Sandra Hofferth, Ph.D.

Bio

Sandra Hofferth, Professor Emerita, School of Public Health, and Research Professor, Maryland Population Research Center, is a former Director of the Maryland Population Research Center (2008-2012) and a former co-Director of the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1994-2001). In 2010 she served as Vice President of the Population Association of America. Her research interests include American children's use of time and later health outcomes, work and family, fathers and fathering, and family policy. She has published on the effects of racial/ethnic disparities at the individual and neighborhood levels on father (and mother) involvement and child outcomes and published a series of papers on social capital. She has also investigated changes in children’s electronic media use over time. Dr. Hofferth has researched family issues in the context of public policy for over 40 years, publishing eight books/edited volumes and more than 100 articles and book chapters. She has been supported through multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and private foundations. Besides her deep knowledge of large national data bases, she has expertise in measurement, methods, and structural equation modeling. Her most recent publication is “The New Big Science: Linking Data to Understand People in Context,” an edited volume of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. From 2012 to 2021 she served as Principal Investigator on an NICHD-funded grant, Time Use Data for Health and Well-Being, which provides advanced extracting capabilities to researchers for multiple years of harmonized American and European time use data on individual time expenditures and family time allocations to activities.