Tell us a bit on how you’ve got involved with DZC, to now becoming a co-investigator at DZC2.
I joined the DZC team as a postdoc in September 2021. My PhD research focused on health among migrant-sending families in Asia, and I was looking for an opportunity that would allow me to explore a different research topic within the broader area of social stratification and health. The DZC project was the perfect fit. It also offered a chance to study the implications of an ongoing public health shock that was distinctly shaping my own life trajectory.
I thoroughly enjoyed working with the DZC team. During my postdoc tenure (2021-23), we collaborated on projects pertaining to:
- The influence of individual risk perceptions and local-level Covid-19 exposure on women’s shifting fertility intentions and desires during the two years of the pandemic (published in Population and Development Review);
- The value of granular fertility intention measures that reveal socioeconomic variations in the volatility and uncertainty of women’s fertility plans during Covid-19 (published in Studies in Family Planning);
- Household work and relationship dynamics for mothers and women in low SES groups in the early months of the pandemic;
- Occupational and racial stratification in the social approval for childbearing during Covid-19 using paired conjoint surveys.
I transitioned to a co-investigator on the project in 2023-24. I joined Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Social Policy during this time.
You’re making significant contributions to the questionnaire we apply to our study participants. Can you share with us what is the relevance of including the LHC section and the impact of accompanying these women for such an extended period will have to the research field (for example, research gaps this study is addressing)?
In DZC-2, we are incorporating life history modules to capture women’s relationship histories, pregnancy and birth histories, contraceptive history, migration history, and early life conditions.
These retrospective measures allow us to take a comprehensive, life-course perspective on how women’s reproductive trajectories evolved during and after public health shocks. It creates scope for various analyses that would illuminate the origin, persistence, and intergenerational transmission of disparities. Detailed life history information (that includes location and date of life events) allows us to examine how changing micro-, meso-, and macro-level conditions through the life-course inform subsequent reproductive behaviors and outcomes. As our sample varies by socioeconomic status and race, we can also examine the unequal ways in which these changing conditions across various levels shape reproductive trajectories.
Why is it important to keep studying this theme through DZC2 and what scopes you plan to focus on these coming years?
One of the goals with DZC-2 is to build out a 6-year panel, including a detailed life-history calendar, for our cohort of women. This would facilitate a range of multi-level, longitudinal analyses on the factors shaping women’s reproductive trajectories. This would be the first detailed panel study, combining retrospective and prospective measures, to track the lives of women and their children in Brazil.
Going forward, I hope to bring a life-course perspective, with a focus on the implications of early-life events and structural conditions, to further examine how relationship trajectories, family formation and health evolved during and after the Zika and Covid-19 shocks.