Our research adopts both an inter-generational perspective, in its concern with how advantage and disadvantage is transmitted between generations, and an intra-generational perspective, focusing on the life course and human development. Much of our work is comparative in nature, across time (comparing the experiences of different birth cohorts, for example) and space (cross-national comparative research), allowing us to explore the impact of different institutional environments on the processes that generate social inequalities.
The members of CIQLE – faculty, postdocs and graduate students – are engaged in a variety of research falling within this broad area. Current projects include work on the causes and consequences of the prison boom in the U.S.; the relationship between assortative mating and income inequality; racial inequality in family formation among the highly educated in the U.S.; school context and educational attainment; the relationship between education and health; and mechanisms of the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment. A full list can be found here: CIQLE Research Projects.
CIQLE runs a weekly workshop, CIQLE Inequality and Life Course Workshop, at which faculty, postdocs, students and visitors present their work. Faculty affiliated with CIQLE provide research training in the Department’s graduate program and CIQLE organizes occasional weekend methods workshops. We are interested in, and employ, a range of quantitative methods in our work. These include models for causal inference with observational data, simulation, agent-based modeling, and social network analysis.