Dr. Musick's interests include medical sociology - social factors and health; religion and health; sociology of aging and the life course; and social psychology. Dr. 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 second area of research focuses on the factors that predict volunteering and how volunteering influences physical and mental health outcomes. In 2008 his book, Volunteers: A Social Profile, was published. 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.