Brittany Piper is a PhD student in sociology. Her primary research area is the sociology of family and the life course, including relationship formation, and the effect of divorce on children in early adulthood. She is currently working on two research endeavors.

First, she is studying the effect of parent divorce on women as they enter early adulthood. Second, she is researching differences in friendship networks through romantic relationship initiation, transition to marriage, and dissolution. Brittany is an Illinois native and earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology in 2008 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her master’s degree in sociology from the University of Nebraska-Omaha in 2013. Her master’s thesis measured the effect of the “package deal” on class identity. The analysis revealed that financial satisfaction, childhood family income, and education are the overall strongest predictors in determining class identity, more than any of the characteristics of the package deal: marriage, parenthood, homeownership, or job status.

She is interested in teaching introductory, gender, family, or social inequality courses in sociology. In Spring 2015, she is an instructor for the Sociology of Marriage and Family at UNL. She has previously taught Introduction to Sociology, Sociology of Sport, and Women in Contemporary Society.