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CURRENT RESEARCH PROGRAM
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My primary research interests are in
understanding change
at both the aggregate
and individual levels. At the aggregate level, I am interested in
changes in crime rate, gender gap in crime, the
urban-rural gap in crime. At the individual level, the focus of my
research is the study of social
processes of youth development from childhood through adolescence
and mid-life with the focus on origin, course, progression,
and consequences of abnormal behavior.
Specifically, I am interested in synchronous modeling of the
developmental trajectories of the two or more targeted behaviors,
relating them to
one another, exploring how the changes in one behavior are related
to changes in the other, and examining gender differences in
developmental links between two or more targeted behaviors.
In addition, my
research investigates the degree to which each of the modeled
behaviors is influenced by social, environmental, and personal
factors (which may also change over time) and how the effects of
these covariates vary by gender.
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I apply a
variety of analytical techniques, depending upon the research
question being asked.
For aggregated data, I use joinpoint
regression technique for evaluating trend patterns in data
collected over time. For individual level data, I use Latent Growth
Modeling (LGM),
which permits the systematic study of stability and change in two or
more behaviors over time and, thus, provides critically needed
empirical evaluations of the course, progression, and consequences
of abnormal behavior. I also use
the
Latent Mixture Growth Modeling (LMGM)
to identify distinct subgroups of youths with different
developmental trajectories over the course of time and examine the
utility of these trajectory classifications in predicting the
distinctive life pathways for each identified subgroup. |
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