introduction

My research interests are social aspects of inequality. I'm especially interested in the relationship between social inequality and family formation. As an individual living in a society, we interact with people from similar or different backgrounds and might finally meet a partner and have a family in the future. The result of these individual choices is a transmission of economic or social resources from parents to children, which is social mobility in my field.
In my master thesis, I would like to examine how family formation such as marriage and having children contributes to (re)constructing inequality not only in Japan, the country where I was born, but also in other developed countries. In recent years, scholars in sociology and demography have shown that one reason for growing inequality in the United State is an increasing number of women going to college, having stable jobs, and being engaged with partners from similar social backgrounds. Through comparative analysis, I would like to show these trends are also (or will be) observed in contemporary Japan.