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2026 ASA Section Awards Reception Program

2026 Sociology of the Family Section Awards

 

Distinguished Career Award

Winner
Kathryn J. Edin
William Church Osborn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs
Princeton University

Kathy Edin is one of the most influential poverty researchers of her generation. Her research combines ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, surveys, and quantitative data to understand how low-income families navigate everyday life. She has authored nine books and approximately 90 peer-reviewed journal articles, advancing our understanding across four key areas: (a) how single mothers survive on welfare and low-wage jobs, (b) the impact of economic insecurity on marriage, (c) the lives of disadvantaged fathers, and (d) extreme poverty. Edin also serves as Principal Investigator of the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, the longest-running and only contemporary U.S. birth cohort study of young adults based on a national sample. In recognition of her contributions, Edin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2014, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. Her nominators consistently praise the depth and originality of her research, as well as the profound contributions she has made to advancing our understanding of disadvantaged populations.

 

William J. Goode Book Award

Winner
Christina J. Cross, Harvard University
Cross, Christina J. Inherited Inequality: Why Opportunity Gaps Persist between Black and White Youth Raised in Two-Parent Families. Harvard University Press, 2025.

In Inherited Inequality: Why Opportunity Gaps Persist Between Black and White Youth Raised in Two-Parent Families, Christina Cross investigates why being raised in a two-parent family does not reap the same rewards for Black children as it does for White children. By rigorously analyzing representative and longitudinal data, Cross systematically debunks pernicious arguments that persistent structural racial inequities result from family structure. Instead, Cross documents what she calls a “two-for-one discount” such that educational and employment outcomes among Black children raised in two-parent families are comparable to those of White children raised in single-parent families. Cross shows that durable racial inequalities in parental economic and parenting resources account for Black children’s lower educational attainment, lower annual wages, and high unemployment rates among Black young adults. The “returns” to being raised in a two-parent family are lower for Black children, mirroring the structural factors that produce lower resource returns among their parents. Cross challenges the narrative that marriage promotion programs will reduce racial gaps in life outcomes with evidence that shows these gaps result from structural, cultural, and interpersonal racism. The outcomes of Black children and families will be equalized only when America society provides more expansive resources for all families and dismantles deep-rooted racial inequalities.

 

Article of the Year Award

Winners
Deirdre Bloome, Harvard University
Garrett T. Pace, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Bloome, Deirdre, and Garrett T. Pace. “Family Tree Branches and Southern Roots: Contemporary Racial Differences in Marriage in Intergenerational and Contextual Perspective.” American Journal of Sociology 129, no. 4 (2024): 1084-1135.

Bloome and Pace examine how intergenerational ties to the U.S. South shape contemporary Black-White differences in marriage by linking longitudinal PSID data with historical Census and religious membership records. Using information on the childhood residences of respondents’ parents and grandparents, they identify “southern family lineages” and estimate event-history models of union formation among Black and White Americans born between 1970 and 1997. They find that individuals with southern family lineages are more likely to marry, regardless of where they themselves were raised, and that these lineages have historically narrowed Black-White differences in marriage because Black Americans are more likely than White Americans to have familial roots in the South. However, the Great Migration reduced Black families’ exposure to southern lineages more than White families’, contributing to widening racial disparities in marriage across recent cohorts. Southern lineage is more strongly associated with marriage than cohabitation, highlighting the enduring influence of intergenerational marital norms. The study advances family sociology by showing how historical place-based contexts continue to shape family formation and racial inequality across generations.

Winners

MacKenzie A. Christensen, University of Oregon
Kristin Turney, University of California, Irvine
Suyeon Park Jang, University of California, Irvine
Christensen, MacKenzie A., Kristin Turney, and Suyeon Park Jang. “The Carceral Contradictions of Motherhood: How Mothers of Incarcerated Sons Parent in the Shadow of the Criminal Legal System.” American Sociological Review 90, no. 1 (2025): 61-87.

This paper examines how mothers navigate parenting when their sons become involved with the criminal legal system using in-depth interviews with 69 mothers of incarcerated men, most of whom identified as Latina. Drawing on data from the Jail and Family Life Study, Christensen, Turney, and Jang recruited mothers through a longitudinal study of incarcerated men and their families in Southern California. Using an abductive qualitative approach, they explore how mothers understand and respond to their sons’ incarceration over time. Building on theories of decarceral motherwork, they show that mothers engage in crisis motherwork to manage emergencies, collective motherwork to mobilize family and community resources, and hypervigilant motherwork to protect sons from further contact with the criminal legal system. The authors find that the cumulative burden of these responsibilities often leads mothers to engage in “distanced motherwork,” a temporary withdrawal of emotional, financial, or instrumental support to protect their own well-being. By illuminating mothers’ lived experiences and the evolving strategies they adopt across the incarceration process, the article makes an important contribution to family sociology by demonstrating how the reach of the carceral state extends beyond incarcerated individuals to reshape parenting, caregiving, and family relationships.

