About

M. Giovanna Merli is a faculty member at the Sanford School of Public Policy, where she holds the position of Professor. She is also the Director of the Duke Population Research Center and serves as the Associate Director of the Duke University Population Research Institute (DUPRI). Additionally, she is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and a Research Professor of Global Health at Sanford School of Public Policy. Her work is centered around population research, public policy, sociology, and global health, contributing to the academic and research community through her leadership roles and scholarly activities.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Demography
• Geography
• Medicine
• Computer Science
• Gerontology
• Nursing
• Environmental health
• Psychology
• Economics
• Clinical psychology
• Demographic economics
• Telecommunications
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• The impact of two types of COVID-19-related discrimination and contemporaneous stressors on Chinese immigrants in the US South

  UNC Libraries · 2025-05-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• A Note From the New Editors of <i>Demography</i>

  Demography · 2025-07-24

  articleOpen access

  Our term as the new coed i tors of Demography, the flag ship jour nal of the Population Association of America (PAA), began on July 1, 2025.We are hon ored by the trust the PAA has placed in us and are delighted that Demography will once again be hosted at Duke University-fol low ing in the foot steps of Ken Land, who served as edi tor from 2008 to 2010, and Phil Mor gan, who coedited the jour nal with UNC's Barbara Entwisle from 1999 to 2001.The trans fer of the Demography edi to rial office from the University of Washington to Duke University was smooth.We are deeply grate ful to Sara Curran and her out stand ing edi to rial assis tants, Mara Vignau Lora and Aryaa Rajouria, who have gen er ously shared their knowl edge with us over the past sev eral months.We are par tic u larly pleased to announce that Mara will con tinue to serve as our edi to rial assis tant.Her rich expe ri ence is vital to the daily oper a tions of the jour nal and to shepherding man u scripts through the edi to rial pro cess.Many oth ers also deserve our grat i tude.Demography's sea soned Managing Editor, John Thomas, is a plea sure to work with-for both authors and edi tors.We are also thank ful to the PAA Publications Committee (Matt Hall, Jenny Trinitapoli, and Elizabeth WrigleyField) for advis ing us on a num ber of impor tant edi to rial prac tices, the PAA Communications Director Betsy Alafoginis for work ing with us on con trac tual issues, and Liz Beasley and Jed Cohen at Duke University Press for their respon sive ness and sup port with the ScholarOne man u script sub mis sion sys tem and man age ment.Over the past three edi to rial terms, Demography has received sub mis sions at a robust rate of approx i ma tely two per day-a pace we aim to sus tain with a timely and trans par ent review pro cess that will be reflected in jour nal met rics cur rently in use and addi tional accep tance/speed met rics.We are also for tu nate to rely on the gen er ous efforts of our Deputy Editors and Editorial Board mem bers, who are a diverse group of respected schol ars from Duke and numer ous insti tu tions across the United States and around the world-includ ing Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America.These ros ters are avail able on the Demography website under the Editorial Team menu (https: / /www .populationassociation.org/demography /home).Deputy Editors han dle rou tine sub mis sions as well as sub mis sions from Duke authors, where con flicts of inter est may arise.Editorial Board mem bers con trib ute their exper tise by pro vid ing reg u lar, timely reviews of a lim ited num ber of man u scripts.The dis ci plin ary diver sity, per spec tives, and knowl edge of our Deputy Editors and Editorial Board mem bers are invalu able as we con tinue Demography's 60year tra di tion of pub lish ing rig or ous research and wel com ing sub mis sions from demog ra phers and pop u la tion sci en tists from across the globe.Demography, as a dis ci pline, is grounded in accu rate mea sure ment, care ful eval u a tion of data qual ity, pre cise com pu ta tion of demo graphic rates, rig or ous esti ma tion and pro jec tion meth ods, and cru cial engage ment with both tra di tional and new data land scapes.The field con tin ues to evolve, with demog ra phers apply ing their unique frame work and tools to a wid en ing array of top ics-many of which ben e fit from

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Studying Chinese immigrants’ spatial distribution in the Raleigh–Durham area by linking survey and commercial data using romanized names

  Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A (Statistics in Society) · 2024-10-23 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Many population surveys do not provide information on respondents' residential addresses, instead offering coarse geographies like zip code or higher aggregations. However, fine resolution geography can be beneficial for characterizing neighbourhoods, especially for relatively rare populations such as immigrants. One way to obtain such information is to link survey records to records in auxiliary databases that include residential addresses by matching on variables common to both files. We present an approach based on probabilistic record linkage that enables matching survey participants in the Chinese Immigrants in Raleigh-Durham Study to records from InfoUSA, an information provider of residential records. The two files use different Chinese name romanization practices, which we address through a novel and generalizable strategy for constructing records' pairwise comparison vectors for romanized names. Using a fully Bayesian record linkage model, we characterize the geospatial distribution of Chinese immigrants in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Immigration chinoise en France : un groupe homogène ?

  2024-10-09

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Social Integration and Perceptions of Racism among Chinese Immigrants in France: Findings from the Chinese Immigrants in the Paris Region (ChIPRe) Study

  2024-09-18

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  We describe the heterogeneity of the Chinese immigrant population in France and investigate how immigrants’ diverse patterns of social integration predict perceptions of racism, using survey data and in-depth interviews collected during the COVID-19 outbreak, a period during which anti-Chinese and anti-Asian xenophobia and racism were activated. Our unique data, collected for the Chinese Immigrants in the Paris Region (ChIPRe) Study, enable a classification of Chinese immigrants at the intersection of their migration histories, socio-demographic profiles, broad social integration indicators, and attributes of their social ties that characterize distinct patterns of social interaction with co-ethnics and with the wider French society. Our classification highlights three distinct groups: an established ethnic enclave of Wenzhou Chinese, an immigrant underclass whose members arrived in France after the dismantling of China’s centrally planned economy, and successive cohorts of international students, many of whom have gained professional employment in France or intend to stay in France after graduation from institutions of higher education. These distinct immigrant profiles predict different frequencies of subjective experiences of racism that are not attributable to the conventional predictors of racism perceptions alone and add nuance to the discrepancy between conventional social integration indicators and discrimination and racism found among the main immigrant groups and their children in many European countries.

