Marcia (Marcy) J. Carlson

I am currently the Sewell-Bascom Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for Demography and Ecology (CDE)  Development Core Director and Research Director of the Fertility, Families, and Households Research Area in CDE. I previously served as the CDE Director from 2016 to 2021. From 2012-2016, I served as CDE’s Associate Director for Training. As a family demographer, my primary research interests center on the associations between family contexts and the wellbeing of parents and children. My recent work has focused on aspects of family change (especially nonmarital childbearing) as linked to growing family complexity and inequality in the U.S. and increasingly in other industrialized countries; I have especially explored aspects of fathers’ roles in family life.

CDE Research Area Affiliations:

Demography of Inequality; Fertility, Families, and Households

Selected Publications:

Berger, Lawrence, Maria Cancian, Marcia J. Carlson, Daniel R. Meyer, Quentin Riser, and Nora Cate Schaeffer. “Defining the ‘Resource Unit’for Poverty Measurement in Complex Contemporary Households: It’s Complicated.” Population Research and Policy Review 43, no. 2 (2024): 1-30.

Carlson, Marcia J., Christopher Wimer, and Ron Haskins. “Changing Work, Changing Families, and Public Policies Toward Low-Income Families.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 8, no. 5 (2022): 1-22.

Carlson, Marcia J. “Sara McLanahan: Pioneering scholar focused on families and the wellbeing of children.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 16 (2022): e2204143119.

Meyer, Daniel R., Marcia J. Carlson, and Md Moshi Ul Alam. “Increases in shared custody after divorce in the United States.” Demographic Research 46 (2022): 1137-1162.