Joy E. PixleyAssistant Professor, Sociology |
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Research Interests |
Career Hierarchy, Dual-Career and Dual-Earner Couples, Work and Family, Life Course, Sex Stratification, Gender Roles, Research Design | |
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Research Abstract |
I am currently finishing up, working on, or starting a number of projects with the following themes: * Career-prioritizing in dual-earner couples. Which couples are likely to favor the woman’s career and which favor the man’s career? What does it mean to say that a decision “prioritizes” one career over the other? To what extent does having the secondary career constrain occupational attainment, net of other work investments -- and is the effect the same for men with secondary careers as for women? Are the processes any different for cohabiting couples than married couples? How does the pattern of prioritization over time affect long-term outcomes? (And if I had the data, I'd test how career hierarchy operates in same-sex couples.) * Transition to adulthood. Early decisions about schooling, establishing a career, committing to a partner, and having children set the stage for later negotiations between partners about whose career is prioritized. Are young people planning ahead to best balance the work careers and personal lives they desire, or are they overly optimistic? To what extent are women with clear professional goals (e.g., in MBA programs) in worse positions than their male colleagues due to these early behaviors? * Developing and applying life course methods. I continue to develop the life history graph approach (with Carter Butts) for assessing the interactions of individuals’ multiple life roles over time or the interaction of spouses’ work roles over time. A second method can be applied to life course patterns of a certain valued event or state, allowing me to systematically represent and compare non-monotonic patterns of income, work hours, or career prioritizing, or a range of other topics such as marital satisfaction or health. * Next, I plan to apply the same questions and methods to couple-level data from a variety of other sources, including some rich data from Europe. If any students speak German or Russian and are interested in working with me on couple-level dynamics, let’s talk. |
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| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5099 | |
| Last updated | 10/03/2007 | |