Professor of Sociology
136 Post
Phone: (610) 660-1674
Email: gdowdall@sju.edu
Biographical Sketch
GEORGE W. DOWDALL is Professor of Sociology at Saint Joseph 's University. His research and teaching interests include mental health, substance use, and research methods. Among his professional affiliations are the American Public Health Association, American Society of Criminology, American Sociological Association, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
His publications include The Eclipse Of The State Mental Hospital (State University of New York Press, 1996); Finding Out What Works and Why: A Guide to Evaluating College Prevention Programs and Policies (The Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention, 2002; and Adventures In Criminal Justice Research: Data Analysis Using SPSS For Windows, Third Edition (Pine Forge Press, 2004). He has been the author or co-author of papers on college student binge drinking published in journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association (1994), the American Journal of Public Health (1995 and 1998), Journal of Studies on Alcohol (2002 and 2004), the Journal of American College Health (1997 and 1998), and Psychology of Women Quarterly (1998). He co-authored “The Attica Trials: A Thirty-year Pursuit of Justice,” which appears in Bailey and Chermak’s Famous American Crimes and Trials (2004).
A graduate of Regis High School and Holy Cross College , he received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University and was an NIMH postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA School of Public Health. He has been a regular faculty member at Indiana University , Buffalo State , and Saint Joseph 's, and has held visiting appointments at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania , the Brown University School of Medicine, and the Harvard School of Public Health. He was chair of the Sociology Department and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Saint Joseph 's. In 2000, he served as American Sociological Association Congressional Fellow in the office of U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. of Delaware . He participated in the evaluation of " Philadelphia Safe and Sound," an initiative of the City of Philadelphia to improve the well being of its youth. During 2003-2004 he was chair of the Section on Communication and Information Technologies of the American Sociological Association. Governor Ed Rendell appointed him to the Pennsylvania Advisory Council on Drug and Alcohol Abuse. He also serves on the HIV Resources Allocations Advisory Committee of the Philadelphia ’s Department of Public Health and on the Board of Directors of Security on Campus, Inc.
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