Assistant Professor, North Carolina A&T
RESEARCH
Check out my CV here!
Research Interests
Informal Mentoring
Natural Mentoring
Upward Mobility
Economic Mobility
Social Capital
Social Support
Methods
Quantitative Approaches:
Propensity Score Matching
Quasi-Experimental Design
Secondary Data Analysis
Logistic and Linear Regressions
Bivariate Analyses
Qualitative Approaches:
Narrative Analysis
Thematic Analysis
Selected Presentations
Approach to Research
My research focuses on the role social capital plays in supporting upward mobility for historically oppressed young people. Being born into a low-income family and being born a person of color are two major barriers to economic mobility in this country (Chetty et al., 2016; Chetty et al., 2018). This is not due to qualities of the individual, but due to structural oppression. Social capital, as in who you know and what they have to offer, may be an important tool to redress immobility. My particular area of interest is informal mentoring in adolescents, as in caring relationships with non-parental adults who care about the young person and support them (Sterrett, Jones, Mckee, & Kincaid, 2011; Sykes, Gioviano, & Piquero, 2014), and what role these relationships can play in supporting upward mobility for vulnerable young people. My current research agenda has four specific goals, as detailed below.
Goal 1: To add rigorous investigation that moves us towards a causal claim. In order to move to a place where we can truly understand what, if any, impacts are directly caused by informal mentors, we must first understand what predicts informal mentorship.
Goal 2: To understand the impact informal mentors have on early indicators of upward mobility and economic mobility itself.
Goal 3: To understand important variations among mentorship relationships, adding nuance to our false simplification of them.
Goal 4: To develop meaningful interventions that promote and support informal mentoring, to ultimately support upward mobility for historically oppressed young people.
Many of my current projects are inter-disciplinary collaborations and involve students, two priorities of mine in moving this agenda forward. My research contributions to date demonstrate my desire to understand how to promote upward mobility for young people by utilizing and expanding the relationships they already have with their family and community. So far, I have used methodologies ranging from in-depth interview analyses to quasi-experimental designs with large data-sets to show that varying forms of informal mentorship can indeed help youth in many ways, including by helping them be upwardly mobile. I plan on spending my academic career expanding on these potential aids for young people, no matter the structural barriers they face.