I use primarily qualitative methods to investigate the intersections of reproductive health, family formation, and gender. The cornerstone of my research agenda is the idea that reproduction is a social, cultural, and political process. Transitions in the reproductive life course represent key transitions in social status and identity.
Modeling Infertility as a Social Process
Website under construction!
Constructions of Family
Website under construction!
Making Sense of the Postpartum Period
I use posts and comments scraped from parenting, pregnancy, and childbirth-focused communities on social networking website Reddit to qualitatively investigate the intersection of motherhood, mental health, and medicalization. I argue that discussions of postpartum depression prioritize medicalized views of the postpartum period, and situtate the postpartum period as another dimension of medicalized reproduction.
Identifying Sources of Sexual and Reproductive Health Information
As part of a research team, I explore adolescents’ experiences with identifying sources of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information based on 23 in-depth interviews with Black adolescent girls living in North Carolina. This project has generated publications in the Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology and the Journal of Adolescent Health.
Kaitlin H. Joshua 