Last updated March 2024

Kristin Turney is a Dean's Professor in the Department of Sociology (and, by courtesy, Criminology, Law and Society) at the University of California, Irvine. Turney’s research investigates the role of stressors in creating, maintaining, and exacerbating social inequalities in health and wellbeing. She investigates how individuals have differential risks of exposure to stressors based on their social position, how stressors influence health and wellbeing, and how stressors have unequal consequences for individuals and families (that is, how aspects of the social structure condition responses to stressors). Much of this research focuses on stressors of the criminal legal system (including police contact, jail incarceration, and prison incarceration). This research uses a variety of methodological approaches including in-depth interviews, quantitative methods for causal inference, and demographic analyses. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript, What Doing Time Does to Families: Incarceration and Family Inequality in the United States, that examines the unequal consequences of paternal incarceration for child and family wellbeing.

At the University of California, Irvine, Turney is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Population, Inequality, and Policy (CPIP), the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, and the Initiative to End Family Violence. She is also a research affiliate at the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin. She holds a B.S. in Journalism and Sociology from Northwestern University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. She completed a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan. Her research has been supported by the American Council for Learned Societies, the American Educational Research Association, Arnold Ventures, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Foundation for Child Development, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and William T. Grant Foundation. In 2019-2020, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.