My research uses quantitative methods to analyze contextual inequalities in community attributes, schools, and neighborhoods, and to examine the consequences of these inequalities for racial/ethnic disparities in domains such as education and health. Much of my work has focused on the Mexican-origin population in the U.S.

In individual and collaborative work, I have addressed the following research questions:

*How do maternal employment and community contexts relate to early childhood education enrollment patterns among children in Mexican-origin, Black, and White families? (Article on-line in JMF 2018.)

*How does affective and behavioral engagement among Mexican-origin youth vary across schools by racial/ethnic and socioeconomic composition? (Article on-line in SSR 2018.)

*Do Mexican-origin youth in new immigrant destinations have a higher risk of school non-enrollment than those in more established gateways?  (Article on-line in PRPR 2016.)

*How does geographic proximity to kin networks relate to mobility and neighborhood choice? (Article on-line in Demography 2017.)

*How have Black-White achievement gaps changed over time?  Do family-level factors or school-level factors do a better job of explaining the gap? (Article on-line in SSQ 2018.)

*Does racialization block Mexican-origin youth from enrolling in more racially/ethnically and socioeconomically integrated schools?

*Does isolation in minority-concentrated and impoverished schools explain low achievement and high dropout among Mexican-origin youth?

*Can racial/ethnic differences in the likelihood of exiting a poor neighborhood be explained by differences in geographic closeness to kin networks?

*How do health care resources and immigration enforcement vary across immigrant destinations, and do these differences explain or moderate early childhood health disparities between young Latino/a children across destinations?