Spotlight on Professor Amanda Sheely

In the United States, single-parent families are much more likely to be poor compared to families with two parents, with one in three single-mother families living in poverty. In March 2023, for the LSE's Research for the World online magazine, Amanda Sheely, Janet C Gornick and Laurie C Maldonado wrote about their research into what policy lessons the US can learn from other high-income to better support single-parent families.

Read the Research for the World article.

To push the debate on single-parent families and public policy forward, in the July 2022 special issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Dr Sheely and other researchers from the US and other high-income countries examined a range of policy options available to improve the economic wellbeing of these vulnerable families.

Read the special issue, Single-Parent Families and Public Policy: Evidence from High-Income Countries.

The special issue was launched on 1 December 2022 with an online event hosted by the Brookings Institution.

Video of the event

The Phelan US Centre provides funding for faculty affiliates organising small conferences on US-related research topics or themes. These conferences are designed to bring together up to a dozen scholars from the US, Europe and LSE to present and discuss ongoing research. Such efforts often culminate in research outputs such as journal articles.

As part of this initiative, in May 2021 Dr Amanda Sheely, organised the LSE Single-Parent Family Conference. Conducted virtually over three days, the conference included academics based in the UK, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Finland and the United States. This conference opened with an LSE public event on 20 May 2021, co-hosted by the Department of Social Policy and the Phelan US Centre: Where Are All the “Welfare Queens”? Diversity and European evidence on single-parent families.

Video of the event