Anne-Rigt Poortman is professor at the Dept. of Sociology (Chair: Family diversity and life course outcomes). She has specialized in family sociology and social demography. She is particularly interested in divorce and repartnering, postdivorce residence arrangements for children, new relationship types, and legal aspects of partner relationships.

Currently she is the programleader of a large data collection (New Families in the Netherlands; NFN) and related VICI research program (start 2019) about postdivorce family diversity and outcomes for children and parents. The growing diversity among postdivorce families (due to e.g. the rise in shared physical custody) begs the question what the consequences of this growing diversity are for children and parents. The VICI project examines whether children and parents in varying family types differ on an extensive range of outcomes and why this is the case. Anne-Rigt Poortman is also involved in an international data collection about people's attitudes about family diversity (ESS Cronos module) allowing for a cross-national comparison about how people think about child well-being and parents' legal rights in diversy family types.