Maureen Waller
Cornell University
Maureen Waller has conducted research on fatherhood, marriage, and child support policy in low-income communities using qualitative and mixed-method techniques. Some of this research appears in My Baby’s Father: Unmarried Parents and Paternal Responsibility (2002). This book draws on in-depth interviews to investigate how unmarried parents living in New Jersey define fathers’ obligation to their children, develop private arrangements of paternal involvement and support, and reconcile these informal practices with mandatory welfare and child support regulations. In related work, she has examined low-income parents’ perceptions of the child support system and marriage.
In addition to conducting intensive field research with unmarried mothers and fathers, Dr. Waller has expertise with the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study. In particular, she was a member of a research network that designed and piloted the Fragile Families study, received funding for the first site of the study in Oakland, California, and helped to coordinate early survey data collection. She has also conducted two waves of qualitative interviews with a sub-sample of mothers and fathers participating in the Oakland site to explore unmarried fathers’ early connections to mothers and their children. This mixed-method research has so far yielded a journal article on unmarried parents’ expectations about marriage, a research report on unmarried parents’ relationship transitions within the first year of their child’s life, and two papers that summarize findings from the Oakland site.
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