Research
My research sits at the intersection of sociology, political science, labor, mental health, and social theory. I study how institutions shape emotional life, how work demands performance, and how people search for dignity within structures that make authenticity difficult.
Research Question
A central question guides the work:
How do social conditions become emotional, psychological, and embodied realities?
My current research examines labor as both an economic system and a psychological environment. I study how organizational structures shape autonomy, recognition, stress, belonging, and quality of life.
Across projects, I am drawn to the gap between institutional design and lived experience. What do systems ask people to carry? What masks do people learn to wear? What happens when those masks crack?
This theme explores labor, emotional masking, burnout, autonomy, and neurodivergent experience within contemporary organizational life.
I am interested in how workplaces create or intensify psychological strain, and what alternative structures might make labor more humane.
This project examines how self-direction and organizational design shape meaning, fairness, belonging, and well-being in everyday life.
It asks what becomes possible when people have more control over the conditions of their labor.
This project examines how Americans think about responsibility for healthcare, institutional trust, and social obligation leading up to the Affordable Care Act.
At its center is a tension between individual responsibility and collective care.
Looking Forward
My broader trajectory is moving toward the sociology of mental health, illness, and neurodivergence, with attention to care, control, stigma, and support.
I am interested in how psychological experience is shaped across workplaces, schools, healthcare systems, prisons, mental health institutions, and families.
This includes diagnosis, crisis, recovery, belonging, emotional regulation, institutional response, and the systems that shape identity and well-being across the life course.
Mixed-methods research project · worker autonomy · cooperatives · quality of life
A mixed-methods project on worker autonomy, recognition, belonging, and quality-of-life outcomes in cooperative and traditional workplaces.
Sociological report · alienation · emotional masking · burnout
Gaither, 2026
A sociological report on labor, neurodivergence, emotional masking, burnout, and the contradictions of contemporary work culture.
Empirical public opinion project · healthcare responsibility · institutional trust · ACA era
An empirical project on healthcare responsibility, institutional trust, and social obligation before the Affordable Care Act.
Public writing · American work culture · productivity · labor and life
A public-facing essay on American work culture, exhaustion, productivity, and organizing life around something more human than labor alone.
My research uses mixed methods: survey analysis, regression modeling, logit modeling, pulse surveys, structured interviews, and comparative-historical analysis.
Quantitative data can reveal patterns. Qualitative work helps preserve voice, context, and lived meaning.
Additional research, seminar work, essays, and ongoing projects live on my public platforms.
ResearchGate
Formal academic work, conference papers, research projects, and developing scholarship.
Writing Through Fire
Public-facing essays and interdisciplinary writing on labor, mental health, identity, institutions, and human experience.
Featured piece: Theories on Human Interaction
Research, for me, is not separate from lived life.
It is another way of paying attention.