Research Interests

Her first line of research is focused on the institutional and psychological antecedents of social class inequality in school and society.

 

Her 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), she obtained a Doc.Mobility SNSF grant to work on a new project investigating the effects of ideological beliefs about educational equality on the legitimation of social inequality at the University of Queensland (AUS). She 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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Her second line of research delves into the psychological consequences of social class inequality.

 

She came back to the University of Lausanne in 2019 to work on a 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). She specifically oversees 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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Since then, she also received a SNSF Spark grant to conduct a large-scale and theoretically comprehensive 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 parallel, she has been working on projects that are aimed at understanding: 1) Why is it that individuals from different social class relate differently to social groups? 2) Have manifestations of social class conflict changed over time? How is social class conflict expressed by lower-social class individuals nowadays?