Hello! I’m Pat, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University who studies parenting, childhood, inequality, and social mobility with quantitative and computational methods. Much of my research focuses on how parents raise their children—what they do, why they do it, differences across social groups and economic contexts, change over time, and how this shapes children’s development and long-term adult outcomes.
I’ve also published papers on the effects of income inequality on family decision making, financial satisfaction, and social trust; the role of religion and spirituality in how people connect to and fit within society; the challenges of survey reliability and retrospective measurement; and even (long ago!) physics. Across my work, I apply and adapt cutting-edge methods from machine learning, computational text analysis, and causal inference, to shed new light on longstanding sociological questions.
I not only study parenting but attempt to practice it as a dad to three boys. When possible, I also enjoy running (sometimes really, really far), biking, climbing, and skiing.
Updates
I’ve posted a new working paper “Explaining the Extracurricular Investment Gap forSchool-age Children between Married and Cohabiting Families.” (Oct 2025)
The GSS asked the same people about their childhood income rank three different times. 56% changed their answer, even though what was trying to be measured couldn’t change. We dig into this in our new article “Growing up Different(ly than Last Time We Asked): Social Status and Changing Reports of Childhood Income Rank” in Social Indicators Research. (Sept 2025)
New paper in the Journal of Marriage and Family shows how parental financial investments changed during COVID and (mostly) returned back to how they were. (Nov 2024)
Sabbatical! This fall I am visiting the Centre for Research on Social Inequalities, Sciences Po and Nuffield College, University of Oxford. (Oct 2024)
How can we measure the cultural logics of parenting using computational text analysis? We show one approach in a new paper in Social Science Research and find two key dimensions of parenting logics: (1) assertive vs negotiated parenting and (2) pedagogic vs pragmatic parenting. (Sept 2024)
New paper! There are larger class gaps in parental investments during the summer and among families with younger children. We examine this (and more) in “The Summer Parental Investment Gap? Socioeconomic Gaps in the Seasonality of Parental Expenditures and Time with School-age Children” that is published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. (Nov 2023)
Tenured and promoted to Associate Professor! (July 2023)
My new paper “Linking Individual and Collective Social Capital: Operationalization, Association, and Sociodemographic Heterogeneity” is now published in Sociological Spectrum. (Feb 2023)
My new data visualization article “Parental Investments of Money for White, Black, and Hispanic Children in the United States” is now published in Socius. (June 2022)
Received a Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (SICSS) research grant from the Social Science Research Council to support my project “What’s a Parent to do? Measuring Parenting Approaches in the US with Topic Modeling for Short Texts” with Luca Maria Pesando. (March 2022)
New article! “Family Structure and Inequalities in Parents’ Financial Investments in Children” is in the Journal of Marriage and Family. We previously summarized some of this research in The Conversation (May 2021)
New article! “Happiness in Hard Times: Does Religion Buffer the Negative Effect of Unemployment on Happiness?” has now been published in Social Forces. (Nov 2020)
The Urban Institute’s Housing Matters posted a summary of our recently published research on how school quality shapes how much parent’s are willing to spend on housing. (Jan 2020)
For more updates, visit the Older Updates page.
Research
“Growing up Different(ly than Last Time We Asked): Social Status and Changing Reports of Childhood Income Rank.” (2025) Social Indicators Research.
“The Fall and Rise of Parental Financial Investments during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” (2025) Journal of Marriage and Family 87:1286-1303.
- with Mariana Amorim and Sabino Kornrich
- Appendix
“What’s a Parent to do? Measuring Cultural Logics of Parenting with Computational Text Analysis.” (2024). Social Science Research 124:103074.
“The Summer Parental Investment Gap? Socioeconomic Gaps in the Seasonality of Parental Expenditures and Time with School-Age Children.” (2023). Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 87:100846.
“Linking Individual and Collective Social Capital: Operationalization, Association, and Sociodemographic Heterogeneity.” (2023). Sociological Spectrum 43(1):31-51.
