About

Douglas Downey is an ASC Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1992. His areas of expertise include social stratification, gender, class, race, family, and education. Downey's research is primarily motivated by questions about inequality—specifically, who receives what and why. He focuses on the role of schools in addressing inequality, positing that schools play a more positive role than typically thought and emphasizing that the core sources of inequality are rooted in broader policy decisions. Downey has recently published a book titled 'How Schools Really Matter.' Additionally, he is increasingly interested in how technological change influences inequality and social relationships, exploring how new technologies may facilitate greater inequality, affect social interactions, and influence perceptions of authority and evidence. His current projects include examining whether face-to-face social skills among American children have declined and investigating the connection between internet expansion and 'deaths of despair.'

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Developmental psychology
• Social Science
• Psychology
• Demography
• Mathematics education
• Mathematical analysis
• Gender studies
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Number of Siblings and Mental Health Among Adults: A Life Course Resource Dilution Model

  Journal of Family Issues · 2025-07-30 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Scholars observe an inverse association between sibship size and mental health among adolescents, but how do siblings matter when children become adults and tend to live away from parents and each other? We modify the Resource Dilution Model, suggesting that, as individuals age, the influence of parents declines and sibling are more likely to become resources and less likely to remain competitors. We then test the association between number of siblings and indicators of mental health among American adults in the General Social Surveys ( n ∼ 62,000) and European adults in the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) ( n ∼20,000). In contrast to the patterns among adolescents, we find that associations between sibship size and mental health indicators are typically neutral or positive. We conclude that, when people enter adulthood and later life stages, siblings tend to play a more positive role in their lives.

  PublisherDOI

• Are Skills Becoming an Increasingly Important Determinant of Life Outcomes?

  Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Several theoretical traditions posit that individual skills (or human capital) have become stronger predictors of life outcomes over time. To date, however, significant limitations have hindered a confident empirical assessment of this important idea. Using six nationally representative datasets, the authors find surprisingly little support for the notion that measurable skills are becoming more important over time. Instead, the results reveal a durable relationship between measurable skills and socioeconomic outcomes despite periods of significant societal change.

  PublisherDOI

• The Inverse Association Between Number of Siblings and Divorce: New Evidence From China and Europe

  Journal of Family Issues · 2023-03-16 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the U.S., evidence has emerged suggesting that divorce is lower among those with many versus few siblings, a pattern that may indicate that children develop important social skills via their childhood interactions with siblings. However, this pattern has yet to be tested in other countries with varying fertility and divorce rates. We extend the empirical basis of the sibship size/divorce literature by exploring the association in China and Europe, each with unique demographic characteristics. Each additional sibling is associated with an 11 percent decline in the probability of divorce in China and a two percent decline in Europe, net a wide range of covariates. We also test whether these patterns vary across cohorts and alternative coding schemes. The results have implications for our understanding of how growing up with siblings influences later life outcomes and the contextual features that form that relationship.

  PublisherDOI

• How Does Schooling Affect Inequality in Cognitive Skills? The View From Seasonal Comparison Research

  Review of Educational Research · 2023-12-01 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  A small subset of education studies analyzes school data collected seasonally (separating the summer from the school year). At first, this work was primarily known for documenting learning loss in the summers, but scholars have since recognized that observing how inequality changes between summer and school periods provides leverage for understanding how schools influence inequality. Results based on this analytic technique confirm current views in some ways, but in other ways the patterns challenge existing wisdom. For example, Black/White gaps in math and reading skills often grow faster when school is in versus out, consistent with the view that schools exacerbate racial inequality. But socioeconomic gaps produce the opposite pattern, suggesting that schools are compensatory across this dimension. In this review, I consider the logic behind seasonal research, the empirical patterns it has produced, and the kinds of new questions it motivates.

  PublisherDOI

• Number of Siblings and Mental Health Among Adolescents: Evidence From the U.S. and China

  Journal of Family Issues · 2023-12-09 · 21 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  A growing number of children are being raised with few or no siblings yet the consequences of this seismic demographic shift in family forms are not well understood. We investigate this question in the U.S. and China because previous studies highlight how contextual features can play an important role shaping how siblings matter. Our Chinese analyses draw on more than 9,400 eighth graders from the China Education Panel Study (CEPS). In the U.S., we analyze over 9,100 American eighth graders from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort of 1998 (ECLS-K:98), where our data allow us to consider multiple features of the sibship structure (e.g., size, sex composition, and density). We find that number of siblings is negatively associated with mental health in both China and the U.S., although the details of this pattern (non-linear association, sisters versus brothers, and closely versus widely spaced siblings) vary.

