Andrew Cherlin

Andrew J. Cherlin is an American sociologist, born in 1948, focusing on family life in the United States and around the world, and an emeritus professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. A social demographer, he is a former president of the Population Association of America; his books include The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today (2009) and Labor's Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America (2014). His most highly cited article, The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage (2004), argued that marriage has evolved from a marker of conformity to a marker of prestige, introducing the term capstone marriage; he is also the author of a leading textbook on the sociology of family life, Public and Private Families: An Introduction.