Invitation

I welcome contacts from prospective collaborators to discuss:

  1. Research in the social sciences, health & safety, law, and other disciplines.
  2. Applied projects involving human services, non-profits, law and litigation, and educational programming.

What I Bring to Collaborations

  1. Original data. See the data page for details.
  2. Forward-looking perspectives on Amish & Mennonite people, with particular experience articulating subject relevance, theoretical perspectives, social problems, and data meaning.
  3. Years of lived experience among the Amish & Mennonite people, sensitively informing research study design and interpretation.
  4. Mastery of the Amish & Mennonite research literature. I have annotated over 1,000 Amish-focused publications.
  5. Careful attention to scientific writing evidenced by publications in well-regarded sociology and health journals.
  6. An eye for stereotypes baked into Amish studies: cliche vocabulary, conceptual fallacies, generalizations, and mis-weighted issue salience.

What I Cannot Bring to Collaborations

  1. Speaking on behalf of the Amish or Mennonite body
  2. Providing a pool of research participants
  3. Legitimizing an outreach program to Amish/Mennonites by mere merit of my involvement

Attributes Sought in Collaborators (any or all)

  1. Mastery of advanced quantitative and qualitative tools that add value to my datasets, including ability to link the CAPED-2010s data to other datasets, or experience processing and analyzing qualitative datasets
  2. Command of a relevant body of research literature in another subject area: culture, theory, health subareas, organizations, family and gender, legal subareas, and so forth.
  3. Extended lived experience with either the Amish/Mennonites (or other plain Anabaptists) or a related population well-poised for comparative research, especially religious groups with coordinated dress practices