My program of research is largely concerned with uncovering how and why neighborhoods and communities shape the lives of individuals and their families. To this end, my work revolves around three main interests:
How and why the characteristics of the places in which adults live, work, and play impact their health, and how unequal exposures to these contextual environments shape disparities in health and well-being.
How and why ethnoracial inequities in residence and housing are maintained and reproduced through homeownership, residential mobility, and neighborhood change.
Community social organization and social capital with a focus on how individuals’ neighborhood perceptions and behaviors change as their neighborhood settings change over time.
My population health research uses novel longitudinal data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (LAFANS) to assess contextual exposure and health by considering residential and activity space neighborhoods weighted by the amount of time adults spend in these contexts. These efforts have produced published papers in Social Science & Medicine on self-rated health and in Health & Place on obesity risk. I am currently working on a number of papers in this area, with a particular focus on the key mechanisms of contextual exposure effects on adult health.
I also use longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to examine racial differences in exits from homeownership. One collaborative paper featured in Social Problems finds that black homeowners were not at an elevated risk of losing their homes compared to similar whites until the 1990s, signaling a historical shift in the way racial stratification in housing markets manifests, from a system of overt market exclusion to one of market exploitation. Current work on this topic investigates the role of extra-household kin resources (wealth, income, poverty) in contributing to the racial gap in homeownership exit.
I have also published widely on the effects of residential stratification on non-health outcomes. These research efforts (appearing in City & Community, Population, Space and Place, and Socius) demonstrate that neighborhood disadvantage and disorder are linked to neighborly attitudes and residential mobility behavior, elaborating on neighborhood fear and local social ties as mediating and moderating processes.
Finally, my past work has explored patterns and trends in ethnoracial residential segregation and diversity. These collaborative pieces appear in several outlets, including Demography, Social Science Research, Rural Sociology, and the ANNALS.