Esha Chatterjee’s areas of specialization are in the areas of ‘demography’ and ‘gender, work and family’.  During the course of her PhD, she has worked with the ‘India Human Development Survey’ group and has extensive experience in working with survey data. Her dissertation analyzes the determinants of women’s fertility intention, contraception use and subsequent behavior in India.

A second  area of interest for her, has been migration. She is working on a couple of projects on internal migration in India. Her paper ‘Physical vs. imagined communities: migration and women’s autonomy in India’ with Dr. Sonalde Desai has received a revise and re-submit from the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

The third stream of research she interested in, is related to labor force participation. Her paper with Dr. Sonalde Desai and Dr.Reeve Vanneman titled ‘Indian Paradox: Rising Education, Declining  Women’s Employment’ is currently under review.

DISSERTATION

"Determinants of differential regional fertility rates in India: an examination of fertility intention, behavior and the unmet need for contraception":

 While there is a rich literature on fertility in India, her work is the first to use a national panel sample to study the impact of past intentions and actions on subsequent outcomes.The first chapter of her thesis looks at the impact of ideational factors (such as exposure to mass media) and availability of contraception in the area of residence, on the unmet need for contraception amongst women in 2005 . Thereafter, she investigates how this unmet need for contraception translates into unintended births between 2005 and 2012. Preliminary results show that women with an unmet need for contraception in 2005 are about twice as likely as those with no unmet need, to have an ‘unintended birth’ between 2005 and 2012. The second chapter of her dissertation looks into how a woman’s autonomy at the individual, household and community levels, impacts her ability to translate her fertility intentions into fertility behavior. The final chapter  examines how rural women who intend to have no more children, use available infrastructure to gain access to (and knowledge about) contraception. . It focuses especially on how  their communication with spouses and their physical mobility influence their use of the available infrastructure.