Research
Research Interests
Education, stratification, social class, gender, race/class/gender, family, civic engagement/ volunteering, social psychology, social justice, teaching and learning, mixed methods (qualitative and statistics)
Current Project: Entering College during a Pandemic: Decisions, Uncertainty, and Inequality
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Research questions:
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How did first-year students choose to attend an expensive residential university despite the uncertainty of being able to experience the standard experiential learning model?
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What do students expect will be their successes and challenges for their first semester and how do these compare to the actual experiences of their first semester of college?
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How will the covid-19 pandemic affect institutional policies and how will those changes impact the students’ transition to college?
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How do these challenges vary by race/class/gender of the student?
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Design: Longitudinal in-depth interviews with 50 students at St Lawrence University in Sept 2020 and January 2021
Other Project: Major Questions: Reproducing Inequality through College Major Decisions
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Research questions: How do students choose their college majors? How does this process reproduce inequality by race, class, and gender?
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Design: Longitudinal surveys (n=1,1,00) and in-depth interviews (n=50) with first-year college students at UNC-Chapel Hill
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Major findings:
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Student orientations to choosing a major differ by race, class, and gender and these orientations change over time as students learn new schemas for choosing a major (i.e. based on career, intellectual interests, or match with student skillset)
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Students often get stuck in ill-fitting majors because they feel compelled to choose a major before they have much (correct) knowledge about what that major means and entails
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Students feel uncertainty during parts of the major choosing process, and these times of uncertainty are critical junctures for inequality reproduction
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2010 - present
2010 - present