I have been recognized for my sociological expertise within the Emotions, Social Psychology, Deviance, and Affect Control Theory (ACT) researcher communities in several ways.When I was in my final year of doctoral work, the Emotions section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) presented me with the 2007 Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award. The following year (and the year I started at UWG), that paper would be accepted for publication in the highest ranked sociological social psychology journal, Social Psychology Quarterly (SPQ). That article is still being cited, as recently as 2023, as a seminal piece in the study of subculture and ACT. In the following years, I published a paper in another esteemed sociology journal, Deviant Behavior. As a result of this publication, and from networking at professional conferences, Dr. Craig Forsyth, a highly respected and prolific scholar in the area of deviance, approached me about writing several encyclopedia entries for the Encyclopedia of Social Deviance. This pattern of recognition and accomplishment has continued to the present day. For example, acclaimed sociologist and the developer of Affect Control Theory, Dr. David Heise provided a glowing review of my first book manuscript. Further, the publisher held a book signing at the American Sociological Association (ASA) annual conference in 2015, at which I was approached by well-known sociologists such as Peter Burke and Gary Alan Fine to discuss the impact of the text in sociology courses. Also, in Dr. Heise’s and Dr. Kathryn Lively’s comprehensive overview of emotions in the Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions[1], my book and the SPQ article were among a list of citations that included pieces written by Arlie Russell Hochschild, Theodore Kemper, and Peggy Thoits. 
[1] Lively K., Heise D. (2014) Emotions in Affect Control Theory. In: Stets J., Turner J. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions: Volume II. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Dordrecht.

In 2020, I published an editorial collaboration (with colleague Jennifer Beggs Weber)—a volume of critical essays about the popular television series Shameless. In the book, both Dr. Weber and I author a topical chapter (mine is solo authored), and we co-author an introduction to the manuscript. The substantive chapter authored by me applies Techniques of Neutralization Theory to the behaviors of the series’ characters. Essentially, I analyze whether the behaviors exhibited in Shameless (the television series) are “shameless,” and I critically analyze the use of justifications and accounts in the series.Earlier in my career, I explored deeply various elements of the jamband music subculture. In my 2010 publication in the journal Deviant Behavior, “Are You Kynd? Conformity and Deviance Within the Jamband Subculture,” I examine the whether membership in the jamband subculture correlates with countercultural meanings for what the mainstream often dubs "deviant behaviors."

My primary research focuses surveying culture. Specifically, I study within- and between-group variation in affective meanings – first in a deviant music subculture, but more recently, I have shifted my scholarship to focus on the lives underserved populations, including sexual and gender minorities, collecting data and submitting scholarship in three areas: parenting, campus climate, and intimate partner violence. In 2017, I published an article in the Journal of GLBT Family Studies. Specifically, this is an investigation of how attitudes related to social networks and the language used to identify parental figures likely contribute to the binary gender-role structure of the family. Using data from a self-administered survey, I examined whether non-birth and birth parents hold distinct attitudes about social concepts that are relevant to their lives. Also in 2017, I wrote an extensive technical report on the UWG campus climate for students, faculty, and staff who self-identify as a sexual or gender minority (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, genderqueer). 

I have extensive experience developing and administering survey instruments, and in the creation of measures for sociological concepts. I was trained to design and implement a variety of research methodologies. With the exception of my most recent book manuscript, Shameless Sociology, I have collected primary data for all of my publications—using participant observation, interviews, and cultural surveying techniques. I developed the survey instrument used in the data collection on jamband fans as well as the one I used later to gather data from sexual and gender minorities. The jamband fan instrument includes a wide variety of measures (several of which I developed) including character vignettes that measure participants’ ideological embeddedness in the subculture. This is the first quantitative measure of involvement to exist in the subculture literature. Additionally, the measure is unique because it is a quantitative measure developed using qualitative data. Specifically, I created the character vignettes based on years of extensive qualitative data collection in the field. Respondents read the vignette character descriptions and rated themselves, on a Likert scale, on their similarity to each character. Principal components factor analysis produced scores for each respondent, with high scores indicating strong ideological embeddedness in the subculture. The development of this measure is fully outlined in my first published book, which is intended to serve as a main or supplemental reader to undergraduate and graduate courses with topics on social psychology, music, culture, ritual, deviance, sociology, psychology, or cultural anthropology. Where the Music Takes You: The Social Psychology of Music Subcultures was written to offer a dynamic exploration of sociological and methodological concepts, such as: rituals, collective effervescence, ethnography, gaining entree, interviewing, participant observation, subculture, and symbolic interactionist theory. In addition, it presents students with accessible introductions to both qualitative and quantitative methods of social research.