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Graduate Student

• Affiliation(s)

  • Population Studies Trainee

• Fields of Study

  • Social Demography

• About

  I am interested in family processes, including marriage, marital dissolution, and fertility behaviors. I study the ways in which people’s attitudes and experiences influence their motivation for these family behaviors. My research currently has a strong focus on the South Asian context of rural Nepal. In this context, I have worked on projects investigating the influence of mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes on sons’ marital behavior, and the influence of neighbors’ attitudes on women’s progression to third and higher parity births. I am also interested in survey methods used to study family processes, and have been working with US data to study the influence of frequent survey measurement on the sexual behavior of young women. My current research focuses on marital dissolution in rural Nepal—a setting in which divorce has historically been rare.  I study the way that marital dissolution operates in this setting, and the factors that can lead marriages to dissolve. For example, I am working on a paper that investigates the influence of marital discord on dissolution, and whether wives’ and their husbands’ attitudes each have an independent influence on this marital outcome.

• Education

  • B.A. University of Maryland, 2006

• Research Areas of Interest

  • Social Demography, Family Demography, Developing Country Populations, Divorce, Fertility, Marriage, Survey Methods

• Dissertation Title

  • Women’s Experience with Marital Dissolution in a Setting of Rapid Social Change

• Dissertation Committee

  • Abigail J. Stewart, William G. Axinn, Dirgha Jibi Ghimire, Jennifer Barber