Yen-hsin Alice Cheng

Yen-hsin Alice Cheng is currently a Professor and Research Fellow in the Institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. She is trained as a demographer and received a Ph.D. degree in Sociology and Demography from the Pennsylvania State University in the United States. Her main research interest is family demography, focusing particularly on family changes and social inequalities. Her recent research investigates the socioeconomic differentials in marriage, cohabitation, divorce, fertility, and emerging family diversities over the past few decades in Taiwan and East Asia.

The project

Title: Comparative Research on Survey Methodology and Family Changes using GGS-Taiwan and GGS-France

"For more than two decades, the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) provides large-scale, harmonized, internationally comparable longitudinal panel data for studying family trends and associated inequalities in Europe, and increasingly beyond. This programme, launched by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) in 2000, collects data on individual life courses (including the occurrence, timing and sequencing of events), gender relations (including division of paid and unpaid work), and relationships between generations through the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) instrument. The survey micro data is complemented by a contextual database (CDB), containing comparable aggregated macro-level data for 97 indicators on the demographic, socio-economic and political contexts in which individual behaviours are embedded. Currently, the GGP provides high-quality, internationally comparable data for 32 countries, representing more than 480,000 individuals. All of these data are available free of charge from the GGP’s website. A new round of GGS data collection is planned in the 2020s, using cutting-edge multimode data collection tools: web interviews based on large, representative samples, complemented by telephone and face-to-face interviews. As the GGS has become the gold-standard for family-related surveys, scholars from other continents (Latin America and Asia) are increasingly interested in joining this new round of data collection."

Hosting institution: Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

Selective Bibliography

• Cheng, Yen-hsin Alice and Chen-Hao Hsu. (2025). "Partnering in East Asia" in Dimitri Mortelmans, Laura Bernardi & Brienna Perelli-Harris (Eds.) Research Handbook on Partnering across the Life Course. Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Cheng, Yen-hsin Alice.  (2024). "Who Gets the Kid? Female empowerment and child custody in Taiwan", Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. 10: 1–14.
• Cheng, Yen-hsin Alice. (2024). "Les politiques pronatalistes à Taiwan et en Corée du Sud", Informations sociales, n° 211 Politiques familiales et natalité: 79–87.
• Cheng, Yen-hsin Alice. (2023). "The Changing Face of Intimate Premarital Relationships in Taiwan." Journal of Marriage and Family. 85(4): 987–1001.
• Cheng, Yen-hsin Alice and Martin Kolk. (2021). "An East-West Dichotomy? Shifting Marriage Age Patterns in Taiwan and Sweden over Two Centuries." The History of the Family. 26(3): 434–465.
• Cheng, Yen-hsin Alice. (2020). "Ultra-low Fertility in East Asia: Confucianism and its Discontents." Vienna Yearbook of Population Research. 18: 83–120.