Research interests and current projects
I study relationships among family members, as well as relationships between families and other social institutions. I am also interested in health and health disparities, including issues of reproductive health equity and access. I engage questions in these areas from a feminist perspective that is informed by my training in demography and population health principles.
My master's thesis, "Family composition, race, and teachers' perceptions of parent-teacher alliance," uses data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study to investigate how teachers' perceptions of parent-teacher alliance vary based on parents' family composition. I show that teachers report single mother families with multipartner fertility and (to a lesser extent) repartnered mother families with multipartner fertility as less aligned with the school’s goals than parents with nuclear families. Socioeconomic status, children’s behavioral problems, and parental involvement do not fully explain this association. This pattern holds for White teachers but not Black teachers, and for White teachers' perceptions of both White and Black parents. This paper is published in Social Problems.
Other current projects include...
A paper with Lidia Panico and Melissa L. Martinson comparing differences in infant health inequalities across family structures in the U.S., U.K., and France (draft here)
Poster presentation at PAA 2024.
A research note with Hoa Vu, Laura E. T. Swan, and Tiffany L. Green on structural inequality in bankruptcy and Black-White disparities in infant health
Oral presentation at PAA 2024.
A paper examining how often parents return to school after divorce and nonmarital birth, including differences across race-gender groups and over time
Oral presentation at RC28 in Spring 2023.
Poster presentation at PAA 2022, available here.
A paper with Lindsay M. Cannon, where we collected original survey data via Facebook advertisements to examine changes in the division of household labor and couples' relationship quality before and during the COVID-19 pandemic
Oral presentation by Lindsay M. Cannon at PAA 2021.
A book chapter, co-authored with Eric Grodsky, on the family's influence on education