Changing family dynamics shapes future societies.
Changing family dynamics, such as shifts in the timing of fertility or number of children and family diversity plays a crucial role in shaping societies.
The Centre also has expertise in the study of family structure, complexity and dynamics and fertility processes. Research has examined educational assortative mating, twinning across the world, cohort trends in sibship size and the relationship to educational attainment and internationally, grandparenthood and subjective wellbeing. Work also focuses on cash transfers and household dynamics, the importance of marriage for the intergenerational transmission of income and how mass education has altered women's autonomy in Latin America.
We have also engaged in the biosocial examination of family and fertility processes where we discovered 371 genetic variants linked to age at first sex and birth, identified variants linked to number of children and demonstrated the importance of the inclusion of the family in genomic estimates.
Recent work
New study on human fertility
This video outlines the findings of a ground-breaking Nature Human Behaviour study co-authored by our Director professor Melinda Mills alongside Iain Mathieson and John Perry et al. that identifies genetic variants influencing human fertility. Find out more here.