Research Interests

My first line of research is focused on how schools contribute to social class inequality in society.

 

My PhD thesis aimed to experimentally uncover the structural barriers to educational equality (i.e., when and why teachers discriminate against lower social class students; 2013-2018; (Autin et al., 2015; 2019; Batruch et al., 2017; 2019a; 2019b).

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In the last year of her PhD (2017), I obtained a Doc.Mobility SNSF grant to work on the effects of beliefs in school meritocracy on the legitimation of social inequality at the University of Queensland (AUS). I then took a post-doctoral position at the sociology department at the University of Amsterdam (2018-2019) and continued working on both institutional (i.e., teacher discrimination; Batruch, Geven et al., 2022) and psychological (i.e., beliefs in school meritocracy; Batruch et al., 2022) processes accounting for social class inequality in schools and society.

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I came back to the University of Lausanne in 2019 to work on a nation-wide large-scale longitudinal experiment (> 100 schools) on the effects of jigsaw puzzle classroom on performance and socio-emotional outcomes for French high-school students (N > 10,000; Mella et al., 2021; Rudmann et al., 2024, Riant et al., 2024). I oversee a subproject on the socio-emotional and academic consequences of downward mobility (i.e., being a student who will likely have a lower educational diploma than their parents).

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My second line of research delves into the how social class affects one's relations to others.

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Since then, I received a SNSF Spark grant to conduct a large-scale (N > 30,000) and theoretically comprehensive (42 effects) replication project to advance and refine the theoretical framework of psychological models of social class. The project became a registered report which received an “in-principle acceptance” in Nature Human Behaviour (Batruch, Sommet & Autin, 2022).

 

In 2024, I joined the LIVES Centre as a SNSF Ambizione researcher (2024-2028) to work on  social class in a lifecourse perspective. I examine how change in social class affects interdependence. The first paper in this lifecourse perspective uses propensity score matching to analyze whether educational mobility (first-generation students transition to University) affects personality change (Batruch &  van Scheppingen, 2025).

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