Robert Crosnoe
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Social Science
Family circumstances early in life shape how smoothly young people move into adulthood, and two kinds of family hardship are the focus here: losing a family member to death while growing up, and caring long-term for a child with a serious health condition. Both projects ask how such experiences ripple through education, work, family formation, and physical and mental health over decades, and both look for the points where support could change the trajectory.
- Fields
Social Science
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
- Topics
bereavement
family member death
life course
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2028
What they work on
- Document whether exposure to family member deaths in childhood and adolescence predicts unstable trajectories of socioeconomic attainment, family-building, and health in young adulthood, using longitudinal causal-inference techniques on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health.
- Test physiological, cognitive, psychological, and social mechanisms linking early family loss to disrupted adult transitions, including emotional dysregulation and physical wear and tear, through lab-based cognitive and affective assessments, biosignal tracking, and daily diaries with 480 young adults.
- Identify concrete sources of resilience, such as opportunities to achieve and to connect, that let bereaved young people reach adulthood on stabler footing, combining qualitative interviews with the national survey analyses.
- Examine how the rewards and strains of parenting a young adult child with a serious condition converge to shape mothers' physical and mental health in late midlife, using roughly 3,100 mothers in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979.
- Test whether health risk for these mothers accumulates across the parenting career or concentrates in sensitive periods, tracking mothers from their children's births into the children's adulthoods.
- Assess whether informal family supports and formal community health and human services moderate caregiving strains, using geocoded multilevel survey data plus grounded-theory analysis of interviews with 80 mothers.
More about the research
Both combine statistical analysis of large existing survey datasets with newly collected in-depth data, so that numbers and personal accounts explain each other.
Why it matters
Both projects target populations whose needs are easy to overlook: young adults carrying the aftermath of a family death, and aging mothers caring indefinitely for adult children with disabilities, mental illness, or chronic conditions. By pinpointing which mechanisms destabilize health and attainment, when in the life course risk peaks, and which family and community supports buffer it, the work could inform the design and timing of programs, services, and policies for these groups, and supply protocols and data for future research.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Colter Mitchell
University of Michigan, MI·Public Health & Epidemiology
Compare short-term health, economic, social and behavioral outcomes among essential workers, non-essential workers, and people who lost jobs during the 2020 pandemic, using Fragile Families cohort parents and young adults.
Tessa Bonney
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Define measures of employment precarity and employment variability, including job changes and gaps in work, and describe how they change over time using the NLSY79 and NLSY97 national survey cohorts.
Elizabeth Shewark
University of Notre Dame, IN·Psychology·Early-career
Map trajectories of psychiatric, social, emotional and academic resilience to neighborhood disadvantage from middle childhood to adolescence, using longitudinal analysis methods.
The school
University of Texas at Austin: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 871 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.