Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology

Email: kjohnson@albany.edu
Phone: (518)442-4671
Office: Arts & Sciences 351

Curriculum Vitae | Publications | Grant Activity | Personal Website

Recent Scientific Accomplishments

One aspect of Johnson’s work that intersects CSDA signature themes examines earnings inequality among various racial/ethnic groups. With Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Melvin Thomas, Johnson developed a sociologically variant of human capital that conceptualizes human capital acquisition as a social product, not an individual investment. They apply this model to racial earnings inequality focusing on how exposure to discrimination influences both human capital acquisition and earnings inequalities as they develop across the career. Their paper on the effects of race and human capital accumulation across the career has been published in the American Journal of Sociology.

Funded Research

None.

Future Plans

Johnson’s primary interest lies in how race and gender inequality influence crime and delinquency. Her work seeks to understand the collateral consequences of incarceration for individuals and communities. She has collaborated with Jacqueline Johnson on two papers that investigate the linkages among incarceration, social inequality, and earnings for African Americans, Latinos and whites. In other work Johnson investigates the role of incarceration, human capital acquisition and racial inequality in labor markets.
Johnson’s second area of research explores the relationship between schools and delinquency. Here she considers the extent to which stratification, disciplinary practices within schools and individual-level characteristics affect delinquency. She is particularly interested in examining how delinquent behavior varies across race/ethnicity, gender and immigration status. This line of research has been funded by a CSDA Junior Researcher Award (Fall 2005). During summer 2006, the funds provided for this research enabled Johnson to attend an ICPSR short course on Multilevel Modeling and also the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) Users Conference held at the NIH campus. Currently, CSDA houses the restricted-use files of the Add Health data and provides researchers access to the data and a computer designated to store this data. This fall, Johnson began working with this sensitive data and has completed the preliminary analyses for a paper on curriculum tracking, zero tolerance policies, and delinquency among African American and Latino youth.