I study social inequality and family life, focusing on how families engage with state systems and how these systems affect families. My published research to date has been situated in three empirical domains: child protective services (CPS), school choice, and residential decision-making. I have shared findings from my qualitative and quantitative analyses with academic, policy, and practitioner audiences. Please feel free to email me if you are interested in an article you are unable to access.

Child Protective Services and State Intervention into Families Facing Adversity

Much of my research has examined the workings and implications of the U.S. child protection system, a state system that wields tremendous governmental power – the power to separate families – and has a substantial footprint in marginalized communities. I analyze CPS as a state response to families facing adversity. My book, Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services, shows how our reliance on CPS makes motherhood precarious for those already marginalized. This research draws on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with agency social workers, mandated reporters of child maltreatment, and mothers subject to CPS investigations in Connecticut as well as on fieldwork with low-income mothers in Rhode Island. In the American Sociological Review, I analyzed the wide reach of CPS intervention and its implications, summarizing these findings in a brief for the Council on Contemporary Families and an op-ed for The Imprint.

I also analyze low-income mothers’ perspectives on CPS reporting and the threat thereof. In Social Forces, I show how CPS concerns inform how mothers mobilize institutional resources for their families. My Social Problems article argues that mothers invoke empathy, borne of their own experiences of scrutinized and precarious motherhood, to justify their reluctance to report other mothers to CPS. In collaborative work, I have studied the “administrative burdens” that the system imposes, its provision of material support to families, and mechanisms of redistribution by frontline workers.

In addition to tracing system practices and families’ experiences, other work zooms out to document broader patterns in CPS intervention, focusing on social and neighborhood contexts. In this research, I have analyzed unequal system exposure by race/ethnicity and neighborhood demographic characteristics; the relationship between foster care rates and child maltreatment mortality rates; voting among people with CPS contact; the contexts of poverty that generate CPS reports; and the role of neighborhood evictions and food assistance retailers in CPS reports.

Parents Selecting Schools in a Context of Compulsory Choice

In another line of research, I examined school choice in Boston Public Schools, where all families submit choices at registration and children have no “default” or guaranteed zoned neighborhood school. An article in Sociological Forum analyzed how parents differentially mobilize their social networks in selecting schools. Additionally, a study published in Sociology of Education with Sarah Faude drew on administrative data, survey data, and qualitative interviews to show how bureaucratic processes such as registration deadlines foster inequality in school access and school choice experiences.

Residential Decision-Making Among Parents of Young Children

Finally, with collaborators, I have studied how parents think about, search for, and decide among housing and neighborhood options, examining parents’ residential search logics (with Hope Harvey, Kathryn Edin, and Stefanie DeLuca); parents’ expressed aspirations for neighborhood racial/ethnic diversity (with Jennifer Darrah-Okike and Hope Harvey); and the social patterning of housing “finds” not resulting from active searches (with Hope Harvey).