I work on sociological and demographic questions around family, health & mortality, and social inequality. In the most general sense, I am interested in how societies differ in who lives with whom, who gets how much of the good and bad things in life, and how (mis)fortune in life is related to family background.
My research agenda has evolved around several major projects. In FamSizeMatters, an ERC-funded project of which I was the PI, we study various questions about the link between family size and composition and (the reproduction of) social inequalities. Work is still ongoing on several papers from this project and on new spin-off projects.
Work in the Norface ERA-NET funded project, CritEvents - Critical Life Events and the Dynamics of Inequality - studies how the risk of and vulnerability to critical events - union dissolution and job loss - is socially patterned, how this has changed over time, and which social policies are relevant for these associations. In this project, our Oxford team (myself, Erzsébet Bukodi and Lewis Anderson) partnered with colleagues from Amsterdam, Cologne, Lausanne, Florence, and Stockholm.
A global view of family dynamics is central to my contributions to the Global Family Change project. This project was spearheaded from Penn with partners in Oxford, Barcelona (CED), Montreal (McGill), and Milan (Bocconi) and explores the complex ways in which families are changing across low and middle-income countries. Finally, with Gilles Pison (INED, Paris) and Jeroen Smits (Nijmegen), I share a long-standing interest in the development of twin fertility and its related high infant mortality rates.
