J. Jill Suitor

Ph.D., Sociology, State University of New York at Stony Brook (1985)

Specialization

parent-adult child relations, family caregiving, sibling relations in adulthood, interpersonal relations & well-being, mixed methods

Dr. J. Jill Suitor (Ph.D., SUNY-Stony Brook, 1985) in a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and a Faculty Associate of the Center on Aging and the Life Course. Her research focuses on interpersonal relations and well-being, particularly relationships between parents and adult children and among adult siblings. She is especially interested in studying these processes in the context of family caregiving. Her research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Spencer Foundation, and has resulted in the publication of more than 120 journal articles and book chapters. She is Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Innovation in Aging and Associate Editor of The Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, both of which are sponsored by the Gerontological Society of America and published by Oxford University Press. She has also served as a member of the National Institutes of Health Study Section on Personality, Social Psychology, and Interpersonal Processes. She regularly teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on family relationships across the life course with particular emphasis on later-life families. Since 2001, she has led the Within Family Differences Study (WFDS), an NIH-supported mixed-method panel investigation of the causes and consequences of within-family differences and parental favoritism in more than 550 multigenerational families.

Faculty Associate: Center on Aging and the Life Course