“Parental Investments of Money for White, Black, and Hispanic Children in the United States.” (2022). Socius 8:1-2.
“Family Structure and Inequalities in Parents’ Financial Investments in Children.” (2021). Journal of Marriage and Family 83(3):717-736.
- with Daniel Schneider
- Appendix
- Coverage: Brookings Institution Class Notes
“Happiness in Hard Times: Does Religion Buffer the Negative Effect of Unemployment on Happiness?” (2020). Social Forces 99(2):447-473.
“A Quarter of US Parents are Unmarried – and that Changes How Much They Invest in Their Kids” (2019). The Conversation.
- with Daniel Schneider
- Coverage: Dissent
“Who Feels It? Income Inequality, Relative Deprivation, and Financial Satisfaction in U.S. States, 1973–2012.” (2019). Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 60:1-15.
- Coverage: The Atlantic, The Tobin Project
“Buying In: Positional Competition, Schools, Income Inequality, and Housing Consumption.” (2019). Sociological Science 6:416-445.
- with Adam Goldstein
- Coverage: Urban Institute
“Income Inequality and Class Divides in Parental Investment” (2018). American Sociological Review 83(3):475-507.
- with Daniel Schneider and Joe LaBriola
- Appendix
- Replication
- Prize for Exemplary Work on Inequality and Decision Making, The Tobin Project
- Article of the Year Award, ASA Family Section
- Coverage: New York Times, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Hechinger Report, Russell Sage Foundation, Dissent, Coloradoan, CSU SOURCE
“Less Equal, Less Trusting? Reexamining Longitudinal and Cross-sectional Effects of Income Inequality on Trust in U.S. States, 1973–2012” (2018). Social Science Research 74:77-95.
“Keeping up with the Joneses: How Households Fared in the Era of High Income Inequality and the Housing Price Bubble, 1999–2007” (2017). Socius 3:1-15.
- with Neil Fligstein, Adam Goldstein
- Coverage: New York Times, Washington Post Wonkblog, The Tobin Project
“Income Inequality and Household Labor” (2017). Social Forces 96(2):481-506.
- with Daniel Schneider
- Appendix
- Open-Access Preprint
- Article of the Year Award, ASA Family Section
“Not a Lonely Crowd? Social Connectedness, Religious Service Attendance, and the Spiritual But Not Religious” (2016). Social Science Research 57:63-79.
- Best Student Paper Award, ASA Sociology of Religion Section
- Robert J. McNamara Student Paper Award, Association for the Sociology of Religion
“Reliability of the Core Items in the General Social Survey: Estimates from the Three-wave Panels, 2006-2014” (2016). Sociological Science 3:971-1002.
- with Michael Hout
“Socioeconomic Variation in the Demographic Response to Economic Shocks in the United States: Evidence from the Great Recession” (2015). Demography 52(6):1893-1915.
- with Daniel Schneider
“Recession, Religion, and Happiness, 2006–2010” (2014). In Religion and Inequality in America: Research and Theory on Religion’s Role in Stratification, Lisa A. Keister and Darren E. Sherkat (eds.). Cambridge University Press.
- with Michael Hout
“Rethinking Religious Gender Differences: The Case of Elite Women” (2013). Sociology of Religion 74(4):471-495.
- with D. Michael Lindsay
“Reliability and Stability Estimates for the GSS Core Items from the Three-wave Panels, 2006–2010” (2012). GSS Methodological Report #119. NORC.
- with Michael Hout
“Recent Atomic Clock Comparisons at NIST” (2008). The European Physical Journal Special Topics 163:19-35.
- with L. Lorini, N. Ashby, A. Brusch, S. Diddams, R. Drullinger, E. Eason, T. Fortier, T. Heavner, D. Hume, W. Itano, S. Jefferts, N. Newbury, T. Parker, T. Rosenband, J. Stalnaker, W. Swann, D. Wineland, and J. Bergquist