  PublisherDOI

• The impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on network dynamics among Chinese immigrants in the United States

  International Migration · 2024-08-22 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  We use longitudinal data on the social networks of Chinese immigrants in the United States from 2018-2020 to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communication frequency and friendship formation. Understanding the pandemic's effect on social networks is important because, while individual social networks are always in flux (Schaefer and Marcum 2017; Sekara, Stopczynski, and Lehmann 2016), they tend to change slowly over time in periods of social stability (Wrzus et al. 2013). In contrast, the COVID-19 pandemic was a massive disturbance in the social environment, similar to the effect a natural disaster such as a hurricane on social networks, but on a much broader scale (Bertogg and Koos 2022). For Chinese immigrants in the U.S., the social disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic was magnified because, in addition to the social isolation caused by lockdowns and social distancing, there was a dramatic rise in anti-Chinese discrimination and hate crimes in the U.S. which affected migrants' sense of inclusion and collective identity in their host society (Li, English, and Kulich 2021; Stolte et al. 2022). By examining how migrant networks changed and adapted to this altered macro-level social environment, we can better understand how micro and macro level factors interact to affect network changes in general. The findings indicate that while stress during the pandemic affected the level of social network communication, the process of new tie formation to natives appears to be relatively unaffected.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Demography's Changing Intellectual Landscape: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Leading Anglophone Journals, 1950–2020

  Demography · 2023-05-11 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Much of what we know about the intellectual landscape of anglophone demography comes from two sources: subjective narratives authored by leaders in the field, whose reviews and observations are derived from their research experience and field-specific knowledge; and professional histories covering the field's foundational controversies, which tend to focus on individuals, institutions, and influence. Here we use bibliographic information from all articles published in the three leading journals of anglophone demography-Demography, Population Studies, and Population and Development Review-to survey the changing contours of anglophone demography's key research areas over the past 70 years. We characterize the field of demography by applying a two-pronged, data-grounded approach from the sociology of science. The first uses natural language processing that lets the substance of the field emerge from the contents of publication records and applies social network analyses to identify groups of papers that talk about the same thing. The second uses bibliometric tools to capture the "conversations" of demography with other disciplines. Our goals are to (1) identify the primary topics of demography since the discipline first gained prominence as an organized field; (2) assess changes in the field's intellectual cohesion and the topical areas that have grown or shrunk; and (3) examine how demographers place their work in relationship to other disciplines, the visibility and influence of demographic research in the broader scientific literature, and the cross-disciplinary translational reach of demographic research. Results provide a dynamic view of the field's scientific development in the second half of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Research Note: Bayesian Record Linkage with Application to Chinese Immigrants in Raleigh-Durham (ChIRDU) Study

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2023-10-21

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Many population surveys do not provide information on respondents' residential addresses, instead offering coarse geographies like zip code or higher aggregations. However, fine resolution geography can be beneficial for characterizing neighborhoods, especially for relatively rare populations such as immigrants. One way to obtain such information is to link survey records to records in auxiliary databases that include residential addresses by matching on variables common to both files. In this research note, we present an approach based on probabilistic record linkage that enables matching survey participants in the Chinese Immigrants in Raleigh-Durham (ChIRDU) Study to records from InfoUSA, an information provider of residential records. The two files use different Chinese name romanization practices, which we address through a novel and generalizable strategy for constructing records' pairwise comparison vectors for romanized names. Using a fully Bayesian record linkage model, we characterize the geospatial distribution of Chinese immigrants in the Raleigh-Durham area.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using Electronic Health Records to understand the population of local children captured in a large health system in Durham County, NC, USA, and implications for population health research

  Social Science & Medicine · 2022 · 20 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Demography
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using Social Networks to Sample Migrants and Study the Complexity of Contemporary Immigration: An Evaluation Study

  Demography · 2022 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  We test the effectiveness of a link-tracing sampling approach-network sampling with memory (NSM)-to recruit samples of rare immigrant populations with an application among Chinese immigrants in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. NSM uses the population network revealed by data from the survey to improve the efficiency of link-tracing sampling and has been shown to substantially reduce design effects in simulated sampling. Our goals are to (1) show that it is possible to recruit a probability sample of a locally rare immigrant group using NSM and achieve high response rates; (2) demonstrate the feasibility of the collection and benefits of new forms of network data that transcend kinship networks in existing surveys and can address unresolved questions about the role of social networks in migration decisions, the maintenance of transnationalism, and the process of social incorporation; and (3) test the accuracy of the NSM approach for recruiting immigrant samples by comparison with the American Community Survey. Our results indicate feasibility, high performance, cost-effectiveness, and accuracy of the NSM approach to sample immigrants for studies of local immigrant communities. This approach can also be extended to recruit multisite samples of immigrants at origin and destination.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ted Mouw

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  12 shared

• Allison Stolte

  University of California, Irvine

  9 shared

• James Moody

  Duke University

  7 shared

• Claire Le Barbenchon

  Duke University

  6 shared

• Sharon S. Weir

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  6 shared

• Wei He

  5 shared

• Herbert L. Smith

  University City Science Center

  5 shared

• Sherman A. James

  Duke University

  5 shared