Associate Professor, Associate Dean for Student Affairs, University of Texas

Dr. Musick's interests include medical sociology - social factors and health; religion and health; sociology of aging and the life course; and social psychology. Musick's most recent work has revolved around two longstanding interests. First, he has continued to investigate the association between religion and health and recently published a paper on religious service attendance and prospective mortality in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Together with colleagues at UT-Austin, Musick published another paper showing that religiously active people tend to behave in ways that promote better health outcomes. Musick's work on this topic is also showcased in a forthcoming book edited by Robert Hummer and Christopher Ellison, Religion, Families and Health in the United States.

Musick's second area of research focuses on the factors that predict volunteering and how volunteering influences physical and mental health outcomes. The majority of his work over the past year has been devoted to writing his book, The Volunteer, which will be published in 2007 by Indiana University Press. The book reviews over a dozen major theories of volunteering behavior and uses several data sets from the U.S. and around the world to test them. Aside from the book, Musick has published papers and book chapters dealing with the determinants of volunteering and how volunteering affects health and other social outcomes.