I am an Applied Psychology doctoral student and an emerging data scientist with advanced statistical programming skills using R & related languages & environments, as well as programmatic typesetting & web design languages. My research expertise include mixed-methods research, program evaluation, qualitative & quantitative data analysis, & statistical programming.
My action-oriented research examines how dominant gender ideologies within patriarchal systems influence violence and oppression.My research is conducted under the advisement of Dr. Eric Mankowski, and is funded through the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (Fellow ID: 2014173965). The primary goal of my NSF-sponsored research is to develop comprehensive and intersectional approaches to preventing intimate partner and sexual violence, particularly among marginalized populations, with specific attention to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals and communities.
My research follows a mixed-methodological framework that values the unique importances, utilities, and natures of qualitative and quantitative data.
Prior to beginning my graduate career at Portland State University, I worked as a research assistant in two Psychology research labs at Georgia State University focusing on gender-based violence intervention and prevention, and violence-specific social media rhetoric. I also worked as a shelter and legal advocate at an Atlanta-based violence response agency.Partnership Against Domestic Violence In Oregon, I continue to be an active member of the violence intervention and prevention community by working with community partners to address the range community health and of social justice issues related to violence and oppression intervention and prevention efforts.
More information is available via the Gender & Violence Intervention Team’s website.
“This project applies social and community psychological principles to describe and understand how legislative and other regulatory standards that govern the practices of the domestic violence intervention programs are implemented in jurisdictions across the United States. We document the history of program standards across the U.S., describe the composition and structure of program regulatory bodies, and identify facilitators and barriers to policy implementation, program monitoring and evaluation practices, repercussions for non-compliant programs, and funding issues that impact implementation. Findings inform best practices for successful implementation of laws regulating batterer intervention programs in Oregon and nationally.”
For a little over three years, I have served as the project coordinator and primary graduate research assistant on this project. In April of 2014, Dr. Mankowski asked an undergraduate research assistant (UGRA) and me about our initial interest in and thoughts regarding the feasibility of contacting each U.S. state’s batterer intervention program (BIP) standards committee to ask a brief series of broad-based questions about the state’s process for monitoring programs’ compliance with the state’s standards. The UGRA and I both expressed interest in conducting the study and the three of us (i.e., Dr. Mankowski, the UGRA, and myself) began brainstorming the initial steps for the study, which we decided would begin with an online search for each state’s BIP standards committee to ascertain the level of difficulty potentially involved in obtaining the necessary contact information for each state’s standards committee. This process also helped us in finalizing a sampling frame definition for the study, which we ultimately defined in three levels:
Once this sampling frame was defined, Dr. Mankowski, the UGRA, and myself began drafting an initial list of interview questions for the study, and then consulted with the rest of the research team during weekly team meetings about the interview’s scope and the wording of interview questions. I also spent this time developing protocols, scripts/email templates, and an electronic recruitment flyer for contacting each state to identify and request an interview with the most appropriate individual according to the above-described individual interviewee definition for our sampling frame. As a team, we decided that the best approach was to conduct “cold calls” with each state using the contact information we obtained through our previous internet searches as our starting point. After a while, the cold-calls, finally, paid off and we started scheduling and completing more and more interviews (each lasting around 30-to-60 minutes). We transcribed the audio-recorded interviews on a rolling basis, and once we reached a half-way point in the number of anticipated interviews, we began trancribing I began distilling and compiling the discrete data (i.e., data obtained from close-ended interview questions) provided by interviewees and eventually developed a codebook and coding protocol for the all of the discrete data that would be collected for the study. Another graduate research assistant and I worked worked together to developed a second codebook for the study’s qualitative data (obtained from the open-ended interview questions). The which is now being implemented by four graduate research assistants (including myself) and Dr. Mankowski.
An interesting aspect of the data collection process for this study was that interviewees often provided commentary about the types and levels of information from the study that would be useful to their states/organizations, as well as ideas about how this information could be presented and which dissemination modes might be most useful to the study’s stakeholders. Also, while data collection was still underway, but at a point of having a somewhat representative sample of batterer intervention program standards committees in the U.S., we provided a presentation of the study’s progress and preliminary descriptive findings to BIP providers and relevant policy-makers in Oregon.
In response to receiving this somewhat unexpected level of information and insight from the study’s participants and stakeholders, I began brainstorming more innovative and multi-modal reporting and data presentation methods as part of my role as the project coordinator. Specifically, there was, and still is, a growing sense of eagerness and sometimes urgency among national and local stakeholders to receive and utilize this study’s findings. So, I focused my attention on anticipating potential barriers to accessing the study’s findings and began developing & implementing reporting methods that would better ensure the study’s findings would be both accessible to and usable by a range of audiences, including:
R & the Shiny R-package providing data summaries, data visualizations, and an interface allowing users to explore relations among two or more discrete variables in the datasetA summary report of the first phase of this research project is available here.
The purpose of this research is to inform intimate partner violence (IPV) intervention and prevention strategies specific to sexual minority women. The research responds to a dearth in the empirical literature concerning the mechanisms underlying the perpetration of female same-sex IPV (FSSIPV). In particular, this research aims to evaluate the face validity and construct coverage of existing survey measures related to gender, minority stress, and violence and to inform a working intersectional model predicting women’s use of violence in their same gender intimate relationships. A series of in-depth semi-structured, open-ended one-on-one interviews and one focus group were conducted with fourteen lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) women in Portland, Oregon. Individuals were recruited and engaged in the study via a combination of purposive and convenience sampling methods aided by the involvement of multiple community partners working in violence and education related fields. Interview and focus group questions addressed participants’ experiences with gender role stress and minority stress. Grounded theory analysis of participants’ narrative responses informed the coverage and relevance of constructs in a working intersectional model predicting women’s use of violence in their same-gender intimate relationships. Findings from this analysis support an intersectional and contextually-minded approach to IPV intervention and prevention strategies. In particular, findings from the present research indicate that sexual minority women’s experiences of gender role stress and minority stress, particularly in combination, may be important dimensions to consider when designing IPV intervention and prevention strategies among this population. These dimensions were found among interview participants to be especially influential on their identities and behaviors when multiple forms of minority stress are experienced simultaneously. Findings from this first phase of exploratory research are further used to inform the adaptation of the model, which will be subsequently tested for fit in a large survey dataset.
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