About the Contributors
Toni C. Antonucci is the Elizabeth M. Douvan Collegiate Professor of Psychology and program director in the Life Course Development Program of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on social relations and health across the life span, including multigenerational studies of the family and comparative studies of social relations in the United States, Europe, and Japan.
Francesco C. Billari is a professor of demography at the Department of Decision Sciences and director of the Carlo F. Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics at Università Bocconi, Milan, Italy, and secretary-general of the European Association for Population Studies. His research focuses on methods for life course analysis, comparative family and fertility behavior, and the transition to adulthood.
Edna E. Brown is an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, Department of Human Development and Family Studies. Dr. Brown’s research focuses on life transitions in adulthood (marital relations, divorce, and health) in the context of race and gender. She also studies the influence of culture, social relations, spirituality, and religiosity on health and well-being.
Donald Cox is a professor of economics at Boston College and has served as a consultant to the World Bank. His primary research interest concerns intergenerational transfer behavior in developing and developed countries. Dr. Cox has recently published on the connection between reproductive and evolutionary biology and the economics of family behavior. Dr. Cox takes an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and research, drawing from biology, psychology, and anthropology to improve economic models.
Olav Svein Daatland is a social psychologist and a leading Norwegian expert in aging research. He has served two periods as a research director of the Norwegian Social Research (NOVA), and is now a research professor at NOVA. He has been coordinating a number of Scandinavian studies and has been partner on several European projects, among them the OASIS project. He is also the founding editor of the Norwegian Journal on Ageing and the Life-Course.
Adam Davey is an associate professor in the College of Health Professions, Temple University. Dr. Davey is a developmental psychologist whose research addresses issues of marital and intergenerational relationships, family caregiving, and comparative analysis of the interface between formal and informal care networks, particularly in the United States, Great Britain, and Sweden. He is investigating longitudinal changes in care networks within families and couples’ navigation of the retirement process.
Cassandra Rasmussen Dorius is a doctoral candidate in sociology and demography at Penn State. Cass’s dissertation focuses on the trends and prevalence of women’s multipartner fertility and the consequences of this family pattern on children’s lives. Other research interests include family formation patterns, father involvement, and the intersection of biosociology and family life.
Jeremy Freese is a professor of sociology and fellow of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. His research interests are in articulating relationships among biological, psychological, and social processes, especially in the contexts of technological or social policy innovation. He was formerly a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard University.
Jan Greenberg is a professor in the School of Social Work, University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research focuses on the challenges faced by aging families caring for adult children with major mental illnesses, in particular schizophrenia. In collaboration with Dr. Marsha Mailick Seltzer, Dr. Greenberg has conducted a series of NIH-funded studies comparing different groups of aging parental caregivers to understand how the effects of caregiving are determined by the unique characteristics of the adult child’s disability (e.g., an adult child with schizophrenia versus an adult child with developmental disabilities).
Melissa Hardy is a distinguished professor and director of the Gerontology Center at Penn State. Dr. Hardy’s research has focused on work and retirement, including family decisionmaking; public policy, including Social Security, pensions, and the Age Discrimination and Employment Act; political attitudes; and older workers, including training, and displacement. She serves on the editorial board for Sociological Methodology, Research on Aging, and Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences.
Laura Holian is a research analyst at CNA Education in Alexandria, Virginia. Her work focuses on accountability systems, school transitions, and at-risk populations.
V. Joseph Hotz is the arts and sciences professor of economics at Duke University and is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Institute for Research on Poverty. In his research, Dr. Hotz has analyzed such issues as the costs and consequences of teenage childbearing in the United States, the effects of regulations on the availability and quality of child care services, how parents interact with and influence their adolescent children’s risk-taking behaviors, and how adult children care for their aging parents.
James S. Jackson is the Daniel Katz Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, professor of health behavior and health education, and director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on adult development and aging, attitudes and attitude change, immigration, race and ethnic relations, and cultural influences on mental health. He is currently directing the most extensive social, political behavior, and health surveys on the American and Caribbean black populations ever conducted.
Paul W. Kingston is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and is currently serving as associate dean for arts, humanities and social sciences. His research has focused on social stratification, especially in its connections to education. Aart C. Liefbroer is the head of the Department of Social Demography at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute in The Hague and professor of demography of young adulthood and intergenerational transmission at the VU University in Amsterdam. His research focuses on trends, determinants, and consequences of demographic transitions in young adulthood, like leaving home, union formation, and entry into parenthood.
Julie Lounds Taylor is an assistant professor of pediatrics and special education and investigator at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on how individual, family, and society characteristics interact to promote healthy development among families of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Kathleen McGarry is the Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt 1972 Professor in Economics at Dartmouth College and a research associate at the Nation Bureau of Economic Research. She was previously a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisors. Dr. McGarry’s research focuses on the economics of aging, primarily on the roles of public and private transfers in affecting the well-being of the elderly. She has examined the long-term care and medigap insurance markets, and the effect of expansions in the Social Security program on living arrangements of the elderly.
