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​​​I am a trained sociologist whose academic work examined how people navigate education and work when opportunities are limited or uncertain. I focused on students who do not follow traditional college pathways, with particular attention to young mothers living on low incomes. I sought to understand how people make educational decisions in the context of disrupted lives and within an increasingly complex postsecondary system that includes community colleges, technical programs, and for-profit institutions. I also examined how employers interpret different types of educational credentials, helping to clarify what degrees signal in the labor market and how those signals shape opportunity.

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I completed my PhD in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University, where my goal was to produce research that could support greater equity in educational outcomes. My training combined deep engagement with scholarship on social and economic inequality with work on the Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (RISK) Project. The RISK team included both sociologists and clinical psychologists, which expanded my perspective beyond the study of formal institutions and highlighted the role of personal narratives, social support, and meaning-making in persistence and recovery after disaster-related trauma.

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I take a multimethod approach to understanding the world and am especially interested in research design and qualitative methods. I am attentive to how people understand and tell their own stories, and to how research evidence can be produced in ways that are transparent, ethical, and useful for real-world decision making.

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Since completing my PhD, my work has bridged academic research, applied program evaluation, and systematic analysis of administrative data. I focus on generating evidence that reflects real-world constraints while remaining rigorous and human-centered. This work has included assessing and improving federal performance data and measures; establishing conceptual frameworks and theories of change; developing learning agendas; and overseeing traditional research and evaluation studies.

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Peer-Reviewed Publications with Plain Language Summaries*​
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Flexible Coding of In-Depth Interviews
A 21st Century Approach

Nicole M. Deterding and Mary C. Waters

2021. Sociological Methods and Research 50 (2): 708-739.

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Plan Language Summary*

When grounded theory was introduced as a qualitative research design, sociologists analyzed interview transcripts using paper, pens, scissors, and index cards. Now, many of us use computers and qualitative data analysis (QDA) software that let us easily store, search, tag, and reorganize interview data. Still, the grounded theory framework continues to drive how many beginning qualitative researchers are taught to analyze interview data.
 

In this article, we argue that traditional grounded theory guidelines do not fit how most sociologists actually work with interviews in the 2010s—especially when we have large samples, work in research teams, or combine qualitative and quantitative methods. We also show how those older guidelines can make it harder for other researchers to see exactly what we did or to reuse our data in future studies.
 

We first lay out the assumptions behind grounded theory–style coding and analysis. Then we review recent articles using semi-structured interviews in top American Sociological Association journals to show how current practice already departs from classic grounded theory. Drawing on our own experience analyzing interview data, we propose a step-by-step approach to organizing and coding interviews that takes full advantage of QDA software. Our aim is to make qualitative analysis more rigorous, transparent, and flexible, while being honest about the strengths and limits of this updated approach.
 

  • Recorded Webinar from the American Sociological Association Professional Development Webinar series, December 2019.  

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Lessons from the Social Innovation Fund
Supporting Evaluation to Assess Program Effectiveness and Build a Body of Research Evidence

Lily Zandniapour and Nicole M. Deterding

2018. American Journal of Evaluation, 39 (1):27-41.

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Plain Language Summary*

Governments increasingly want social programs to be backed by strong evidence about what works. One strategy is “tiered evidence” funding, where programs with more proof of effectiveness can receive more money, and newer or less-tested programs get support to build that proof.
 

The Social Innovation Fund (SIF), run by the Corporation for National and Community Service, was one of the most ambitious efforts to do this. It used a public–private partnership model: federal money was matched by private and local dollars, and grantees were required to carry out rigorous evaluations of their programs.
 

In this article, we explain how the SIF model worked and how it turned the idea of “building evidence” into concrete requirements and tools for grantees. We describe the guidance, templates, and technical assistance that were developed to help mostly small and mid-sized organizations plan and complete strong evaluations. Drawing on our experience overseeing more than 130 evaluations funded by SIF, we highlight key lessons about how funders can:
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  • Support organizations to build evaluation capacity

  • Produce credible, useful findings about program effectiveness

  • Contribute to a broader evidence base on how to address major social problems
     

We also discuss what evaluators and technical assistance providers outside of tiered evidence initiatives can learn from SIF’s approach.

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The Emotional Cost of Distance
Geographic Social Network Dispersion and Post-traumatic Stress in Survivors of Hurricane Katrina

Katherine Ann Morris and Nicole M. Deterding

2016. Social Science and Medicine, 165 (1):56-65.

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Plain Language Summary*

After disasters, family and friends are crucial for emotional and practical support—but displacement can scatter them across the map.
 

In this article, we ask whether being physically far from close network members increases the risk of long-term post-traumatic stress. We use surveys and interviews from the Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (RISK) Project, which followed low-income mothers from New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. Participants were surveyed about a year before the storm and again five years later, and a subset took part in in-depth interviews.

