Current Research Activities:
Musick's research has focused on changes in marriage, cohabitation,
and childbearing and their implications for adults, children, and - more
broadly - processes of social stratification.
In one line of research, she uses the intendedness of pregnancies to
shed light on the meaning of nonmarital childbearing and cohabitation. Cohabitation is found to increase the chances
of intended childbearing outside of marriage, suggesting that, for some,
cohabitation may be an acceptable setting to have and care for children. A second line of research looks closely at the
benefits of marriage for adults and children, paying particular attention to
differences between marriage and cohabitation and variation across
marriages. Musick finds striking
similarities in associations between marriage, cohabitation, and indicators of
adult well-being; moreover, where there are differences, many dissipate over
time. She finds that children tend to
fare better living with two married parents, but not when their parents
frequently argue or fight. Finally, a
third line of research considers the intergenerational inheritance of poverty
and family structure and how it plays into population-level trends over
time. Studies of social mobility in
sociology and economics tend to emphasize the opportunities of individuals as
they relate to labor market rewards.
Musick, examining the transmission of poverty and family structure from
mothers to daughters, focuses on the interdependence of socioeconomic
well-being and the organization of families.
This work concludes that while there are strong intergenerational links
in poverty and family structure, mobility rates are high enough to have little
effect on trends in poverty and single-parent families over time.
Musick's new project sets fertility and its correlates in a
life course perspective using longitudinal data. Its overarching aim is to understand the
evolving relationship between education and fertility in the context of
class-based changes in work and family across time and place. Women consistently "underachieve" when it
comes to meeting their stated fertility desires, particularly at the higher end
of the education distribution. Why this
is the case remains an empirical puzzle.
Scholarship on completed fertility
has waned over the past few decades in favor of more detailed examinations of
individual factors influencing its timing and social context. And economic models, often used to
describe women's fertility decisions, are increasingly inadequate in the face
of changes in women's roles at home and at work. Musick uses an approach that marries individual modeling and aggregate-level
simulation to address, first, whether the education gap in completed
fertility has narrowed over historical time and, second, what intervenes
between expected and achieved fertility as women age.
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