Ronald Anderson

Ronald Eugene Anderson (June 14, 1941 – December 21, 2020), also known as Ron Anderson, was an American sociologist.

While born in Sikeston, Missouri, from 1944 to 1953 he lived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

In the late 1960s, Anderson worked full-time as a computer programmer at the Stanford University Computation Center, now called Information Technology Services.

Throughout his career as a sociologist, he also worked as a computer consultant developing applications for many educational, governmental and business organizations.

Many of publications by Anderson (125 articles, 4 books authored, and 5 books edited) describe and critique the use of computers and new media in research, teaching, and learning.

Anderson learned secondary data analysis skills from his mentor, Stuart C. Dodd at the University of Washington in 1963, and his advisor, John W. Meyer at Stanford University.

Anderson applied these skills with John O. Field to study how ideology influenced presidential elections.

The resulting paper, published in the Public Opinion Quarterly, was reprinted in several major political science texts and was discussed at length by Herbert Hyman, who considered the Anderson-Field link between theoretical analysis and creative mining of secondary data resources to be exemplary and a contribution to both theory and data analysis methodology.

He was a Professor Emeritus at University of Minnesota in Twin Cities where he taught sociology from 1968 to 2005.

His early work focused on social and institutional factors shaping the diffusion of technology-based teaching.

In 1968, he accepted a faculty position at the University of Minnesota and still resides in the Minneapolis area.

He graduated from La Sierra University in Riverside, CA with a BA in psychology, and from Stanford University with a PhD in sociology in 1970.

During the 1970s and 80s, Anderson pioneered educational software applications for social science teaching and research.

He developed over 50 applications that were distributed by Random House, Longman Publishing, and Control Data Corporation.

Some of the more popular titles include Social Indicators Game,

The Public Opinion Exercise: American Sexual Values and Social Power Game.

This work started in 1979 for the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission and the [Minnesota Department of Corrections] (MDOC).

It consisted of a [microsimulation] model of the effects of hypothetical changes in sentencing laws upon prison and probation populations.

The model, now called the Structured Sentencing Simulation, is still used by [Minnesota] and [North Carolina] in prison population projections and “what if” scenario simulations.

In 1981, Anderson received a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct secondary analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) of science and math.

Thirty years later, researchers continue to find major gaps (digital divides) in the demographics of the use of information technology In 1981, Anderson founded and served as Director of the Minnesota Center for Survey Research.

He served in that capacity for five years and started the Minnesota State Survey and the Twin Cities Area Survey, both of which are still conducted annually by the center, which is a unit of the University of Minnesota.

During the next two decades, Anderson continued survey work but mostly cross-nationally, which is described in later sections below.

One of the papers from this project was published in 1984 and was the first report on the digital divide in the United States using large-scale, national survey data.

The term digital divide did not appear in the literature or the media until 11 years later.

These results, with lengthy quotes from Anderson, who directed the US portion of the study, were widely disseminated in the popular media including articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, and Ms. Magazine.

In the academic literature, Anderson is reported as “explicating the depth of the digital divide in shaping the adolescent life course.” While the media focused upon the findings of sex and income gaps in access and computer course enrollments, Anderson and his associates also found major differences by race and region.

He also (with David Garson) has served as Co-Editor of the Sage Publishing academic journal, Social Science Computer Review, since 1987.

Anderson pioneered the development of two major simulation models.

The first provides scenario-based analysis of the impacts of changing sentencing laws.

In 1990, he became an invited member of Sociological Research Association; and in 2008, he became an invited Fellow of the American Educational Research Association.

In 2001, he was awarded the Outstanding Service Award by the Special Interest Group for Computers and Society of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Since 2007, his work has focused on web-based compassion and world suffering.

His second major simulation work, between 2009 and 2012, addresses college student retention.

He and demographer, Martin Spielauer, developed a computer model called MicroCC.

It was developed under a grant from the [National Science Foundation], and has been applied to 250,000 community college students in New England.

In August, 2012, the Communication and Information Technology Section[4] of the American Sociological Association will honor him with the prestigious William F. Ogburn Lifetime Achievement Award

Anderson died on December 21, 2020, at the age of 79.

During most of his professional career, Anderson actively contributed in three distinct disciplines: sociology, educational research, and computer science.

While his publications reside within the intersection of these fields, he has received honors or awards for outstanding service from the principal professional associations of each of these three fields: American Sociological Association, the American Educational Research Association, and the Association for Computing Machinery.