About

Karen Benjamin Guzzo is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She serves as the Director of the Carolina Population Center. Her areas of interest include Fertility, Family Demography, and Measurement. Dr. Guzzo received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UNC Chapel Hill in 2003 and completed postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania. After holding faculty positions at other universities, she returned to UNC Chapel Hill in 2022 to join the Sociology faculty and assume the role of CPC Director. Her professional background emphasizes her expertise in demographic research related to family and fertility issues.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Psychology
• Demography
• Medicine
• Political Science
• Economics
• Social psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Demographic economics
• Gender studies
• Psychiatry
• Keynesian economics

Selected publications

• The Future Family Desires of Single Early Midlife Adults

  Family Transitions · 2026-04-10

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Consistent Reports of Pregnancy/Birth Contexts and Links to Parental Experiences

  UNC Libraries · 2026-04-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Perceived Spousal Concordance on Desired Family Size and Birth Intendedness Among Second and Higher-Order Births in Pakistan

  UNC Libraries · 2025-09-13

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Different-sex American couples’ stress, uncertainty, and fertility desires during the COVID-19 pandemic

  UNC Libraries · 2025-07-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Don’t Panic: Population Projection is Not a Crystal Ball

  2025-08-21

  articleOpen access

  Population panic – worries about “depopulation” linked to low birth rates – has become pervasive, with dire predictions in both the short and long term. Yet demographers like us – experts who explicitly study population size, composition, and structure – are generally not highly concerned. Why is this? It’s because we understand the strengths and limitations of population projections. Projections can accurately describe how populations will change if we know future birth, death, and migration rates. But demographers are well aware that they don’t have a crystal ball – we can't fully anticipate economic shifts, political changes, global events, or how future generations will respond to their changing worlds. That’s why the farther we project from the present, the less accurate those projections are likely to be.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Medically Assisted Reproduction in the United States: A Focus on Parents 40 and Older

  UNC Libraries · 2025-03-28

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  As age at first birth continues to increase in the United States, the use of medically assisted reproduction (MAR) has likely increased. Using population-level data of births in the United States from the National Vital Statistics System from 2010 to 2021, the authors document the proportion of births due to MAR with a focus on parents 40 years or older, disaggregating by parental age combinations and parity. Although MAR-related births constitute a small proportion of all births, there is a growing and sizable proportion of first births to women 40 years or older due to MAR. Specifically, 28.2 percent, 21.5 percent, and 15.3 percent first births involved MAR among mothers 40 or older with an unknown father’s age, both parents 40 or older, and mothers 40 or older with fathers younger than 40, respectively. Thus, for some groups, MAR is a particularly important component of the pathway to parenthood.

  PublisherDOI

• Fears that falling birth rates in US could lead to population collapse are based on faulty assumptions

  2025-07-25 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Pandemic-Based Stress and Timing of Fertility Intentions among Partnered Adults

  UNC Libraries · 2025-03-27

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Despite initial declines in fertility since the onset of the pandemic, less is known about how fertility intentions are related to pandemic-based stressors in the United States. The authors examine the following two questions. First, how are pandemic stressors associated with short-term fertility intentions? Second, among those delaying fertility, what are the rationales for doing so, and how are pandemic stressors related to these rationales? The authors draw on the National Couples’ Health and Time Study, a nationally representative sample of 20- to 50-year-olds in the United States who were married or cohabiting and interviewed between September 2020 and April 2021. Among those desiring or remaining open to having (more) children, experiencing pandemic-related stressors was associated with delays in fertility plans; those whose lives were most disrupted and those who experienced relationship stress were less likely to intend to have children in the next year. The most common rationale for not intending to have children in the next year was economic worries, followed by health worries and concerns about an uncertain future. Economic and health stress were linked to these rationales, net of objective indicators. A comprehensive assessment of fertility intentions and underlying rationale for intentions on the basis of subjective factors is critical for understanding fertility patterns.

  PublisherDOI

• Multiple dimensions of uncertainty in fertility goals: recent trends and patterns in the United States

  Genus · 2025-06-02 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract A growing body of fertility research focuses on uncertainty as a key contributor to fertility decision making and behaviors. In this paper, we identify and describe multiple components of uncertainty in fertility goals that, when analyzed together and in relation to macro-level trends, provide critical insight into fertility dynamics. Drawing from multiple streams of research on fertility goals and behaviors, we focus on (i) goal uncertainty , (ii) realization uncertainty , and (iii) intensity of goals . We use data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) 2002–2019 to estimate trends and patterns of these three dimensions of uncertainty in fertility goals, with a focus on variation across the life course and inequality by education and income. We link uncertainty in fertility goals with the quantum and timing of fertility intentions among U.S. women. The results show that realization uncertainty is pervasive, with up to 50% of women who intend children being uncertain whether they will actually follow through with those intentions, and intensity of intentions is low, with up to 25% of childless women who intend children saying that they would not be bothered if they did not have a child. Although goal uncertainty is overall stable across the study period, young and childless women show increasing realization uncertainty over time and hold their positive intentions less intensely. More socioeconomically advantaged women exhibit higher realization certainty and greater intensity of their goals. Women who are more certain of realizing their positive intentions and those who hold them more intensely report a higher number of additional intended children and a shorter time frame for future childbearing. We conclude by situating these findings in a broader climate of increasing uncertainty.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Different-sex American couples’ stress, uncertainty, and fertility desires during the COVID-19 pandemic

  Genus · 2025-07-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Narratives of the Future (NofF) framework has drawn attention to the role of subjective well-being and uncertainty as key determinants of individual fertility intentions. We apply the NofF framework to the Traits-Desires-Intentions-Behavior (TDIB) model, arguing that perceptions of current and future well-being are aspects of traits and thus that desires-not intentions-would be most strongly related to perceptions. Further, although most research on subjective well-being and uncertainty has focused on economic aspects, a life course perspective suggests that other domains, such as health or relationship concerns, are also relevant. Finally, few studies consider the dyadic nature of fertility decision-making. We address these gaps by using the U.S.-based National Couples' Health and Time Study (NCHAT), collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, to investigate how subjective concerns across economic, health, and relational domains relate to American couples' agreement on wanting a(another) child and how men's and women's own fertility desires are related to their own stress and their partner's relative stress across different domains. We find that couples' higher levels of stress-across domains-is related to greater couple-level uncertainty and disagreement about fertility desires. Women's own fertility desires are associated with their partner's relative stress across domains, with less evidence that men's fertility desires are related to their partner's relative stress. Our findings point to the importance of considering stress and uncertainty across multiple domains, at least during the COVID-19 pandemic, as important for the formation of fertility desires as well as the need to incorporate both partners' experiences as key factors in fertility decision-making.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant F32HD046332

  NIH · $84k · 2006

• Distal Determinants of Disparities in Unintended Fertility

  NIH · $1.2M · 2014–2019

• Carolina Population Center

  NIH · $6.6M · 2005–2027

Frequent coauthors

• J. Bart Stykes

  Sam Houston State University

  130 shared

• Mofeyisara Oluwatoyin Omobowale

  University of Ibadan

  128 shared

• Deborah Fahy Bryceson

  128 shared

• David G. Schramm

  Utah State University

  128 shared

• Kay Bradford

  Utah State University

  128 shared

• Katharine H. Zeiders

  University of Arizona

  128 shared

• Javiera Cienfuegos Illanes

  128 shared

• Olena Kopystynska

  Emerald Group Publishing (United Kingdom)

  128 shared