Research Approach and Foci

Preamble

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In the early 2000s, when I started researching the topics of both U.S. race/ethnicity and gender identity by combining individual difference and social psychology perspectives, my research was not easily understood within either traditional personality science or traditional social psychology research. Consequently, I called my research lab the SPAMS Lab--both as an acronym for the specific research foci (i.e., Social Perception, Attitudes, Mental Simulation) but also as a way to make light of the idea that people did not want to hear about the research at the time (in the original Internet Age use of "spamming" someone). Over the intervening years, this combined perspective (of using both personality and social psychology approaches) and to the topics of gender and sexuality has become more accepted, and even gained a measure of popularity. Thus, in 2025, I rebranded the lab as the QuantSAGE Lab or QSAGE Lab to better reflect that the lab is now part of the vanguard and mainstream understandings of these topics.

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Human Behavior Research Foci

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My research and my lab's research focuses on “The Big Three” social categories in United States culture: gender, sexual identity, and race/ethnicity. However, we have focused and continue to focus the majority of our research on gender and sexual identity. You can read a more detailed description of my approach and underlying reasoning here.

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Inclusive Approach from the Outset

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It is also worth noting that a key feature of our lab’s approach to psychological science is to be as inclusive in our thinking and data collection as possible from the outset. Consequently, we approach measuring gender or sexuality  from the most inclusive perspective possible from the beginning. Our lab believes that starting from an inclusive place of theory and research is a hallmark of any useful scientific investigation. Unfortunately, the history of the life sciences is rife with examples of non-inclusive approaches to social phenomena, which tend to lead to under-developed understandings and roadblocks to scientific progress.

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Our best current example of this inclusive approach is being the first research lab to introduce and evaluate the inclusive two-step method for gender demographic questions (original paper here), which involves asking participants about gender identity (first) and birth assigned category (second) in any questionnaire to track cisgender and all transgender (including nonbinary) statuses of respondents. We take a similar approach to understanding sexuality (including to make sure to represent asexuality and aromanticism in all the questions we construct). Consequently, our lab is focused on improving research methods (e.g., the two-step method) as well as the statistical evaluation of responses.