My research focuses on three concepts and their intersections:
family and gender,
culture and politics, and
methodology.
In my largest ongoing project, the MomPol project,
I examine the relationship between parenthood in politics.
As part of this project, I used quantitative data from the NLSY 1997 to demonstrate that our understanding of motherhood’s impact on voting rates is incorrect, as it is built on a false assumption about motherhood as a nonrandom event.
In a methodologicallly-focused article, I present a set of criteria by which we can evaluate drawings as data on relationships, using motherhood and women’s relationships to the government as examples. In this chapter, I use the qualitative data I collected in my study, which involved four waves of interviews and over fifteen waves of surveys with 84 women in Wisconsin between 2019 and 2022.
I also draw on this data for an article in which I argue for a new understanding of categories of motherhood as including pre-birth or pre-adoption motherhood.
If you’d like to suggest a resource or learn more, email me at abigail.jorgensen@slu.edu.