Jenna Nobles, University of Wisconsin Madison

About the Presentation for the Fall 2020 MPRC Online Seminar Series

Human pregnancy loss is common. We demonstrate that it is also socially patterned. As a result, prenatal cohort selection can shape the composition of birth cohorts in important ways, via disproportionate attrition of some pregnancies to some parents at some moments in time. We discuss the implications of largely ignored prenatal selection on several questions central to the social sciences. We then study this process using data on hundreds of thousands of U.S. pregnancies documented in menstrual cycle and pregnancy tracking apps on mobile devices.

About the Speaker

Jenna Nobles is the H.I. Romnes Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She studies how people make decisions about migration and fertility and the implications of these decisions for population change. Her current projects include the links between residential change and crime, anticipatory migration behavior, demographic responses to the diffusion of health risks, and the reconstruction of hidden population traits. Her research has been funded by the NIH, NSF, William T. Grant Foundation and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is the Associate Director of the Center for Demography and Ecology and the Assistant Director of UW-Madison’s Health Disparities Research post-doctoral scholars program.

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