Demography: Family Demography and Intergenerational Relationships

Family scholars in this area address issues key to population dynamics research, including influences on change and variation in family formation, structure, and stability; parenting and child development; and intergenerational relationships across the life course. They create cutting-edge, timely scholarship on newly recognized family structures (e.g., same-sex marriages), under-studied segments of the population (e.g., immigrants), and family functioning in the modern technological age (e.g., online marriage markets).

PRC faculty are innovators in the field and work to develop and refine key concepts in family demography (e.g., intensive parental support of young adults, education that advances health of children from disadvantaged families); advance novel mixed-methods approaches (e.g., combining demographic and qualitative methods, pairing surveys with daily diaries, joining social and biologic data); pioneer data-linking techniques to exploit extant data sources in new and innovative ways; highlight new media in research on family patterns; explore international and historical comparisons of families; and map the physical space of family life; and experiment with new methods (e.g., text analytics, machine learning, video-coding for large population samples).

Area Projects

REU Site: Undergraduate Research in Race, Ethnicity and Fami Demography

Principal Investigator: Shannon Cavanagh
Funded by: National Science Foundation

Fertility Trends, Changing Maternal Characteristics, and Children’s Health

Principal Investigator: Shannon Cavanagh
Funded by: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Identifying the Optimal Levels and Timing of Family and School Influences on Child and Youth Development

Principal Investigators: Robert Crosnoe and Elizabeth Gershoff
Funded by: National Science Foundation

Image of Children and Adults for Health Research

Principal Investigator: Rachel Gordon
Co-Principal Investigator: Robert Crosnoe
Funded by: NICHD

Environmental, Genetic, and Epigenetic Mechanisms for Hormonal Change at Puberty

Principal Investigator: Kathryn Paige Harden
Funded by: NICHD

Collaborative Research: Mexican American Language Brokers’ Multiple Levels of Stress and Academic and Health Outcomes

Co-Principal Investigators: Su Yeong Kim, Belem G. Lopez, and Katherine Zeiders
Additional Investigator: Cindy Liu
Funded by: National Science Foundation

Children's Family and Household Experiences by Maternal Education, Race and Ethnicity

Principal Investigator: Kelly Raley
Funded by: National Institutes of Health

Impact of Marital Quality and Alcohol Use on Health in Diverse Marriages

Principal Investigator: Amanda Pollitt
Faculty Mentor: Deb Umberson
Funded by: National Institutes of Health