RESEARCH

Overview

As a family sociologist and social demographer, my primary goal is to understand how family and gender shape social inequality, with a particular emphasis on how this impact varies across different societies and time periods. My current research agenda comprises three areas of focus: 1) gender dynamics in marriage and family, 2) marital formation, dissolution, and repartnering, and 3) unequal life chances and experiences of children. Below, I provide a more detailed description of each area and list my published and working papers.

Gender dynamics in marriage and family

My first project focuses on marriages where the wives possess a higher socioeconomic status than their husbands, which is also referred to as female hypogamy or female breadwinning. In the first paper, I investigate the relationship between macro-level factors and people's attitudes towards female breadwinning. Specifically, this chapter examines whether and how societal gender equality and economic conditions are related to men's and women's aversion to female breadwinning. The second paper explores the associations between being a female breadwinner and women's health and well-being, while also examining how cultural discomfort with female status-dominant marital relationships in society moderates the associations. Lastly, the third paper documents the changes in the relationship between couples' relative education and marital dissolution over the past two decades in South Korea, which is a gender-traditional society.

Lee, Sangsoo. In progress. "Men's and women's aversion to female breadwinning in 57 countries: Linking individual attitudes to macro-level contexts"
Lee, Sangsoo. In progress. "Female breadwinners' health and well-being: How do individual gender attitudes and societal gender culture matter?"
Lee, Sangsoo. In progress. "Trends in couples’ educational pairings and marital dissolution in South Korea."

Marital formation, dissolution, and repartnering

I am interested in marital formation, dissolution, and repartnering in societies with relatively conservative family norms compared to Western societies. My research shows that the association between spouses' marital histories (i.e., first-married vs. remarried) has declined over time across all educational groups, but crossing boundaries of marital history is most difficult among marriages in which both spouses are college-educated. Another research explores how divorced men's and women's remarriage intentions have changed over the past two decades, showing dramatic declines in divorced men's interests in remarriage. Lastly, a more recent study expands this line of research by incorporating the roles of couples' religious homogamy in understanding marital success.

Lee, Sangsoo, and Hyunjoon Park. 2021. "Trends and educational variation in the association between spouses' marital histories in South Korea, 1993-2017." Demographic Research 45: 857-870. [link]
Lee, Sangsoo, and Jaesung Choi. 2023. "Gendered trends and patterns of attitudes toward remarriage among the divorced in South Korea." Population Research and Policy Review 42(1): 11. [link]
Lee, Sangsoo, and Myoung-Jin Lee. 2023. "Religious homogamy and marital satisfaction in South Korea: Exploring variations across religious groups." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 62(3): 672-693. [link]

Unequal life chances and lives of children

This line of research seeks to understand how children's life chances are unequally shaped across families and societies in which they are situated. Especially, my research investigates how children's lives are gendered and stratified in diverse domains such as health behaviors (e.g., physical activity or meal skipping) and paid and unpaid work with cross-national data. This research suggests that families and macro-level societal contexts are important factors in making the lives of children. Another recent project studies how social inequalities are reproduced across generations by exploring the trends in advanced degree holding parents' financial investment in young children in the United States.

Lee, Sangsoo, and Youngshin Lim. 2022. "The gendered playing field: Family socioeconomic status and national gender inequality in adolescents' out-of-school physical activity." Social Science & Medicine 305: 115062 (equal authorship). [link]
Lee, Sangsoo. In progress. "Social inequalities in adolescents' health behaviors: Evidence from a cross-national study."
Cha, Yun, and Sangsoo Lee. In progress. "Trends in advanced degree holding parents' financial investment in young children in the United States, 1995-2019."