Sarah Kendig

Sarah Kendig received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2010. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

She specializes in social demography with grounding in social psychology, studying how family roles and relationships structure health and well-being across the life course in ways that reflect and reproduce inequality. This general research program breaks down into three specific strands. The first focuses on how disadvantaged, women, especially teenagers and young women, experience motherhood and the implications of these experiences for the risk and resilience of their children. The second assesses health disparities in adolescence and young adulthood and how these disparities are associated with characteristics and processes of the families in which youth grow up. The third strand examines variations in union formation/dissolution and fertility in young adulthood and adulthood across diverse segments of the population. The overall goal of this research program is to identify the ways in which social inequalities operate through families to determine how to effectively reduce disparities in key markers of adjustment and functioning during critical periods of the life course.

In the fall of 2013, she will begin a position as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Arkansas State University.