  PublisherDOI

• Schools as a Relatively Standardizing Institution: The Case of Gender Gaps in Cognitive Skills

  Sociology of Education · 2022-01-27 · 14 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Growing evidence suggests that contrary to popular belief, schools mostly do not generate achievement gaps in cognitive skills but, rather, reflect the inequalities that already exist. In the case of socioeconomic status, exposure to school often reduces gaps. Surprisingly little is known, however, about whether this pattern extends to gender gaps in cognitive skills. We compare how gender gaps in math and reading change when children are in school versus out (in the summer) among over 900,000 U.S. children. We find that girls learn faster than boys when school is out (in both reading and math), but this advantage is completely eliminated when school is in session. Compared to the family environment, schools act as a relatively standardizing institution, producing more similar gendered patterns in learning.

  PublisherDOI

• Schools as Refractors: Comparing Summertime and School-Year Skill Inequality Trajectories

  Sociology of Education · 2021-09-07 · 21 citations

  article

  How does schooling affect inequality in students’ academic skills? Studies comparing children’s trajectories during summers and school years provide a provocative way of addressing this question, but the most persuasive seasonal studies (1) focus primarily on skill gaps between social categories (e.g., social class, race/ethnicity), which constitute only a small fraction of overall skill inequality, and (2) are restricted to early grades, making it difficult to know whether the patterns extend into later grades. In this study, we use seasonal comparisons to examine the possibilities that schooling exacerbates, reduces, or reproduces overall skill inequality in math, reading, language use, and science with recent national data on U.S. public school students spanning numerous grade levels from the Northwest Evaluation Association. Our results suggest that schooling has a compensatory effect on inequality in reading, language, and science skills but not math skills. We conclude by discussing the theoretical implications of our findings, possible reasons why the math findings differ from those of other subjects, and discrepant seasonal patterns across national data sets.

  PublisherDOI

• How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong

  2020 · 38 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  Publisher

• When Does Inequality Grow? A Seasonal Analysis of Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Learning From Kindergarten Through Eighth Grade

  Educational Researcher · 2020 · 48 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Developmental psychology

  What role does schooling play in the development of racial/ethnic inequalities in academic skills? Seasonal learning studies, which allow researchers to compare the growth of achievement gaps when school is in versus out of session, provide important evidence regarding whether schools reduce, reproduce, or exacerbate educational inequalities. Most studies that have compared the growth of achievement gaps when school is in versus out of session have been restricted to the early grades. In this study, we examine seasonal patterns of racial/ethnic achievement gaps using test scores from over 2.5 million kindergarten to eighth-grade students. Following three different cohorts of students from 2015 to 2018, we find that Black-White achievement gaps widen during school periods and shrink during summers, whereas Asian students generally pull ahead of White students at a faster rate during summers. At the same time, we find that disparities observed among older students are largely in place among kindergartners. Our results imply that although schooling does have disparate impacts on the learning trajectories of students, schools play less of a role in widening racial/ethnic achievement gaps than children’s prekindergarten environments.

  PublisherDOI

• Kids These Days: Are Face-to-Face Social Skills among American Children Declining?

  American Journal of Sociology · 2020 · 48 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Developmental psychology

  Many social commentators posit that children’s social skills are declining as a result of exposure to technology. But this claim is difficult to assess empirically because it is challenging to measure “social skills” with confidence and because a strong test would employ nationally representative data of multiple cohorts. No scholarship currently meets these criteria. The authors fill that gap by comparing teachers’ and parents’ evaluations of children’s social skills among children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study 1998 and 2010 cohorts. The authors find no evidence that teachers or parents rate children’s face-to-face social skills as poorer among more recent cohorts, even when accounting for family characteristics, screen time use, and other factors. In addition, within cohorts, children with heavy exposure to screens exhibit similar social skills trajectories compared to children with little exposure to screens. There is a notable exception—social skills are lower for children who access online gaming and social networking many times a day. Overall, however, the results represent a challenge to the dominant narrative that social skills are declining due to technological change.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David Melamed

  The Ohio State University

  9 shared

• Monica C. Bell

  9 shared

• Matthew Sweitzer

  Sandia National Laboratories

  9 shared

• Jered Abernathy

  University of South Carolina

  9 shared

• Ashley Harrell

  Duke University

  9 shared

• Christopher Munn

  9 shared

• John A. Robinson

  9 shared

• Brent Simpson

  University of South Carolina

  9 shared