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