Web Bio

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Utah State University and am primarily affiliated with the Research & Evaluation Methodology emphasis area within the Experimental and Applied Psychological Sciences specialization.

My research applies psychometric and taxometric modeling techniques (e.g., latent class and latent trait models, mixture models, Meehlian taxometric methods, and other clustering algorithms) to research questions in the psychosocial epidemiology of adult sexual victimization. My research is driven by the premise that prevention is the optimum solution to many behavioral and social problems, including sexual violence, and is thus focused on ascertaining and defining their characteristics and etiology. For instance, recent projects sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) have included 1) the identification of an empirical taxonomy of sexual violence in terms of victim, offender, and offense characteristics and 2) latent variable modeling of potential longitudinal risk and protective factors for adult sexual victimization. Additionally, my graduate students are currently working with data from 1) the BJS on a study investigating protective and risk factors for adolescent school violence, 2) the NDACAN on a study of maternal resiliency to child abuse and neglect, and 3) the BJS on a large national sample of incarcerated male sex offenders to investigate risk factors associated with child, adolescent, and adult sexual victimization. Two additional lines of research include 1) the neuropsychological classification of seizure types and 2) in collaboration with several educational scientists (University of Toledo, Utah State University, University of Utah), a series of investigations into methodologies for improving K-12 teacher instruction quality on which I primarily serve as a methodologist.

I also have methodological interests in general psychometrics, taxometrics, longitudinal data analysis, and multilevel models. I teach several graduate-level quantitative methodology courses and am the founder and director of the Office of Methodological and Data Sciences, which, along with several students and affiliated faculty, provides methodological consultative services to the College of Education and Human Services and the Utah State University community.