Jill Suitor

Within-Family Differences Study

Professor J. Jill Suitor’s research focuses on later-life families, with emphasis on the ways in which relationships between parents and their adult children affect well-being, particularly during the caregiving years.

Suitor is in the fourteenth year of directing the Within-Family Differences Study (WFDS), an NIH-funded panel investigation of the patterns and consequences of parental favoritism in 550 later-life families.  

She is planning to extend the project from a two-generation to a three-generation study in which she and her colleagues will explore the intergenerational transmission of favoritism from grandparents to grandchildren.  She is also developing an extension of the WFDS that will explore these issues using data collected from members of multi-generational Hispanic families in Chicago.

She has recently served on the editorial boards of Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences (JG:SS), The Gerontologist, and Journal of Health and Social Behavior; and recently began a term as a Deputy Editor of  JG:SS.