Ronald (Ron) E Anderson

Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota

Contact Info:
Department of Sociology, Minneapolis, MN 55455

Phone: (952) 473- 5910
rea@umn.edu

Professional Synopsis

Since 2005 I have been emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, having served on the faculty since 1968. This first phase of my career concentrated on technology, both applications to use computers in research and the evaluation of the impact of technology on society. To read about my accomplishments in these areas, please see my biographical summary on Wikipedia under the name "Ronald_Anderson." You will see that I kept very busy writing books, articles, technical reports and software applications.

I retired from teaching in 2005, but I continue to do a lot of research and writing. I have been Co-Editor of the academic journal, Social Science Computer Review, for 25 years, and continue in that capacity. And I still continue to do consulting work such as serving as an expert witness in court cases where the quality of relevant social science research is at issue.

Soon after retiring from teaching, I started work on the analysis of cross-national data on social well-being in affluent societies and constructed the Good Society Index.

As a result of my work conceptualizing and measuring compassion, I completed and published a paper entitled Caring Capital. In 2009, I established the Foundation for Compassionate Societies, a 501c3 nonprofit organization, to support my research and the websites. My principal website effort so far has been to build and maintain the website WorldSuffering.org. This site is intended to promote compassion and relief of suffering. Currently it functions as a repository of information, especially short essays about suffering and/or compassion.

In 2013 I began writing Human Suffering and the Quality of Life, which was published by Springer in 2014. I wrote this first book on suffering to layout a framework on suffering and as an introduction to current knowledge about suffering. It is a small book priced big to sell to libraries. If your college or institution has a subscription to SpringerLink, you can download chapters free.
You can download a preprint of the 129-page book as a PDF file here.

Springer in early 2015 published my edited book, World Suffering and the Quality of Life. This book of 32 chapters and 439 pages represents the best of contemporary thought and cutting edge research on world suffering. The 45 authors live in 16 countries and represent each major continent.

Now I am writing a third book titled Alleviating Suffering, which I am aiming to complete by the end of 2015.

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