Frank Folke Furstenberg Jr. (born August 25, 1940) is an American sociologist. He is the Zellerbach Family Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, and a research associate in the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the family in the context of disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, adolescent sexual behavior, and the transition from adolescence to adulthood. He has written on social change, divorce, remarriage, stepfamilies, grandparenthood, intergenerational relations, and cross-national research on children's well-being. He has been cited more than 22,000 times and is a prominent family sociologists in the United States. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Early life and education
Furstenberg was born on August 25, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland, into an established Jewish family descended from aristocratic German Jews. His father, Frank Furstenberg Sr., was a prominent physician and advocate for national health care and his mother, Edith Hollander Furstenberg, was a social worker and family matriarch. His siblings include the late founding owner of Politics and Prose, Carla Furstenberg Cohen, and the baker Mark Furstenberg.
Furstenberg joined the University of Pennsylvania sociology department as a professor in 1967. He rose in rank to the named chair, the Zellerbach Family Professorship, where he remained until his retirement in 2009. In total, Furstenberg drew on 42 years of teaching experience at Penn. Alongside his professorship, he also served as a Research Associate in the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Penn TodayUniversity of Pennsylvania - School of Arts & Sciences.
Furstenberg served as Chair of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on the Transition to Adulthood. In this capacity, he received a four-year, $5.2 million grant from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in support of the Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood. The Network, established in 2000, examines the changing nature of early adulthood and the challenges facing people aged 18 to 34 as they make the transition to becoming self-sufficient adults.
In his 2013 autobiographical essay “How I Became a Developmentalist,” published in The Developmental Science of Adolescence: History Through Autobiography (Psychology Press), Furstenberg reflected on how his longitudinal research led him from sociology to developmental science. He argued that individual preferences are shaped by social interactions and the contexts in which they occur, a perspective that informed his research on families, adolescence, and the transition to adulthood throughout his career.
Research
Teenage childbearing and the Baltimore Study
Furstenberg's research on teenage childbearing included a 20-year longitudinal study of teenage mothers and their children in Baltimore, one of the longest-running investigations of its kind. In Destinies of the Disadvantaged, he argued that public understanding of teen pregnancy has often been shaped by flawed research and political rhetoric, despite declining overall teen pregnancy rates during the 1960s and 1970s.
Transition to adulthood
Furstenberg's research showed that young people today are transitioning to adulthood later in life than they were in the 1960s and 70s, examining the causes of this change and its implications for young adults, families, and the larger society. His edited volume On the Frontiers of Adulthood (2005), co-edited with Richard A. Settersten Jr. and Rubén G. Rumbaut, explored this extended period between adolescence and full adulthood in depth.
Divorce, stepfamilies, and grandparenthood
In collaboration with Andrew J. Cherlin, he co-authored Divided Families: What Happens to Children When Parents Part (1991), which became a widely cited text on the effects of parental divorce. Together with Cherlin, he also investigated stepfamilies in the United States, publishing a reconsideration of that literature in the Annual Review of Sociology in 1994.
Furstenberg and Cherlin jointly studied grandparenthood, producing the landmark book The New American Grandparent (1986). Their 1985 study examined the grandparenting relationship along two variables, the exchange of services across generations and the degree of parental influence exerted by grandparents and identified five distinct grandparenting styles: detached, passive, authoritative, supportive, and influential.
Urban families and neighborhood effects
Furstenberg's longitudinal research followed nearly 500 families in urban Philadelphia neighborhoods over a nine-year span. Earlier findings from this project revealed continuity in success trajectories from early to mid-adolescence despite hazards imposed by poor neighborhoods, low economic standing, and poor schooling opportunities.
Family change and cross-national research
In later work, Furstenberg examined long-term changes in family life in the United States and globally. He argued that the decline of traditional gender roles and rising social inequality contributed to increasing diversity in family forms. His comparative research, drawing on data from more than 80 countries, explored how family systems are changing across the world. He also revisited the study of kinship, highlighting its relative neglect in recent scholarship and calling for greater attention to how kinship ties are formed and maintained in contemporary societies.
Adolescent mothers in later life, with J. Brooks-Gunn and S. Philip Morgan. 1987. New York: Cambridge University Press
Managing to make it: Urban families in high-risk neighborhoods, with Thomas Cook, Jacquelynne Eccles, Glen H. Elder Jr., and Arnold Sameroff. 1999. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
On the frontiers of adulthood: Theory, research, and public policy, edited with Richard A. Settersten Jr. and Rubén G. Rumbaut. 2005. University of Chicago Press
Behind the academic curtain: How to find success and happiness with a Ph.D. (2013. University of Chicago Press)
“How I Became a Developmentalist.” In Richard Lerner, Anne Petersen, Rainer Silbereisen, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn (Eds.), The Developmental Science of Adolescence: History Through Autobiography, pp. 184–191. 2013. Psychology Press
“Family Change in Global Perspective: How and Why Family Systems Change.” Family Relations, 68: 326–341. 2019
“Kinship Reconsidered: Research on a Neglected Topic.” Journal of Marriage and Family, 82(1): 364–382. 2020
Personal life
Furstenberg is married to Nina Segre. Together they have five children and six grandchildren and live in Philadelphia. His nephew, François Furstenberg, is a historian at Johns Hopkins University.
↑Furstenberg, F. F.; Brooks-Gunn, J.; Morgan, S. P. (1987). "Adolescent mothers and their children in later life". Family Planning Perspectives. 19 (4): 142–151. doi:10.2307/2135159. ISSN0014-7354. JSTOR2135159. PMID3678480.
↑Modell, John; Furstenberg, Frank F.; Hershberg, Theodore (1976). "Social Change and Transitions to Adulthood in Historical Perspective". Journal of Family History. 1: 7–32. doi:10.1177/036319907600100103. S2CID144604541.
↑Furstenberg, Frank F.; Cook, Thomas D.; Eccles, Jacquelynne; Jr, Glen H. Elder. Managing to Make It: Urban Families and Adolescent Success. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Mental Health and Development, Studies on Successful Adolescent Development. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