 

Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award

Winner
Inés Martínez Echagüe, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Martínez Echagüe, Inés. “Equality Takes Work: A Process to Understand Why Women Still Do Most of the Household Labor.” Social Forces 104, no. 3 (2026): 898-916.

This paper asks why women continue to do most household labor even when they hold egalitarian ideals and face few structural constraints, and how couples try to achieve equality yet so often fall short. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with members of 20 cisgender, different-sex, college-educated couples in the United States, each partner interviewed separately, Martínez Echagüe develops the concept of “equality work”: because inequality is the default, achieving an egalitarian division of labor itself takes ongoing effort, and that effort falls disproportionately on women. Equality work includes anticipating inequality, strategizing to avoid it, monitoring equality, speaking up, fixing unequal outcomes, and withholding labor. When partners do not cooperate, the work becomes risky and conflict-generating, and many women eventually stop, absorb their partner’s share, and revise their ideals, reframing inequality as fair by emphasizing intangible domains, such as decision-making, that feel equal. By naming “equality work,” the labor women perform to close the gap between egalitarian ideals and unequal outcomes, the study gives family sociology a concept that recasts women as active agents rather than passive participants and captures a genuine paradox: for women, doing less household labor requires doing more of another, invisible kind.

Honorable Mention
Elena G. van Stee, University of Pennsylvania & Harvard University
“Performing Independence: Cultural Contradictions of Financially Intensive Parenting in Young Adulthood”

This paper asks how professional-class families in the United States reconcile two competing cultural ideals: that financially supporting adult children is often necessary, and that such support can undermine their independence. Drawing on interviews with 47 college graduates aged 27 to 33 and separate interviews with 29 of their parents, and comparing native-born White, native-born Black, and immigrant ethnic Chinese families, van Stee develops the concept of the “independence performance”: a financial arrangement that provides support while signaling commitment to the child’s independence, such as a loan later forgiven, rent later returned, or help made conditional on holding a job or completing a financial plan. Structured this way, support allows both generations to preserve identities consistent with ideals of independence even as resources transfer from one generation to the next. All three groups relied on independence performances but enacted them differently: native-born Black and White parents typically initiated them, while in immigrant ethnic Chinese families adult children more often did. The paper’s central contribution to the study of families is opening the black box of parent-to-child transfers: by drawing on relational work and impression management, van Stee names the cultural mechanism that makes class-reproducing support feel legitimate and recasts such support less as top-down investment than as a collaborative process in which adult children help shape whether and how they receive help.

 

Linda Burton Award

Winner
Yiang Li
University of Chicago

 

Family Section Award Committees

  • The ASA Family Section Distinguished Career Award: Kate Choi (Chair), Susan Brown, Christina Cross, Jaime Hsu, Emily Schafer
  • The ASA Family Section William J. Goode Book Award: Liana Sayer (Chair), Grethen Sisson, Gayle Kaufman, Pamela Smock, Lawrence Stacey, Mahala Dyer Stewart
  • The ASA Family Section Article of the Year Award: Kara Joyner (Chair), Melissa Alcaraz, Simon Cheng, Cassandra Cotton, Pilar Gonalons-Pons, and Jenjira Yahirun
  • The ASA Family Section Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award: Eunsil Oh (Chair), Faith Deckard, Vanessa Delgado, Reilly Kincaid, and Daniela Urbina
  • Linda Burton Award: Kara Joyner (Chair), Cassandra Cotton, Jennifer Hook

Family Section Council 2025-2026

  • Chair: Kara Joyner, University of Texas at San Antonio
  • Chair-Elect: Jennifer L. Hook, University of Southern California
  • Past Chair: Liana Sayer, University of Maryland
  • Secretary/Treasurer: Sojung Lim, Utah State University
  • Kate H. Choi, University of Western Ontario
  • Caitlyn Collins, Washington University in St. Louis
  • Christina Cross, Harvard University
  • Pilar Gonalons-Pons, University of Pennsylvania
  • Hope Harvey, University of Kentucky
  • Eunsil Oh, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Tia M. Dickerson, Columbia University (Student Representative)
  • Olivia Hu, University of Pennsylvania (Student Representative)

