My overarching career goal is to become an independent investigator of insomnia and sedative hypnotic use among the health disparities population of Appalachian women. I aim to better understand how insomnia and sedative hypnotic use leads to disparities in health generally and neurocognitive function specifically, and to implement efficacious, culturally acceptable interventions to prevent these disparities. My short-term goal is the successful execution of my current pilot project, “Evaluating Online Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Reduce Stress, Insomnia, and Sedative Hypnotic Use in Appalachian Women Ages 45+.” I am piloting a well-validated online program (SHUTi - Sleep Healthy Using the Internet) to determine its feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy in reducing sedative hypnotic use and improving stress and sleep among Appalachian women ages 45+. Post-intervention, I will analyze findings and solicit participant intervention feedback. These findings will be leveraged for an R01 application in support of a refined, larger-scale intervention that incorporates biometric data collection.

I receive support for this project through my two-year appointment as a Scholar in the NIH-funded Building Interdisciplinary Careers in Women's Health (BIRCWH) program and through my "Igniting Research Collaborations" Pilot Grant, awarded through the UK College of Pharmacy.

Here is a link to a video where I describe my pilot project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubQuJEASP8E

My previous research makes me extremely well-poised to carry out my sleep-focused research agenda. My dissertation used sequential triangulation to quantitatively and qualitatively explore sleeplessness-related trends in the U.S. Analyzing nationally representative data from physician office visits (1993-2007) I found that complaint of sleeplessness, diagnosis of insomnia, and prescription of sedative hypnotics increased significantly over time (1993-2007) - particularly in adults ages 45-64. However, prescriptions of sedative hypnotics far outpaced complaints and diagnoses. This gap is suggestive of medicalization – the process whereby life problems (e.g., stress) are transformed into diagnostic entities (e.g., insomnia) and treated with primarily pharmacologic solutions (e.g., sedative hypnotics). I published these results in in the American Journal of Public Health in 2011. This article has been cited more than 70 times.

To add depth and context to my quantitative work, I conducted in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews with 27 patients prescribed sedative hypnotics, and the 8 physicians who treated them. Patients and physicians openly acknowledged they were treating normal life issues (primarily stress, grief, and aging) with the medical solution of sedative hypnotics. Middle-aged and older women emphasized gendered stressors like multiple caregiving responsibilities as the cause of their insomnia. Men emphasized work stressors. Both patients and physicians expressed reluctance toward the use of sedative hypnotics, citing addiction fears. These findings were published in Sociology of Health and Illness in 2017. Here is a link to my video abstract for the Sociology of Health and Illness piece:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKfng_8yV8A

I am also interested in how various forms of gender socialization impact mental and physical health. I have studied sexualization, a particularly negative form of gender socialization, and created a relevant pedagogical module for undergraduates. An article on this module was published in Teaching Sociology. This work has both theoretical and practical applications for social scientists, educators, and community leaders, and led to an interview on Kentucky Educational Television. Here is a link to the episode preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTi3DSvSY2o

I have continued to explore the sexualization and oppressions of women in the context of online social spaces. With my colleague Tony Love, I analyzed publicly available data from Twitter (an online social networking service) to track real-time reactions to the widely publicized celebrity nude photo hacking of 2014 (“The Fappening”). Findings from nearly 10,000 Tweets revealed that male-identified Tweeters commonly sexualized and degraded both celebrity and non-celebrity women. The results of our study were published in Men and Masculinities​. A piece on our unique methodology was recently published SAGE Research Methods Cases. We also have a forthcoming article in Sociology Compass that assesses concepts of online misogyny from the perspectives of sociology and feminist media studies. Here is a link to the video abstract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFKZQLeSaos

Recently, I have joined forces with  Robyn Lewis Brown, Jordan Brown, and Gabriele Ciciurkaite to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the experiences of working women and college students with disabilities. Our work highlights factors of race, age and - in particular - gender as they intersect with and inform the disability experience. We have published our work in Deviant Behavior, Research in Social Science and Disability, and Journal of Community Psychology.