She is Sewell Bascom Professor of Sociology, Emerita, and was director of the Survey Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison,[1] and president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
[2] Schaeffer graduated in 1971 from Washington University in St. Louis with a bachelor's degree in anthropology.
She earned a master's degree in urban studies from the University of Chicago in 1974, with a master's thesis on Islam and the City: A Research Ideology Reassessed supervised by geographer Paul Wheatley.
She returned to the University of Chicago for doctoral studies, completing a Ph.D. in sociology there in 1984.
Her dissertation, Distress in Major Adult Roles and Depression among White Men and Women, was supervised by Edward O.