Research interests and current projects

I am a multidisciplinary social demographer with wide-ranging interests in inequality and wellbeing, both in the United States and abroad. My research engages questions relating to fertility, families, education, and maternal and reproductive health, with an emphasis on inequality by gender and race. My dissertation investigates questions about contemporary life in the United States following the dramatic social changes of the last half century. I explore the dynamic nature of educational inequality between families over the life course, the relationship between industrial decline and women’s shares of local labor markets, and intergenerational patterns of the age at parenthood.

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 examining variation across states and over time in the gap in infant health between married and unmarried families in the U.S.

Scheduled for oral presentation at PAA 2025.

• A paper with Jenna Nobles and Marcos Rangel examining the consequences of reproductive autonomy for fertility timing and infant health.

Scheduled for oral presentation at PAA 2025.

• 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 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