Christiaan Monden
Professor of Sociology and Demography
I work on sociological and demographic questions around family, health and mortality, and social inequality. In the most general sense, I am interested in how societies differ in who lives with whom, who gets how much of the good and bad things in life, and how (mis)fortune in life is related to family background.
My research agenda has evolved around several projects. In FamSizeMatters, an ERC-funded project for which I was the PI, we study questions about the link between family size and composition and the reproduction of social inequalities. Work is still ongoing on several papers from this project and on new spin-off projects.
Work on the Norface ERA-NET-funded project CritEvents - Critical Life Events and the Dynamics of Inequality - examined how the risk of and vulnerability to critical events - union dissolution and job loss - are socially patterned, how this has changed over time, and which social policies are relevant to these associations. In this project, our Oxford team (myself, Erzsébet Bukodi and Lewis Anderson) partnered with colleagues from Amsterdam, Cologne, Lausanne, Florence, and Stockholm.
A global view of family dynamics was central to the Global Family Change project. This project was spearheaded from Penn with partners in Oxford, Barcelona (CED), Montreal (McGill), and Milan (Bocconi) and explored the complex ways in which families are changing across low and middle-income countries. Finally, with Gilles Pison (INED, Paris) and Jeroen Smits (Nijmegen), I share a long-standing interest in the development of twin fertility and its related high infant mortality rates.
Research Areas: social inequality, demography, population studies, family sociology, health and wellbeing, quantitative methods