Youngmin Yi

Youngmin Yi
Department

I am a sociologist and demographer who uses quantitative methods to examine the intersection of family life with the criminal legal, immigration, and child welfare systems in the United States (U.S.). I leverage an array of data sources and analytic strategies that draw from descriptive formal demographic, quasi-experimental/causal inferential, and ego-centric (so far) social network analytic traditions. My work to date has primarily focused on using survey, population-level census, and administrative data to explore associations between family member incarceration and child welfare system involvement with young people's health, living arrangements, and family instability, and, in some work, how the answers to this questions vary across space and social contexts. More recently, my research interests have evolved to include thinking more critically about the production and collection of data and the types of measures we use to describe social categories and relationships and how these processes shape our understanding of inequality and racism in the United States. Relevant questions include, for example: How might our definitions and measurement of "family" contribute to the marginalization of certain types of key social relationships and manifestations of family life? How is race measured and assigned in the collection of administrative data and how does this contribute to the "making" of race in institutions of social control like the criminal legal and child welfare systems?