Department of Sociology

Vida Maralani (Ph.D. UCLA, 2006) works on a range of topics related to social stratification and demography. She studies educational stratification and inequality, intergenerational processes, social demography, and the pathways that link education and health. Her work examines the connections between education and demographic processes such as marriage, fertility, and mortality, especially with regards to the intergenerational effects of increases in women's education. She also studies why different subgroups acquire different levels of schooling, differences in age patterns of school entry and completion, and how educational inequalities persist or change. Another line of research examines the role that schooling plays in the production of health inequalities, and whether and how these pathways differ across groups.