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Our statistical analyses show that women whose close network members live farther away are more likely to experience post-traumatic stress symptoms—even after accounting for their hurricane-related trauma, perceived social support, demographics, and whether they returned to New Orleans.
 

Interviews help explain why. Women with far-flung networks often describe feeling that they no longer deeply “belong” where they live and that they don’t fully “matter” to important others because they cannot be physically present or meet mutual obligations.
 

Overall, we show that physical proximity to emotionally close ties is an important, and often overlooked, part of long-term psychological recovery after major disasters.

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Educational Authority in the "Open Door" Marketplace
Labor Market Consequences of For-profit, Nonprofit, and Fictional Educational Credentials

Nicole M. Deterding and David S. Pedulla (Equal Authorship)

2016. Sociology of Education, 89 (3): 155-170.

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Plain Language Summary*

For-profit colleges have been one of the fastest-growing parts of U.S. higher education. Classic hiring theories assume that employers can easily judge the quality of different colleges, and select employees they expect will have the best skills. But as new types of colleges multiply, do employers actually distinguish between them—or do they mostly look for “any degree”?
 

In this study, we tested how employers respond to associate’s degrees from different kinds of institutions. We ran a field experiment, sending 1268 applications to administrative jobs in three large U.S. labor markets. Some résumés listed a degree from a local for-profit college, some from a local nonprofit college, and some from a fictional college that we created.
 

Employers treated these applicants similarly: having an associate’s degree mattered, but there was no measurable difference between the different types of schools. We find only limited evidence that employers actively evaluate institutional quality. Instead, for many entry-level administrative jobs, employers appeared to reward degree-holding in general rather than sorting among different types of colleges.

Because for-profit associate’s degrees cost several times more than similar community college programs, but employers in this experiment treated degrees from for-profit, nonprofit, and even fictional colleges about the same in terms of call backs, our results suggest students should be cautious about paying a price premium for for-profit associate’s degrees—at least for administrative jobs in large urban labor markets. More broadly, the study casts doubt on the idea that employer demand and market competition will, by themselves, improve program quality in the “open door” sector: when employers focus on whether applicants have any associate’s degree and largely ignore where it was earned, competition will not effectively sort or upgrade institutions.​

Instrumental and Expressive Education
College Planning in the Face of Poverty

Nicole M. Deterding

2015. Sociology of Education, 88 (4): 284-301.
 

​Plain Language Summary*

In the United States, most young people say they want a college degree, but many never finish. This article asks whether that means people give up on their college plans—or whether the plans stick around, even when college completion is unlikely. I draw on five years of survey and interview data from 700 low-income mothers enrolled at two community colleges. When Hurricane Katrina hit, many were displaced and their education was disrupted, forcing them to decide whether, how, and why to go back to school.

 

Only a small number of women actually completed degrees during the study period. Yet the survey data show that many re-enrolled and continued to say they intended to earn a degree. Interviews help explain why. Instrumentally, women believed college was the key to better jobs and economic security. Expressively, being “a college student” carried moral value and supported stories they told about themselves as striving, responsible adults moving upward despite hardship.
 

Policy and academic debates usually frame education as a human capital investment—a way to gain skills and raise earnings. This study shows that the symbolic and emotional meanings of college also strongly shape decisions about returning to school well into adulthood. For the women in this study, engagement with college often persisted long after the odds of actually finishing were low, because plans to return and re-enrollment added dignity, hope, and a sense of direction to their lives.

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Widening the Net

National Estimates of Gender Disparities in Engineering

Clemencia Cosentino de Cohen and Nicole M. Deterding
2009. Journal of Engineering Education, 98 ​(3): 211-226.

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Plain Language Summary*

This article examines why women remain so underrepresented in engineering. Using national data on undergraduate engineering programs, we estimate how often men and women stay in (or leave) engineering once they have enrolled. Contrary to a common belief that women “leak out” of the pipeline at higher rates, we find that overall—and in most engineering disciplines—women are about as likely as men to stay in engineering once they start. In other words, the gender gap is not primarily caused by women dropping out of engineering majors at higher rates than men.
 

Instead, our results show that the main problem is that too few women enter engineering in the first place. The gender disparity is driven by lower enrollment, not lower retention. This means that increasing the number of female engineers will mean adding a focus on recruitment: expanding outreach within colleges and universities, building stronger pathways from two-year colleges, and reaching into middle and high schools and K–12 curricula. 

It is important to note that the relatively high persistence rates we observe for women in engineering may reflect both who makes it into engineering in the first place and the success of programs designed to support their retention. Still, our results indicate that the underrepresentation of women in engineering is, at the national level, primarily a recruitment challenge—not just a matter of keeping women from leaving the field once they are in.

 

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* NOTE: Plain language summaries were initially drafted with the assistance of ChatGPT Researcher Extraordinaire and revised for precision by me)

In Progress
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