Yujin Kim

Yujin Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and a Pre-doctoral Trainee at the Population Research Center. Her core research interests include family, demography, race/ethnic relations, quantitative research methods, transition to adulthood, and criminology. She is especially concerned about 1) racial/ethnic and socioeconomic differences in family formation behaviors across the life course, with focus on the transition to adulthood, 2) how structural, demographic, and cultural factors are associated with these differences, and 3) the long-term and cumulative effect of life transitions and events such as incarceration on health and family formation behaviors over the life course. These interests are reflected in her dissertation, Men’s Mass Imprisonment and Racial Differences in Women’s Family Formation Behaviors.

In her first chapter of dissertation, Race/Ethnic and SES Differences in Women’s Premarital Fertility Rate: Cohabitation or Contraception?, she aimed to identify the most important contributors to racial/ethnic and SES differences in the premarital fertility rate in a recent period (1997-2009). She found that contraceptive use among single (but not cohabiting) women is the main determinant of racial/ethnic and SES differences in the premarital fertility rate.  In her two dissertation chapters, she investigate how men’s imprisonment is related to women’s non-marital fertility and marriage both at the aggregate and individual level. In her second dissertation chapter, she found that increases in black men’s incarceration were positively related to increases in black women’s non-marital fertility rate at the county level. In her last dissertation chapter, preliminary results indicate that men’s incarceration rates are positively related to women’s transition to first marriage with socio-demographic confounders held constant. 

Education and Transition to Adulthood Research Group (ETAG) website