Sarah Kendig

Biography

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

She broadly specializes in social demography with grounding in social psychology, and her primary research interests are family, health, stratification, the life course, and fertility. Her research agenda currently focuses on teen mothers’ experience of motherhood and implications for their children using a life course and risk and resilience framework. In particular, she is working with Robert Crosnoe and Shannon Cavanagh to explore the young adult educational and relationship trajectories of teen mothers and how these trajectories are associated with experiences of parenting and children’s outcomes using Add Health and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B). The overarching goal of her research is to inform public policy, including initiatives to invest in the human capital of low-income mothers as a means of breaking down the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Additional themes in her research program focus on inequalities in adolescence and the transition to adulthood as well as variations in fertility and union formation across the life course.

Dr. Kendig's current research is based upon work supported by the NICHD Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award under Grant No. T32 HD007081-34.