[1] Her research focused on the impact of social networks on cultural change in the demography of the U.S., Western Europe, and Africa.
A native of the United States, Susan C. Watkins graduated with high honors from Swarthmore College in 1956.
After child-raising, she returned to academia, receiving a PhD from Princeton University in 1980 for her dissertation on Variation and Persistence in Age Patterns of Marriage in Europe, 1870–1960,[2] for which she received the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship,[3] the highest honor of the Graduate School at Princeton University, 1978–79.
Following three years as an assistant professor at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania invited her to join its Department of Sociology and the Population Studies Center.
In 2005, she received the Irene Taeuber Award[5] of the Population Association of America, for "exceptionally sound and innovative research."
The first round of the survey had provided a great deal of data about the composition and structure of the social networks in which rural Malawians talked about AIDS.
It had not however, learned much about the content of the social interactions—what people said to each other, rather than to interviewers, about AIDS or their strategies for avoiding infection and death—and even less about the wider everyday interactions that shaped responses to the epidemic.
Thus, the researchers improvised by commissioning 10 high school graduates, both men and women, who had worked for the survey to be participant observers during their daily routines.
Initially, Malawians were convinced that all would die of AIDS, and were skeptical about the attempts of the government and international organizations to reduce new HIV infections.
By 2017, men and women speaking about AIDS in their social networks acknowledged that times had changed, and the number of new HIV infections had steeply declined.
The study's goal was to investigate the multiple influences that contribute to HIV risks in sexual partnerships; the variety of ways in which people manage risk within and outside of marriage and other sexual relationships; the possible effects of HIV prevention policies and programs; and the mechanisms through which poor rural individuals, families, households, and communities cope with the impacts of high AIDS-related morbidity and mortality.
Among those factors were the high rate of sexual encounters among youth, and a general unwillingness to follow HIV prevention methods.
Watkins found that virtually all work in the fight against AIDS relied on brokers, who act as intermediaries between Western altruists and local villagers.
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship 2009 Irene Taeuber Award for “exceptionally sound and innovative research”, Population Association of America, 2005 Steering Committee, Mellon Foundation Southern African HIV/AIDS Node, 2001–2005 Gifford Distinguished Scholar Lecture, University of California-Davis, 1999 Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford University, 1995 Sociological Research Association, Elected Member 1994.