Sohee Shin

My research examines how structural inequalities, shaped by gender, race, and migration, constrain individual agency and reproduce disadvantage across the life course and within families. To study these processes rigorously, I integrate methodological innovation with substantive inquiry, developing tools that enhance our ability to detect how inequalities evolve over time.

Methodologically, I develop and evaluate age–period–cohort (APC) models to assess how temporal structures shape our capacity to measure inequality. This work identifies a fundamental trade-off between bias and variance in modeling cohort processes, offering practical guidance for researchers studying how inequalities evolve across historical time.

These methodological considerations directly inform my substantive research, which examines how inequalities are produced and negotiated within family contexts, particularly among immigrant and transnational households. My dissertation investigates how gender inequality in housework is shaped by the interplay between partners' gender ideologies and relative resources among marriage migrant women residing in South Korea. Across three interconnected studies, I demonstrate how alignment between resources (e.g., educational pairing and relative income) and gender ideology shapes migrant women's life satisfaction, division of housework, and labor market participation.

Beyond the household, I examine how inequalities accumulate through occupational trajectories and translate into health disparities in midlife. In a related project, I examine how race and gender structure individuals' sorting into distinct occupational trajectories and how sustained exposure to these trajectories shapes physical and mental health outcomes over time. My research agenda aims to reveal how structural forces, such as race, gender, and migration status, converge to reproduce inequality across private and public domains and across generations.