact with their social context, and whether this can explain different aspects of social inequality, especially in the educational context.  

Google Scholar

News

UZH press release: Adolescents of lower income families have fewer friends (Raabe, La Roi, & Plenty, 2024): Link

New study about socio-emotional skills and social inequality in the media (Gruijters, Raabe, & Hübner 2024): Link

Publications

• Raabe, Isabel J., Chaïm la Roi, and Stephanie Plenty (2024). "Down and out? the role of household income in students’ friendship formation in school-classes". Social Networks 78, 109-118.  Link
• Gruijters, Rob, Isabel J. Raabe, and Nicolas Hübner (2024). "Socio-Emotional Skills and the Socioeconomic Achievement Gap". Sociology of Education, Online First Link
• Engzell, Per, and Isabel J. Raabe (2023). "Within-School Achievement Sorting in Comprehensive and Tracked Systems". Sociology of Education, 96 (4), 324–343.Link
• Johann, David, Isabel J. Raabe, and Heiko Rauhut (2022). "Under pressure: The extent and distribution of perceived pressure among scientists in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland". Research Evaluation,  31 (3), 385–409. Link
• Vörös, András, Zsófia Boda, Timon Elmer, Marion Hoffman, Kieran Mepham, Isabel J. Raabe, and Christoph Stadtfeld (2021). "The Swiss StudentLife Study: Investigating the emergence of an undergraduate community through dynamic, multidimensional social network data". Social Networks, 65, 71-84. Link
• Raabe, Isabel J, Alexander Ehlert, David Johann, Heiko Rauhut. “Satisfaction of scientists during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown” (2020). Humanities and Social Sciences Communications: 7(1): 1-7. Link
• Block, Per, Marion Hoffman, Isabel J. Raabe, Jennifer Beam Dowd, Charles Rahal, Ridhi Kashyap, and Melinda C. Mills (2020). "Social network-based distancing strategies to flatten the COVID-19 curve in a post-lockdown world." Nature Human Behaviour, 4: 88–596. Link
• Raabe, Isabel J., Zsófia Boda, and Christoph Stadtfeld (2019). “The Social Pipeline: How Friend Influence and Peer Exposure Widen the STEM Gender Gap”. Sociology of Education, 92 (2): 105-123. Link
• Raabe, Isabel J. and Ralf Wölfer (2019). “What's Going on Around You: Peer Milieus and Educational Aspirations”. European Sociological Review, 35 (1): 1-14. Link
• Stadtfeld, Christoph, András Vörös, Timon Elmer, Zsófia Boda, and Isabel J. Raabe. (2019). “Integration in Emerging Social Networks Explains Academic Failure and Success”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116 (3): 792-797. Link
• Raabe, Isabel J. (2019). “Social Exclusion and School Achievement: Children of Immigrants and Children of Natives in Three European Countries”. Child Indicators Research, 12 (3): 1003-1022. Link