Leping Wang

Post-doctoral Researcher, Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University leping.wang@vanderbilt.edu

Medical Sociology

Aging

Family

Global Comparative Sociology

Social Networks

Quantitative Methods

About Me

Welcome! I'm Leping Wang, a feminist medical sociologist, family demographer, and socio-cultural gerontologist. I use advanced quantitative methods and a global comparative approach for my work. My work closely engages with feminist gerontology, critical gerontology, feminist life course theories, intersectionality, minority stress theory, and LGBTQ+ chosen family theory. I have three lines of research:

My first line of research investigates how marriage as an institution exacerbates gender inequality in health, well-being and wealth over the life course. I have multiple publications that come out of this line of work. Two of them are from the project titled “Gender, Marital Histories and Late-life Poverty: Updating Social Security Rules for 21st Century Families” funded by the RRF Foundation (PI: Deborah Carr; co-I: Pamela Smock), published in the Journal of Marriage and Family and The Gerontologist. One comes out of my dissertation work on “The Impact of Social Connectedness on Older Adults’ Mental and Cognitive Health: A U.S.- China Comparison”, published in Longitudinal and Life Course Studies. At my current post-doc, I am working on the first-of-its-kind NIH-funded National Survey of Never Married Older Adults (NSONMA) to collect pilot survey data among nationally representative never-married U.S. older adults (PI: Lijun Song; Co-Is: Deborah Carr, Brea Perry, Tara McKay, Qingxia (Cindy) Chen, and Siyun Peng).

My second line of research explores the impact of social connectedness on health and well-being outcomes over the life course across the U.S. and China, and the gender differences therein. Stay tuned for some of my work in the pipeline!

My third line of research examines how the intersectionality of human, cultural, and social capital shapes inequality in education and labor market. My single-authored and first-authored publications from this line of work appear in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Sociological Inquiry, and Social Science Research.

In addition to the three main lines of research, I am also committed to community-engaged research focused on the marginalized communities. My collaborative work that involves evaluating the social support program in Immokalee, Florida and developing harmonized matrices for evaluating community health workers' performance across lower- and middle-income countries has been published in Global Health Action and Healthcare in Low-resource Settings.