Welcome

Casey H. Boyd-Swan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. Her primary research area focuses on the impact of early care and education policy on family and child well-being, including child cognitive and behavioral development, health and physical well-being, and parental mental and physical health.

Recent research examines the population of parents and children who use nonparental child care during evening and overnight hours, employs evidence from a resume audit study to identify how child care centers perceive “quality” during hiring decisions, and explores measures of self-reported happiness as potential markers of public policies’ success or failure, particularly for disadvantaged groups. Her broader research agenda is to provide a more nuanced and rigorous examination of how early childhood experiences influence children’s well-being, both contemporaneously and as they age. Her scholarly work has been published in the Journal of Urban Economics, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) Discussion Paper Series.

In addition to her work on early care and education, Dr. Boyd-Swan collaborates with colleagues across the university on issues of policing and race. Recent research, with Dr. Anthony Molina, examining the role of Value Congruence and citizen trust in government was presented at the American Society for Public Administration. Current work with Dr. Molina focuses on the ways in which public administrators in general, and police departments specifically, can practice cultural competency to improve community relations. Additional work, drawing on the expertise of Dr. Ashley Nickels, Dr. Kamesha Spates, and Dr. Tameka Ellington, employs a series of field experiments to expand and enhance this line of research in innovative and intersectional ways.

Dr. Boyd-Swan is proud to announce recent collaborations with graduate students in the Department of Political Science. She and Dr. Nickels were recipients of a University Teaching Council course redevelopment grant and are in the process of evaluating the efficacy of pedagogical enhancements to the undergraduate Research Methods course; this research is in collaboration with doctoral student Anna Hutcheson. Dr. Boyd-Swan and doctoral candidate Preya Bhattacharya are currently collaborating on a methodological note, which explores the challenges of applying complexity methods and models to political science research problems.

Dr. Boyd-Swan can be reached by email or phone (330-672-7903). She is also available during office hours (Tuesday and Thursday, 9:30am until 12pm), or by appointment.