I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Indiana University Bloomington. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University in 2011.
My research asks how social environments shape the ways we think and behave. I am especially curious about how coercive or conflictual experiences — controlling parenting, racial discrimination, problematic encounters with police — affect our sense of trust, our relationships, our moral beliefs, our mental health, and ultimately whether we comply with social rules or break them.
A recurring theme in my work is the gap between what our theories claim and what our data can actually establish. I spend a lot of time thinking about what it takes for empirical evidence to genuinely support a causal claim — and how often standard research practices fall short of that bar. Recent projects have examined criminology’s “precision crisis,” the conditions under which statistically significant correlations mask systematic theoretical failures, and how distinguishing between-person correlations from within-person changes can lead to fundamentally different causal conclusions. I try to make this kind of methodological thinking accessible, not just for specialists.
To test causal claims convincingly, I frequently collect new “primary” data — often from populations and settings that U.S. researchers rarely study. International samples are especially valuable because they let us ask whether our theories actually generalize to people living in very different social environments. With the help of many talented collaborators, I have collected data from adults in Bangladesh, Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Ukraine, as well as restaurant workers and customers across the U.S., college students at Southern and Midwestern universities, and adults in online panels.
In recent and current projects I rely on Bayesian modeling techniques and work to improve the reproducibility and transparency of statistical practices in the social sciences.
You can find some of my collaborative research published in crime-related journals like Criminology; Journal of Criminal Justice; Journal of Quantitative Criminology; Journal of Research in Crime & Delinquency; and Justice Quarterly. You can also find some of it published in interdisciplinary social science journals like Journal of Research on Adolescence; Sociological Methods and Research; Social Forces; Social Networks; and Theory and Society. Some of it has been summarized for general audiences at the Pacific Standard, The Conversation, The Society Pages, and local ABC news outlets.
I teach undergraduate and graduate students about scientific theories, research methods, and data analysis. At the undergraduate level I regularly teach theories of crime and deviance (CJUS P200 & P305) and statistics (CJUS K300). At the graduate level I teach theory construction and analysis (CJUS P502) and have taught courses on replication and reproducibility in the social sciences, causal mediation and moderation analysis, and how to teach undergraduate statistics using R.
Together with Jake Day, I co-author the Reluctant Criminologists — an open-access website where we share course materials, blog posts, and tutorials on statistical methods, causal inference, and reproducibility. Posts are written for a broad social science audience and include full R code and worked examples. Since launching in 2023, the site has reached readers in nearly 90 countries.
Education
North Carolina State University | Raleigh, NC | PhD in Sociology | 2011
North Carolina State University | Raleigh, NC | M.S. in Sociology | 2007
Rockford College | Rockford, IL | B.S. in Sociology and Anthropology | 2003
Academic Experience
Indiana University Bloomington | Associate Professor | August 2019 - present
Indiana University Bloomington | Director of Undergraduate Studies | 2020 - 2026
Indiana University Bloomington | Assistant Professor | August 2016 - July 2019
University of Nebraska Omaha | Assistant Professor | August 2011 - July 2016