people

Lisa McAllister

Lisa McAllister
Department of Anthropology
Pennsylvania State University
Director of Education Programs for Crystal Cove Conservancy, Orange County

Lisa McAllister is a Ph.D. candidate in Integrative Anthropological Sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB).  McAllister is a human behavioral ecologist with research interests in demographic transitions in small-scale societies, family planning in changing societies and the development of reproductive autonomy. McAllister’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and UCSB Humanities and Social Sciences Grant, Anthropology Research Grant and the Integrative Anthropological Sciences Donor Grant. McAllister’s dissertation work focuses on the determinants and consequences of women’s fertility preferences and fertility in a rapidly acculturating Amerindian population. Working with the Tsimane, Bolivian forager-farmers, McAllister addresses three interlinked questions: (1) what are the sources and consequences of individual differences in women’s fertility preferences and their fertility; (2) how are these affected by socioeconomic change?; and (3) why, for many Amerindian women, is there a growing contradiction between their preferred family sizes and fertility, despite socioeconomic change?

Postdoctoral under Mary Shenk at Pennsylvania State University.

Publications

Veile, A., Martin, M., McAllister, L., Gurven, M.
"Modernization is associated with intensive breastfeeding patterns in the Bolivian Amazon."
Social Science and Medicine 100:148-158.
McAllister, L., Gurven, M., Kaplan, H., Stieglitz, J.
"Why Do Women Have More Children Than They Want? Understanding Differences in Women's Ideal and Actual Family Size in a Natural Fertility Population"
American Journal of Human Biology 24: 786-799 (2012).