Faculty

Judith A. Levine, Ph.D.

Judith LevineDuring the 2007-08 academic year, Judith A. Levine is a Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Policy Research. She is a faculty affiliate of the University of Chicago Population Research Center and Center for Human Potential and Public Policy. Her fields of interest are social stratification, poverty and social policy, low-wage work, gender inequality, sociology of the family, social demography, children's outcomes, health, and economic sociology. Professor Levine's research agenda includes investigating the processes that produce inequality and their consequences using quantitative and qualitative methods. She has had a long-standing interest in understanding poor women's welfare program participation and employment patterns.

Professor Levine is completing a book manuscript entitled Reaching for the Bottom Rung: Low-Income Mothers' Climb into the Labor Market before and after Welfare Reform under contract with the University of California Press. The book provides a rare qualitative comparison of low-income women's experiences with welfare and low-wage work before and after welfare reform through open-ended interviews with a total of 95 low-income mothers across two crucial time periods in American welfare policy - the mid-1990s, before the passage of welfare reform, and the mid-2000s, once reform was fully entrenched. Using the lens of economic sociology, Professor Levine examines social interactions and trust within three key contexts: the welfare office, the workplace, and women's own personal networks.

In other work on women, work, and welfare, Professor Levine has written on how sex segregation in occupations is maintained based on a case study of a manufacturing plant and has examined collaboratively the effects of welfare reform on health insurance coverage for disadvantaged women using census data. Her work on children's well-being includes a series of articles in which she and colleagues have investigated the causal links between adolescent motherhood and children's subsequent outcomes using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and work on the link between parents' occupational traits and children's occupational aspirations.

Professor Levine is the 2007 recipient of the William Pollak Award for Excellence in Teaching at the School of Social Service Administration.

Professor Levine graduated magna cum laude in Sociology from Harvard University and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University. Before coming to SSA, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy at the University of Michigan.