Michael Ornstein

Michael Ornstein teaches sociology at York University and has served as Director of the University’s Institute for Social Research since January 2000. The Institute houses the largest university-based survey organization in Canada, and provides statistical consulting, data analysis and courses on methods and statistics.

Dr. Ornstein has been active in the development, design and execution of numerous large scale research projects at the Institute, including the Quality of Life project from 1977 to 1981, the first Canadian study on knowledge, behaviour, and attitudes about AIDS. His recent research is on ethno-racial inequality in Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver, occupational wage differences, age and cohort trajectories of earnings and promotion in Canadian universities.

Ornstein’s Politics and Ideology in Canada: Elite and Public Opinion in the Transformation of a Welfare State, co-authored with H. Michael Stevenson, was the 2001 winner of the Harold Adams Innis Prize for the best SSFC supported book in the Social Sciences and English. From 2005 to 2007 and again from 2008 to 2010 Professor Ornstein has led, and continues to lead York’s SSHRC-Statistics Canada sponsored Summer Program in Data Analysis.

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