Katrina Bell McDonald

Associate Professor

Areas of Specialty

Sociology of the Family

Race Relations

Black Feminist Thought

Qualitative Research

Introductory Social Statistics

Brief Biography

I joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 1994 as I was completing my last year of doctoral study at the University of California, Davis. Just prior to entering the doctoral program I worked as a consultant to social science students requiring assistance with survey research design and data analysis at California State University, Hayward (now California State University, East Bay).  In the years just following my graduation from Mills College (B.A. with honors, Written Communication) and Stanford University (M.A., Applied Communication Research), I worked in the market research field.  I was born in Texas and raised in Sacramento, California.

I began my career by examining maternal activism among middle-class black women, a long tradition steeped in what I call “normative empathy,” motivation derived from a conjunction of empathy for other black women and of African-American norms of solidarity, responsibility, and accountability.  Soon after, I partnered with Prof. Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr. (University of Pennsylvania) in expanding his longitudinal study of predominantly black Baltimorean mothers. This research focused on potential barriers to women-centered kin support for present-day urban black teen mothers in light of kin support mandates specified in the 1996 federal welfare reforms.  The data were also used to examine the residential mobility experiences among disadvantaged black women across the life course, particularly experiences of downward residential mobility.

I have also partnered with my  colleague, Thomas A. LaVeist (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Center for Health Disparities Solutions), to examine differences in life outcome among black and white children in the inner city and to determine the extent to which urban disadvantage differentiates young adult educational outcomes by race and gender under such conditions.

Current Research Interests

My most recent research is reported in Embracing Sisterhood: Class, Identity, and Contemporary Black Women (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).  In this book I analyze how contemporary black women’s ideas of black womanhood and sisterhood merge with social class status to shape certain attachments and detachments among them.  Similarities as well as variations in how black women of different social backgrounds perceive and live black womanhood are interpreted via my primary metaphor “embracing Oprah.” I find that the potential for a pervasive and polarizing “black stepsisterhood” is considerably undermined by the passion with which black women cling to the promises of cross-class, gender-ethnic “community” and of group determination.  Embracing Sisterhood draws its analysis from in-depth interviews with 88 contemporary black women aged 18 to 89, covering issues associated with dimensions of gender-ethnic identity and consciousness.

I am currently crafting new research on the determinants of successful marriage among African Americans.  Here I contemplate how contemporary black couples negotiate marital relationships, navigate marital conflict, and reconcile the recent political pressure for “traditional” marriage with the strong socioeconomic status many black women hold.  One of my research objectives is to better understand the nature of black marital egalitarianism, given numerous claims of egalitarianism’s greater prevalence among blacks as compared to other racial and ethnic groups. I am also interested in the role black churches play in promoting or not promoting certain models of marriage.

My other interests include working to improve measures and interpretations of “race” and “ethnicity” so as to make more meaningful the comparisons regularly drawn among groups.

In addition to serving on the Sociology faculty, I am an associate of the Hopkins Population Center and the Center for Africana Studies.