Kathryn Edin

Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs

Princeton University

Kathryn Edin’s work uses mixed-method approaches to provide new insight into the lives of America’s urban poor. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Margaret Mead Fellow at the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Working in the domains of welfare and low-wage work, family life, and neighborhood contexts, she has taken on key mysteries about the urban poor that have not been fully answered by quantitative work or other qualitative researchers: How do single mothers survive on welfare? Why do these women end up as single mothers in the first place? Where are the fathers, and why do they disengage from their children’s lives? How have the lives of single mothers changed as a result of the 1996 federal welfare reform?

US social policy and even charitable work often revolve around two assumptions: that people in poverty don't want to work and that they just don't want to play by the rules more generally, that they're morally culpable. Both notions are dead wrong, but these orienting assumptions make poverty worse and mobility harder to achieve.

Kathryn Edin