Marisa Young is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at McMaster University and an Early Career Fellow at the Work-Family Research Network (formally the Sloan Foundation). Her research investigates the intersection between work, family, and residential contexts to bring a greater understanding to social inequalities in mental health for parents and children.
Her research has been published in well-known journals, such as the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Family Relations, Journal of Family Issues, Society & Mental Health, Social Science Research, and Work & Stress. Her contribution to work and family scholarship has also been notably recognized, receiving the 2016 Reuben Hill Award from the National Council on Family Relations and several nominations for the prestigious Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research.
Dr. Young is the recipient of the 2017 Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Science and Innovation. With this award, she plans to examine the impact of family-friendly community resources (FFCR) on parents’ experiences of work-family conflict, health, and well-being over time. Supplemented with SSHRC and CIHR funding, this study takes a unique approach compared to previous research on regional effects, which often relies on census-based measures of disadvantage or aggregated individual-level responses by census tract, for example. The ability to actually measure residential resource availability transcends limitations of these previous studies that, instead, assume that disadvantage markers necessarily imply the absence of resources.
Aggregate data on FFCR from over 250 Canadian residential regions—measured at different time points—were then matched to individual-level data from an already existing longitudinal data set: The Canadian Work, Stress and Health Study, which includes a myriad of health and work-family interface measures. The multilevel longitudinal nature of these data provide a novel opportunity to explore the impact of community context on parental outcomes overtime.