
Heather M. Rackin
Assistant Professor
Phone: (225) 578-5123
E-mail: hrackin@lsu.edu
PhD: Duke University, 2013
Office: 125 Stubbs Hall
Biography
Hello and thank you for actually looking at my page (assuming you arrived here due
to some rational choice rather than random chance)! I recently joined the faculty
in the LSU Sociology Department after receiving my Ph.D. in Sociology at Duke University.
In short, my primary research interests include family, fertility, demography, and
research methods. If you want to know more, please read on. If not, thanks for this
short cyber visit. My work has two threads. First a relatively traditional set of
papers in the social demography literature and a second innovative project that builds
on this social demography by applying network methods to textual data describing family
formation. My relatively traditional papers generally examine what factors influence
family formation and fertility over time and the implications of these trends. My
questions tend to be centered on why people tend to have certain family forms (or
fertility patterns), how do those change over time, and what are the implications
for inequality. Additionally, I’m very interested in developing a novel methodology
to explore similar questions. I innovatively use a novel methodology to understand
how structural and schematic factors shape family formation behaviors and connect
multiple methodological and theoretical traditions. This work combines theoretical
and methodological innovations using both qualitative and quantitative analysis. This
research was guided by my interest in applying the Theory of Conjunctural Action that
connects cognitive schemas and material conditions into demography (see, Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a Theory of Conjunctural Action). The difficulty in measuring schemas lead me to adapt a novel methodology, Network
Text Analysis, which uses social network techniques adapted to networks of words to
build a relational network of words used together to decipher meaning. Patterns of
frequent word associations appear and represent meaning or mental schemas. My most
recent work examines the links between marriage and fertility with a focus on how
cognitive schemas and material conditions interact for low-income Blacks. I use interview
data from childless low-income Blacks from the Becoming Parents and Partners Study
(N=69). I explore schemas of childbearing and marriage. Contrary to previous findings
that low-income parents do not link marriage and fertility and have different requirements
for each, I find that marriage and childbearing are indeed linked and have similar
requirements prior to childbearing. Low income Blacks hold quite traditional views
about the appropriate role of marriage and its sequencing vis-à-vis fertility. I argue
that the material constraints to marital childbearing may lead to non-marital births
and thus respondents sever schemas connecting marriage and childbearing and adopt
other schemas of childbearing to provide ad hoc justifications for their behavior.