 

2026 Sociology of Population Section Awards

 

Distinguished Career Award

Winner
Kathleen Mullan Harris
James Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Few scholars have shaped the sociology of population as profoundly as Kathleen Mullan Harris. As Director and Principal Investigator of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) from 2004 to 2021, and through her continuing leadership of the Add Health Parent Study, Kathie built one of the nation’s most consequential population health data infrastructures. Add Health has supported more than 5,000 peer-reviewed publications and hundreds of dissertations. Across her career, she has secured hundreds of thousands of dollars in research funding, and her 200+ publications integrate biological, behavioral, social, and contextual determinants of health. Her research has documented persistent health disparities by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and immigrant status, and helped pioneer the study of gene-environment interactions in population health. Her service to the field is equally distinguished: President of the Population Association of America, Chair of the Committee on Population of the National Academies, and Chair of the National Academies consensus study on rising midlife mortality. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the AAAS. Through her research, her leadership, and the data infrastructure she has helped build, Kathie Mullan Harris has shaped the work of generations of population health scholars.

 

Otis Dudley Duncan Book Award

Winner
Hope Harvey, University of Kentucky
Harvey, Hope. 2025. Doubled Up: Shared Households and the Precarious Lives of Families. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

The Otis Dudley Duncan Book Award Committee is honored to present this year’s award to Hope Harvey. In Doubled Up, Harvey offers a timely and insightful account of the millions of families who rely on shared households to get by. Harvey expands the lens of family demography beyond the nuclear household, revealing in rich qualitative detail the hidden labor, negotiation, and sacrifice embedded in the everyday survival strategies of doubled up households. She argues that doubled-up living arrangements function as an imperfect private safety net, emerging out of necessity in response to rising inequality, precarious labor and housing markets, and a meager welfare state. The Committee applauds Doubled Up for its nuanced and humanizing analysis that deepens our understanding of this demographic phenomenon.

 

Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship in Population Award

Winners
Letícia J. Marteleto, University of Pennsylvania
Sneha Kumar, Northwestern University
Luiz Gustavo Fernandes Sereno, University of Pennsylvania
Alexandre Gori Maia, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)
Marteleto, Letícia J., Sneha Kumar, Luiz Gustavo Fernandes Sereno, and Alexandre Gori Maia. 2025. “Who Can Have a Baby? Social Norms and the Right to Reproduce.” American Sociological Review 90(6):1060–1091.

This article develops a novel theoretical and empirical framework for analyzing childbearing norms. It introduces the theory of socially sanctioned reproduction (TSSR) and shows how evaluations of who is “fit” to have children are shaped by the intersectional attributes of potential mothers and by the characteristics of those making these judgments. The authors draw on an innovative conjoint survey experiment with a population-based sample in Brazil to demonstrate that social approval for childbearing is patterned by race and socioeconomic status, with disadvantaged women—especially those who are low-SES and Black—receiving significantly less approval. By showing how discrimination operates through both structural inequalities and in-group/out-group dynamics, this article makes an important contribution to the sociology of population and advances research on reproductive justice.

Honorable Mention

Deirdre Bloome, Harvard University
Garrett T. Pace, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Bloome, Deirdre, and Garrett T. Pace. 2024. “Family Tree Branches and Southern Roots: Contemporary Racial Differences in Marriage in Intergenerational and Contextual Perspective.” American Journal of Sociology 129(4):1084–1135.

This article provides a framework for understanding how past population patterns shape contemporary population inequalities. The authors integrate intergenerational and contextual approaches to show how family lineages rooted in the U.S. South transmit place-based influences across generations and shape present-day racial differences in marriage. They use linked longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to demonstrate that southern family lineages increase the likelihood of marriage and help explain the evolution of Black–White differences in marriage. In particular, higher exposure to southern lineage among Black individuals historically reduced racial gaps in marriage, while the decline of this exposure following the Great Migration contributed to their widening over time. By tracing how the legacy of the U.S. South is carried through family lineages, this article demonstrates how historical contexts continue to structure contemporary demographic inequalities.

Honorable Mention
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, University of Minnesota
Wrigley-Field, Elizabeth. 2025. “Three Ways of Looking at Black–White Mortality Differences in the United States.” Annual Review of Sociology 51:1–20.

