Doctoral Student

Youngjin YJ Chae is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology. YJ's research lies at the intersection of family demography, group dynamics, and computational social sciences. He examines how life experiences in early and later childhood and adolescence, such as parents' divorce/separation, coresidence with social fathers, and (non)resident father involvement, shape children's wellbeing, union formation, and intergenerational solidarity. 

He has completed a B.A. and M.A. in Sociology from Yonsei University, Republic of Korea, and his master's thesis investigated how longer coresidence with social fathers is associated with children's behavior problems. For his doctoral research, using causal inference and computational techniques, YJ plans on examining how the intersections of family complexity, the politics of parenthood, and AI affect contemporary U.S. families.

Publications: Frederic Traylor & Youngjin Chae (2025). The Effects of Environmentalism on Fertility in the United States: Changing Trends and Causality. Population & Environment. 47(4), 35. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-025-00505-7

Youngjin Chae & Thomas Davidson (2025). Large Language Models for Text Classification: From Zero-Shot Learning to Instruction-Tuning. Sociological Methods & Research, 00491241251325243. https://doi.org/10.1177/00491241251325243 

Lei Lei & Youngjin Chae (2024). Parental absence during childhood and intergenerational solidarity in adulthood in China. Journal of Marriage and Family, 86(3), 655-676. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12964