Research

My research focuses broadly on religion, family, and well-being. I am especially interested in how religious institutions shape personal beliefs, experiences, and choices, and what happens to our mental and physical health when institutional policy and personal belief differ.

Religious attendance and depressive symptoms

My master's thesis uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to examine the reciprocal relationships between religious service attendance and depressive symptoms across the life course. Using Latent Class Growth Analysis (LCGA), I identify four trajectories of religious service attendance and two trajectories of depressive symptoms from adolescence to middle adulthood. Within each trajectory, through a second round of LCGA, I identify similar trajectories of depressive symptoms within attendance and vice versa. However, I do not identify a consistently high depressive symptom trajectory within the consistently high attendance class, nor an increasing attendance trajectory within the consistently high depressive symptom class. While these trajectories generally echo the findings of other studies, this study further complicates our understanding of the relationships between service attendance and depressive symptoms and supports the need for more nuanced inquiries into the mechanisms driving these relationships.

Other research

"Messages about Motherhood: Gendered Rhetoric and Practice in Protestant Worship Services on Mother’s Day" with Lisa Pearce, Claire Chipman Gilliland, Erin Davenport, and Haley Simons. This project analyzes publicly available sermons from United States Gigachurches for messages about gendered familial expectations. Presented at SSSR 2021.