Postdoctoral Fellow, Population Studies and Training Center
Elly Field is a quantitative sociologist and demographer with a focus on how individual choices and preferences intersect with macro-level policies and social structures to shape racial and economic inequality. Her research uses cutting edge quantitative methods and original data collection using GIS, longitudinal administrative data, and survey experiments. In her primary research area, she investigates how the structural link between schools and neighborhoods created by school district policies shapes racial segregation dynamics. Her work explores how school policies shape parents’ decisions about where to live and where to send their children to school and identifies the implications of those decisions for neighborhood and school segregation. School district attendance policies assign students to schools based on where they live, tying school segregation to neighborhood segregation. However, while both parents and scholars have long understood the importance of these school district policies, research has not fully considered the implications of these policies for individual preferences, mobility decisions, and population change. Her ongoing work examines how these policies affect demographic change occurring in schools and neighborhoods as linked contexts, as well as how school districts respond to the release of court-ordered desegregation policies. Elly’s work informs sociological theory on population dynamic, education, and racial inequality.
Elly Field is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. Before joining Brown, she completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Michigan in 2024. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship, the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development Graduate Fellowship, and the American Sociological Association/NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.
