Vanessa L. Fong

Associate Professor of Education

Profile

Vanessa Fong is interested in how the experiences of a now partly transnational cohort of Chinese only-children and their families shed light on theories of education, gender, transnational migration, and demographic, medical, and psychological anthropology. Her research focuses on a cohort of youth born under China's one-child policy. She has been engaged since 1997 in a longitudinal project that will follow members of this cohort throughout the course of their lives. The first phase of this project focused on this cohort experienced adolescence, and was based on a survey of 2,273 members of this cohort while they were in grades 8-12 in Dalian, China, and on three years of participant observation in their schools and homes between 1997 and 2009. She is now using re-surveys of and participant observation among that cohort to examine how the parenting, gender socialization, educational experiences, academic achievement, and academic interests they had as adolescents shape their decisions about work, higher education, childbearing, parenting, smoking, alcohol, diet, healthcare, citizenship, and in some cases study abroad in the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Ireland, Singapore, and other developed countries now that they are young adults. She is also collaborating with psychologists and sociologists on a project in Nanjing, China, examining relationships between socioeconomic trajectories, parenting beliefs and practices, and child development among 414 families with infants and 710 families with adolescents.

Degrees

• Ph.D., Harvard University