KORT C PRINCE portrait
  • Research Associate Professor, College Of Social Work
801-587-9947

Research Summary

My research focuses on criminal justice and homelessness, particularly quantitative analysis of data in these fields.

Education

  • Bachelor of Arts, Psychology, The Ohio State University. Project: Reaction Time as a Determinant of Consumer Attitudes Toward Product Purchasing
  • Master of Science, Social Psychology, University of Utah. Project: Stealing Thunder: Negating Manipulation Through Source Credibility
  • Doctor of Philosophy, Social Psychology, University of Utah. Project: Individual Differences in State Self-Esteem and the Role of Group Acceptance as Determinants of Message Persuasion

Biography

I received my PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Utah in 2004 and have worked in the fields of marketing, social, and medical research since 1997, beginning as a research assistant at the Ohio State University. I am now a Research Assistant Professor at the Utah Criminal Justice Center in the College of Social Work at the University of Utah. Since receiving my PhD, I have worked as a statistical analyst, social, and medical researcher, participating in the design, analysis and reporting for numerous research projects in these fields. I also currently teach two PhD-level statistics courses in the College of Social Work.

Over the last 20 years, I have gained a strong background in academic and applied research settings, including research in medicine and epidemiology, substance abuse prevention, homelessness, and criminal justice. Over the course of my education and career, I have developed expertise in all phases of research design and analysis, but my primary focus is in the management, cleaning, and analysis of complicated data (including experience with databases of several million cases). Over the past decade, in particular, I have refined my expertise in statistical analysis techniques, including factor analysis, cluster analysis, classification procedures, structural equation modeling (including path analysis, multiple groups analysis, and full structural models), and multilevel and longitudinal data analysis (including discontinuous growth models). Within each of these analytic techniques, I am experienced with both general and generalized approaches, including those for count and binary data.

While I use and have expertise in a variety of software programs for data analysis (including SPSS, SAS, MPlus, AMOS, ArcView GIS, and AtlasTI), I have focused my recent training on becoming fluent in R. I currently use R for cleaning and analyzing data, for documenting research procedures, and producing reports.