About
Erin Ice is a doctoral student in Sociology and a predoctoral trainee at the Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research. Her research combines ethnographic and demographic methods to provide a fuller understanding of the complexities of an aging society. In her main line of research, she studies the demographic, institutional, and interpersonal foundations of modern caregiving. Her dissertation examines the broad social reorganization of care emerging from the ongoing demographic and medical system changes. She completed a three-year ethnographic case study on caregiving after a stroke and combines this rich data with nationally-representative survey data on older adults with various health conditions. She shows how shifts in the health care system are creating more intensive forms of caregiving at home and describes the emerging tensions that are reorganizing family life and potentially creating a new caregiving life course phase. In another collaborative line of research, she studies the meaning of, and social inequalities in, health across aging societies.
Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Horowitz Foundation, and several institutes at the University of Michigan. Her work has has received awards from the Population Association of America and IPUMS. Her work has been published in Social Forces, Gender & Society, The American Journal of Epidemiology, and Population and Development Review, among other venues.
