My research focuses primarily on how social processes challenge racial and ethnic boundaries and transform classification systems. I’ve examined this with regard to immigration, interracial marriage and the classification of multiracial children, and genetic ancestry testing. I am also interested in the multiple dimensions of race – how self-identification, observation by others, known ancestry, genetic ancestry, phenotype, and other dimensions are increasingly diverging, and what this means for survey statistics and the racial inequalities they are used to measure.
My current research examines the social impact of genetic ancestry testing, focusing on how tests influence racial and ethnic identity, conceptions of race, racial attitudes, and racial interactions. One project conducted 115 qualitative interviews with people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds who purchased genetic ancestry tests. Another project is a randomized controlled trial that randomly assigns people to receive genetic ancestry tests or not, to study the causal impact of testing.