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Family Research Scholars Program
FAMILY RESEARCH SCHOLARS 2004-2005
M.V. Lee Badgett, Associate Professor, Economics Department and faculty of the Center for Public Policy and Administration
545-0159, lbadgett@econs.umass.edu
LEE BADGETT is the co-founder and research director of the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, a national think tank on policy issues related to sexual orientation. Her work focuses on family policy and on labor market discrimination based on sexual orientation, race, and gender.
Through the FRS program, Badgett has taken a new angle on the study of marriage, particularly the impact of legal marriage on couples' health and economic well-being, by investigating marriage for same-sex couples. By comparing same-sex couples who marry in Massachusetts to same-sex couples in Massachusetts and elsewhere who do not or cannot marry, we can make causal inferences about a variety of outcomes related to marriage
Sanjiv Gupta, Assistant Professor of Sociology and faculty of the Center for Public Policy and Administration
577-1773, sangupta@soc.umass.edu
SANJIV GUPTA's research areas include family sociology and demography, gender, methods. His recent work includes the division of housework, cohabitation, nonresidential fatherhood. His research on marriage and family structure has been published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, the American Sociological Review and Just Living Together: Implications for Children, Families and Public Policy.
The FRS program has enabled Gupta to delve into his research on period trends in the probability of divorce in the United States over the last three to four decades. The research models the influence on the individual likelihood of divorce of two sets of factors: changes in the effects of specific predictors of divorce and of major macroeconomic events. Gupta is particularly interested in the changing effects of women's employment hours, income and education on marital outcomes.
Joya Misra, Associate Professor of Sociology and Center for Public Policy and Administration
545-5969, misra@soc.umass.edu
JOYA MISRA's research focuses primarily on how family policies across a range of industrialized nations mediate and reshape inequalities by gender, class, and racial and ethnic groups. She has recently completed a large project studying family policies in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and is currently working on a project examining how policies shape the experiences of immigrant women caregivers.
She has received funding from the National Science Foundation and American Sociological Association Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline, and, with Dan Clawson and Eve Weinbaum, from the Foundation for Child Development, the Schott Foundation, and A.C. Mailman Foundation. She has also won a variety of teaching and research awards.
Research has shown that U.S. women who are mothers earn significantly less than women without children, even controlling for differences in education and skills, work history, and hours of work. One explanation for this wage penalty may be a lack of supportive family policies in the U.S. context. Misra and her co-author, Michelle Budig (Assistant Professor of Sociology at UMass), propose to investigate differences in the wage penalty to mothers across several nations, and determine whether some of these differences can be explained by the varying constellations of family policies countries offer.
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Lynnette Leidy Sievert, Associate Professor of Anthropology
545-1379, leidy@anthro.umass.edu
LYNNETTE LEIDY SIEVERT's research interest focuses on older women's health. She is currently working to understand variation in age and symptom experience at menopause in Puebla, Mexico; Asuncion, Paraguay; and Hilo, Hawaii. She has received funding in the past from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the AAAS, and UMass-Amherst. She has also received the Young Investigator Award (twice) from the North American Menopause Society.
The focus of the research proposals she will be preparing during her FRS year is on symptom experience around the time of the menopause in relation to hormonal change and social stress, particularly familial stress, in Massachusetts, Mexico and Paraguay, and among Bangladeshi immigrants in London (with Gillian Bentley).
Richard Tessler, Professor, Department of Sociology
545-5980, tessler@sadri@umass.edu
RICHARD TESSLER is Professor of Sociology, formerly the Associate Director of the University of Massachusetts' Social and Demographic Research Institute, and consultant to the Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center at the VA Medical Center, Leeds, MA.
Tessler's research covers social psychology, mental health, and childhood. He is the senior author of The Chronically Mentally Ill: Assessing Community Support Programs and West Meets East: Americans Adopt Chinese Children ( Bergin and Garvey, 1999). Among his numerous publications are: Family Experiences With Mental Illness (Tessler and Gamache, Auburn House, 2000); Effects of Bi-Cultural Socialization on Self Formation in Middle Childhood: A Longitudinal Study of Children Adopted from China, and Overrepresentation of Women Veterans Among Homeless Women, (Gail Gamache, PhD, Robert Rosenheck, MD and Richard Tessler, PhD, July 2003, Vol. 93, No. 7, American Journal of Public Health 1132-11).
Tessler's research has received funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, from the Department of Veterans' Affairs, and Johann Jacobs Foundation. His current proposed research is a follow-up of a large group of families with children from China. In addition to follow-up of this sample, he plans to compare Chinese adoptees in America with second and third generation Chinese-American children. A focus of the research will be to better understand bicultural socialization processes and how children's families help them cope with prejudice and discrimination.
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