Research
My research examines changes in family life through the lens of gender and social class to understand the structural and cultural forces shaping contemporary families in the United States. I am a social demographer primarily using quantitative methods.
If you cannot access any of these publications due to a pay wall, please email me.
Social class and family life
McErlean, Kimberly. 2023. Cohabiting couple’s economic organization and marriage patterns across social classes. Journal of Marriage and Family, online first. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12947
This research explores how a couple's social location affects the associations between their gendered division of labor and marriage formation. Findings are consistent with a cultural explanation for social class’s influence on family dynamics: traditional male-breadwinning arrangements predict marriage among less-educated couples, while more egalitarian dual-earning couples are most likely to marry among more-educated couples. These patterns align with class differences in attitudes regarding preferred gendered household arrangements and support theories on social change that suggest that gender equality in family life has strengthened the institution of marriage, at least among the college-educated.
Replication materials: coming soon!
McErlean, Kimberly. 2021. The growth of education differentials in marital dissolution in the United States. Demographic Research, 45(26), 841–856. https://doi.org/10.4054/DemRes.2021.45.26
In this paper, I demonstrate that overall declines in divorce in the United States have not translated to all subsections of the population. Namely, marital dissolution rates (including divorce and separation) continue to rise among women with the least amount of education.
Replication materials (and readme)
The implications of the growth maternal breadwinning in the United States
Pepin, Joanna R., Kimberly McErlean, Jennifer L. Glass, and R. Kelly Raley. “Why are so many U.S. mothers becoming their family’s primary economic support?” Demography. 11646286. https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-11646286.
This paper seeks to explain why so many mothers have become responsible for the financial provisioning of their households with children. Our findings suggest that mothers have used their increased educational attainment and labor market attachment to ensure they can hedge against potential economic downturns within their households, such as a loss of earnings experienced by their partner. Contrary to some expectations in the literature, changes in household composition, such as a relationship dissolution, do not contribute much to mothers' likelihood of becoming primary earners.
McErlean, Kimberly, and Jennifer L. Glass. 2023. “How do households fare economically when mothers become their primary financial support?” Journal of Family and Economic Issues. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-023-09922-y.
In this paper, we explore what happens to household economic well-being when mothers take over as primary financial providers. We find a somewhat surprising distribution of changes in household income: households are generally equally likely to gain or lose income when mothers become the primary earner. However, income losses are much larger than income gains, and more households are unable to meet their economic needs after the mother becomes the primary earner. Even when households gain income, it is often not enough to lift them out of financial hardship, highlighting the difficulties some mothers face in gaining and maintaining stable, high-quality employment.