Dr. Julia Behrman

Dr Julia Behrman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Behrman’s research investigates the causes and consequences of family change in a global perspective. Behrman’s research has received funding from the National Science Foundation and South African Medical Research Council and her work has received awards from American Sociological Association Sections on Education, Population, and Development; the Society for the Study of Social Problems; the Population Association of America; and the Sociologist AIDS Network. Prior to starting at Northwestern, she was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She received her PhD from New York University in 2017.

While at DeZIM, Behrman plans to work on a project on the intergenerational transmission of fertility in extended families. The proposed study brings new insights to studies of the intergenerational transmission of fertility by extending the unit of measurement from the nuclear family to a more comprehensive unit: the extended family. We adopt a novel “extended family” approach that reconceptualizes the extended family as a discrete unit (or “clan”) made up of households linked by birth, marriage, and adoption spanning multiple generations and extended kin ties (grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins and in some cases great-grandparents, great-uncles, second cousins, and so on). In doing so, we argue that the impacts of clans are greater than the sum of their parts and an exclusive focus on parents—or even grandparents—overlooks the multitude of ways in which the extended family could influence fertility. The specific aims of this project are to: (1) Quantify whether clans are associated with fertility above and beyond the nuclear family; (2) Explore which clan characteristics are associated with fertility; and (3) Examine heterogeneities in the association between clan characteristics and fertility by race and gender.

Link to external profile:

sociology.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/core/julia-behrman.html