Research

I am a mixed methods researcher and a scholar of religion, gender, and well-being. I study how people belong to communities whose values they only partly hold: how individuals understand, interpret, and enact the teachings and policies of their religious organizations, and what that means for their well-being and for holding together across difference.

My three-paper dissertation, Religious Incongruence, Aesthetic Practice, and Moral Identity in American Life, uses quantitative and qualitative approaches to investigate religious incongruence, or misalignment between personal and congregational beliefs. Linking the General Social Survey and the National Congregations Study, I find that incongruence is the norm: fewer than 10 percent of congregants fully agree with their congregation on gender and sexuality, and fewer than 10 percent fully disagree. I also examine the health consequences of incongruence and explore how Latter-day Saint women perform the everyday embodied aesthetic work of communicating belonging within religious institutions through their appearance.

My master’s thesis used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to examine the reciprocal relationship between religious service attendance and depressive symptoms across the life course. As a Wagoner Foreign Study Fellow, I interviewed Latter-day Saint women in Ireland about their faith, their experiences as members of the LDS Church, and how they negotiate belonging within it.