Research

Whitworth, Tanya Rouleau, Katherine Cyr, and Anthony Paik. 2020. “Remotely Coping: How are Students Faring during the COVID-19 Pandemic?” Contexts Magazine: Sociology for the Public COVID-19 Special Online Issue (Education Wave). Link

This brief report showed that law students adapted relatively well during the first weeks of the pandemic. Students experienced increases in fatalism and reduced sense of school community, but this was temporary and school satisfaction increased when the law schools switched to remote instruction.

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Cover of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health

Whitworth, Tanya Rouleau and Anthony Paik. 2019. “Sex and Education: Does Sexual Debut During Adolescence Lead to Poor Grades?” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 51(2):81-89. doi: 10.1363/psrh.12101

Here, we demonstrated that having first sex is unrelated to high school grades, except among very young Black and Latina girls, who experience declining grades after sexual debut. We speculate that this finding is largely due to the especially harsh and constraining stereotypes about sexuality that affect girls of color.

Ide, Michael Enku, Blair Harrington, Yolanda Wiggins, Tanya Rouleau Whitworth, and Naomi Gerstel. 2018. “Emerging Adult Sons and their Fathers: Race and the Construction of Masculinity.” Gender & Society 32(1):5-33. doi: 10.1177/0891243217743245

My coauthors and I found that, although both Black and Asian American college men were more distant from their fathers than White men, Asian American men compared their fathers unfavorably to the “normal American” dad, while Black men praised their “laid-back” fathers for fostering independence. We theorize that this reflects divergent reactions to racism.

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Cover of the Journal of Marriage and Family

Whitworth, Tanya Rouleau. 2017. “Teen Childbearing and Depression: Do Pregnancy Attitudes Matter?” Journal of Marriage and Family 79(2):390-404. doi: 10.1111/jomf.12380

This article was in the top 10 of most downloaded papers from JMF in 2017. In it, I found that personal fertility preferences matter more for mental health than age of the mother—a finding that counters oft-stated views and policies directed to the (supposed) psychological problems associated with teen sexuality and pregnancy.