Linda Burton

Linda Burton's picture
Poverty Research Group Leader, Dean of the Social Sciences
Duke University
Linda M. Burton is the Dean of Social Sciences, Co-Director of the International Comparative Studies Program, and the James B. Duke Professor of Sociology at Duke University. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and the William T. Grant Faculty Scholars Advisory Board and was recently a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Child Maltreatment Research, Policy, and Practice for the Next Decade, the Committee on the Science of Research on Families for the Institute of Medicine, the Advisory Board of the National Center for Marriage and Family Research, the Board of Directors for the Family Process Institute, the Board of Directors for the Council on Contemporary Families and the Editorial Boards of the American Sociological Review and the Journal of Marriage and Family. She was inducted into the Sociological Research Association (National Honor Society for Sociological Researchers) in 2013 and is also a recipient of Distinguished Career Award from the American Sociological Association Family Section, the Inaugural Wiley Alexis Walker Award for Outstanding Research in Family Science, the Family Research Consortium IV Legacy Award, and the American Family Therapy Academy Award for Innovative Contributions to Family Research. Dr. Burton directed the ethnographic component of Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study and is principal investigator of a multi-site team ethnographic study (Family Life Project) of poverty, family processes, and child development in six rural communities. Her research integrates ethnographic and demographic approaches and examines the roles that poverty and intergenerational family dynamics play in the intimate unions of low-income mothers, the lives of African American men and boys, and the accelerated life course transitions of children, adolescents, and adults in urban and rural families.

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