Elly Field

 I am a quantitative sociologist and methodologist working at the intersection of stratification and demography. My research agenda is driven by the overarching questions: how do social policies influence the choices available to individuals, and how those choices aggregate to shape inequality? I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 2024.

I study how the structural link between schools and neighborhoods created by school district policies shapes racial segregation dynamics.  My primary research to date 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. My work informs sociological theory on population dynamics and reveals how social policies can create spillover effects across domains. 

My work has been published in Demography and is forthcoming at Social Forces. My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development Postdoctoral and Graduate Fellowships, and the American Sociological Association/NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.