Background:

Before settling in Charm City for a position in sociology at Johns Hopkins, I spent all of my life in the Windy City. My undergraduate work was done at the University of Chicago (AB'97), where I studied psychology and sociology, and I completed my Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University. While I was at Northwestern, I had the wonderful opportunity of working with James Rosenbaum and Greg Duncan, through the Institute for Policy Research and the Joint Center for Poverty Research.

Current Research Interests and Activities:

I am interested in the way social context (e.g. family, school, neighborhood, peers, teachers, popular culture) affects the outcomes of young people, primarily in adolescence and at the transition to adulthood. I apply interdisciplinary frameworks and multiple methodologies to examine these issues. I am currently engaged in three primary research projects.

First, I am analyzing educational attainment, the timing of educational transitions and student behavior using the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS:88), which is a database collected by the National Center for Education Statistics. I am interested in the ways in which students can influence their educational outcomes, and how their efforts can make a difference. I have examined the role of student homework in high school, and the ways in which family background, teacher reports of effort, school context and education policy interact with student behavior to impact educational attainment. With my colleague, Robert Bozick, I am also using the NELS data to examine the effects of delaying college enrollment on the chance of completing a bachelor's degree.

A second project (joint with Stephen Plank) uses the newer National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to assess whether participation in career and technical education (CTE) enhances school outcomes, especially for students at risk. In particular, we are examining the effect of CTE on students' expectations about the future, early and multiple high school dropout spells and the transition into postsecondary education.

My third project seeks to understand the role of neighborhood and social context on youth and family outcomes. In previous work, I had studied the long-term effects of the Gautreaux residential mobility program in Chicago. With colleagues, I assessed the impacts of changes in neighborhood quality on child and family outcomes such as welfare use, employment, special education, and subsequent mobility. Federal interest in the Gautreaux program led to the design and implementation of the Moving To Opportunity program (http://www.wws.princeton.edu/~kling/mto/). Therefore, I became part of the fieldwork team interviewing mothers and teenagers from the Baltimore site of this MTO program, as well as conducting teacher interviews and classroom observations for the younger children in those families. This qualitative project is intended to shed light on some of the outcomes evidenced from the survey and administrative data collection.