Susan McHale is the director of the Social Science Research Institute; director of the Children, Youth, and Family Consortium; and professor of human development at Penn State. Dr. McHale’s research focuses on children’s and adolescents’ family relationships, roles, and everyday activities. Highlighted in her work are sibling relationships and the family experiences, including gender dynamics in the family, that foster similarities and differences in the development of sisters and brothers.
Steven Nock was professor of sociology and psychology at the University of Virginia. Dr. Nock’s research focused broadly on the causes and consequences of change in the American family, concentrating on the intersection of social science and public policy. He studied issues of privacy, unmarried fatherhood, cohabitation, divorce, and marriage. He also studied covenant marriage and fault-based divorce laws in Marriage Matters, a project supported by the National Science Foundation. Dr. Nock passed away suddenly in January 2008.
Gael Orsmond is an associate professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy at Boston University. She is a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on developmental and family issues for individuals with developmental disabilities, specifically autism, across the life span.
Liliana E. Pezzin is a professor of economics and health policy in the Department of Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Her research focuses primarily on issues related to long-term care, aging, and disability, with special emphasis on the interplay between public policy and family behavior.
Karl Pillemer is a professor of human development at Cornell University, professor of gerontology in medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College, and director of the Cornell Institute for Translational Research on Aging. Dr. Pillemer’s research focuses on intergenerational relations in later life, with a particular interest in the determinants and consequences of the quality of adult child–parent relationships. He also studies family members who provide care to disabled relatives and the relationship between families and community institutions that serve older persons.
Robert Pollak is the Hernreich Distinguished Professor of Economics at Washington University, St. Louis. His research interests include the economics of the family and demography; labor economics; consumer demand analysis; and environmental policy. Dr. Pollak is the author of more than 70 articles and three books, including From Parent to Child: Intrahousehold Allocations and Intergenerational Relations in the United States, with Jere R. Behrman and Paul Taubman.
Barbara S. Schone is a senior economist at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and a visiting professor at Georgetown University Public Policy Institute. She conducts research related to long term care and caregiving decisions within families and also on employment-based health insurance. Besangie Sellars is a Kellogg postdoctoral health scholar at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Minority Health. Her research focuses on the role of social relations in the healthy development of African Americans and how social relations influence the multiple pathways to longevity.
Marsha Mailick Seltzer is a Vaughan Bascom Professor and director of the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Authoring over 130 publications, the focus of her research is on the life course impacts of disability on the family and how lifelong caregiving affects the well-being of parents and siblings of individuals with disabilities such as, autism, Down syndrome, and schizophrenia.
Merril Silverstein is professor of gerontology and sociology at the University of Southern California. Dr. Silverstein’s research focuses on aging within the context of family life, including intergenerational transfers and support, grandparenting, migration in later life, public policy toward caregiving families, and international perspectives on aging families in China, Sweden, and Israel. He is currently a principal investigator of the Longitudinal Study of Generations.
Matthew James Smith is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University. His research focuses on the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and the impact of schizophrenia on the psychosocial development of siblings across the life span.
J. Jill Suitor is a professor of sociology and a member of the Center on Aging and the Life Course at Purdue University. Dr. Suitor’s research focuses on the effects of status transitions on interpersonal relations, particularly between parents and their adult children. She is currently conducting a longitudinal study of the causes and consequences of parental favoritism in later life families.
Robert Willis is a professor of economics at University of Michigan where he is also a research professor in the Survey Research Center and the Population Studies Center. Dr. Willis is past director of the Health and Retirement Study and past president of the Society of Labor Economists. His research interests include economic development, the economics of aging, economic demography, and labor economics. He is currently pursuing a new interest in cognitive economics as a principal investigator of a National Institute on Aging program project.
Rebeca Wong is a professor of sociomedical sciences at the University of Texas Medical Branch and director of its World Health Organization/Panamerican Health Organization Collaborating Center on Aging and Health. Dr. Wong’s research focuses on the social and economic consequences of population aging in Mexico and among Hispanic immigrants in the United States. She has recently completed research on poverty, health behaviors, and utilization of health services among the elderly, international migration and old-age well-being, and served as coinvestigator of the Mexican Health and Aging Study, sponsored by the National Institute on Aging.
Laura Wray-Lake is a doctoral candidate in human development and family studies at Penn State. Laura’s research interests center on the lifespan development of personal values and social responsibility. Her dissertation explores the processes of value socialization for parents and their adolescent offspring.
Steven Zarit is the department head and professor of human development and family studies at Penn State and adjunct professor, Institute of Gerontology, Jönköping University, Sweden. Dr. Zarit has conducted pioneering work on the problems faced by families of people with Alzheimer’s disease and related memory disorders, and on interventions such as adult day services to relieve the stresses of family caregiving.