This article offers a rethinking of how scholars conceptualize and measure racial disparities in mortality. Moving beyond conventional demographic indicators such as life expectancy and excess deaths, Wrigley-Field outlines three approaches—distributional, comparative, and meaning-based—to capture the scale and significance of Black–White mortality differences. Particularly innovative is the introduction of “meaning-based” metrics, which seek to quantify the lived consequences of premature mortality, from lost political representation and cultural transmission to diminished opportunities for relationships, aging, and personal transformation. By bridging together formal demographic methods with insights from multiple intellectual traditions, the article challenges researchers to consider not only how much inequality exists, but what it means for human lives. In doing so, it points toward a more humanistic direction for demographic research on inequality.

 

Student Paper Award

Winner
Kyle Waldman, Harvard University.
Waldman, Kyle. 2025. “Counting Race, Miscounting Identity: The Census and Hispanic Racial Self-Identification.” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 11.

In this paper, published in Socius, Waldman draws on sociological theories about the state and individual resistance and novel data that captures census-like race questions and open-ended racial self-identification questions, self-reported skin tone, reflective self-appraisals proxying how “people on the street might describe them” on a large sample of Hispanics to get at how Latinos self-identify. This paper is theoretically rich and empirically grounded, providing important insights into the meaning of a panethnic category like “Hispanic” as well as the implications of the combined race/ethnicity item with a Hispanic race option to be included in the 2030 Census. He concludes that including a Hispanic option on the census race question improves overlap between state and everyday race categories, but a Hispanic racial self-identification is by no means a universal convention.

Honorable Mention
Milly Yining Yang, Yale University
Yang, Milly Yining.The Skills Paradox: Economic Threat, Legal Boundary-Making, and Labor Market Inequality in US Migration

In this paper, Yang’s proposes the ‘skills paradox’ whereby employment-based immigration relies on an institutional architecture where state-administered rules embed contradictory logics and produce a dual labor market disadvantage for foreign workers: while the temporary visa stage first normalizes overeducation by binding migrants to employer sponsorship and restricting job mobility, the permanent employment screening stage later penalizes overeducation as an economic threat. She also argues that labor market disadvantage is racialized, with immigrants from Latin America and Africa especially harmed. She goes on to use uses the entire population of labor certification applications filed that were approved or denied between January 2015 through June 2025 to test these associations. This study advances scholarship on group boundary-making and labor market inequality, and addresses active debates on economic threat and national membership.

Honorable Mention
Emily Curran, University of Pennsylvania.
Curran, Emily. Parenthood Penalties in Same-Sex Couples: How Parental Status Shapes Paid Work Specialization in American Couples

In this paper, Curran expands our understanding of the ways parenthood is linked with inequality in marriage by considering the parenthood specialization penalty –the share of paid work performed by one partner is greater than half – among a sample of different sex, gay, and lesbian couples with children. Using data from 2015-2019 ACS, yielding a sample of more than 1.5 million couples, 26,630 of whom were same-sex, Curran combines sociological theory and the creative use of cross-sectional data to describe contemporary marriage dynamics and tests ideas about gender, parenting, and economic equality in romantic unions. By leveraging variation both between and within same-sex couples, this study advances a more comprehensive account of parenthood specialization that reveals the heteronormative gendered conditions under which penalties emerge.

 

Population Section Award Committees

  • The ASA Population Section Distinguished Career Award: Shannon Monnat (Chair), Ashton Verdery, Jeffrey Timberlake, Reanne Frank
  • The ASA Population Section Otis Dudley Duncan Book Award: Emily Rauscher (Chair), Wang Feng, Zoya Gubernskaya, Laura Tach
  • The ASA Population Section Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship in Population Award: Sophia Chae, Julia Behrman, Joseph Lariscy
  • The ASA Population Section Student Paper Award: Shannon Cavanagh (Chair), Jane Furey, Noli Brazil, Angelina Grigoryeva, Joe Labriola

 

Population Section Council 2025-2026

  • Chair: Karen Guzzo, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Chair-Elect: Shannon Cavanagh, University of Texas at Austin
  • Past Chair: Jennifer Karas Montez, Syracuse University
  • Secretary/Treasurer: Courtney Boen, University of Pennsylvania
  • Sophia Chae, University of Montreal
  • Zoya Gubernskaya, University at Albany, SUNY
  • Shannon Monnat, Syracuse University
  • Emily Rauscher, Brown University
  • Fernando Riosmena, University of Texas at San Antonio
  • Ashton Verdery, Pennsylvania State University
  • Qianyi Sinyee Lu, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Student Representative)
  • Jessica Short, Indiana University (Student Representative)