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RESEARCH MOTTO
RESEARCH INTERESTS My primary area of research lies in understanding the process of change for whatever the topic happens to be at either the aggregate or the individual level. At the aggregate level, I am interested in questions of change 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. Coupled with this, my research investigates the degree to which each of the modeled behaviors is influenced by social, environmental, and personal factors (which might also change over time) and how the effect of these covariates varies by gender. My analytic strategies vary based on the nature of the research question. 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.Besides Latent Growth Modeling, I 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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