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Arland Thornton
Affiliated Programs:
Developmental Idealism Studies
Funded Research:
Social and Demographic Change Among American Indians (Freedman)
Ideational Influences on Migration: Values and Beliefs (NICHD)
Television and International Family Change: A Randomized Experiment (NICHD)
Research Professor, Population Studies Center.
Research Professor, Director of Family and Demography, Survey Research Center.
Professor, Sociology.
Ph.D., University of Michigan
Arland Thornton is Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, where he is also a Research Professor at the Population Studies Center and Survey Research Center. He is a social demographer who has served as president of the Population Association of America and currently holds a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health. For much of his career, Thornton has focused on the study of family and demographic issues, with a particular emphasis on marriage, cohabitation, divorce, childbearing, intergenerational relations, and gender roles. He has received four awards for his books as well as a distinguished career award from the American Sociological Association. During the past decade Thornton has devoted considerable time and energy studying developmental idealism and its influence in many areas of the world. His 2001 presidential address to the Population Association of America focused on this topic, as does his award-winning book entitled Reading History Sideways: the Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life. Of particular importance for Thornton’s current work are the ways in which values, beliefs, and people have been and are being distributed around the world. His work (in collaboration with others) has involved conceptualization, measurement, and analysis of data from several countries, including Albania, Argentina, Bulgaria, China, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Malawi, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, the U.S., and Vietnam.
Select Publications
Books
Jayakody, Rukmalie, Arland Thornton, and William G. Axinn. 2008. . (Eds)International Family Change: Ideational Perspectives. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum. Abstract.
Thornton, Arland, William G. Axinn, and Yu Xie. 2007. Marriage and Cohabitation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Abstract.
Thornton, Arland. 2005. Reading History Sideways: the Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life. Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. Abstract.
Journal Articles
Thornton, Arland, Shawn F. Dorius, Jeffrey Swindle, Linda Young-Demarco, and Mansoor Moaddel. 2017. "Middle Eastern Beliefs about the Causal Linkages of Development to Freedom, Democracy, and Human Rights." Sociology of Development, 70(94): 70-94. DOI. Abstract.
Melegh, Attila, Tamás Kiss, Sabina Csánóová, Linda Young-DeMarco, and Arland Thornton. 2016. "The perception of global hierarchies: South-Eastern European patterns in comparative perspectives." Chinese Journal of Sociology, 2(4): 497-523. DOI. Abstract.
Thornton, Arland, Georgina Binstock, Linda Young-DeMarco, Colter Mitchell, Kathryn M. Yount, and Yu Xie. 2016. "Evaluating the measurement reliabilities and dimensionality of developmental idealism measures." Chinese Journal of Sociology, 2(4): 609-635. DOI. Abstract.
Thornton, Arland, and Yu Xie. 2016. "Developmental Idealism in China." Chinese Journal of Sociology, 2(4): 483-496. NIHMSID: NIHMS820690. DOI. Abstract.