Department of Sociology

Wendy D. Manning (Professor) currently serves as the Director of the Center for Family and Demographic Research. She is a family demographer and her research examines how family members define and understand their obligations to each other in an era of increasingly diverse and complex family relationships. Manning has examined the meaning of cohabitation with her work on the measurement of cohabitation, fertility in cohabiting unions, the stability of cohabiting unions, transitions to marriage, and implications of cohabitation for child well-being. Manning has lead qualitative data collections that address the measurement issues related to cohabitation, economic underpinnings of marriage, parenting in cohabiting unions, and prerequisites for marriage. Manning is using new collected data about adolescent heterosexual relationships. She is interested in how adolescent relationships influence adolescent sexual decision-making and later young adult relationships.