Matty Lichtenstein

Research areas – keywords: health disparities, maternal and infant health, child welfare policy, family governance, religion, research methods.  
 

Dr. Matty Lichtenstein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Florida Atlantic University. She completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, after which she assumed a position as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Brown University Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs. Dr. Lichtenstein’s areas of expertise include child welfare policy, maternal health disparities, family governance, religion, and qualitative and mixed-methods research.  
 
Broadly, Dr. Lichtenstein’s work focuses on how categories of risk are constructed and institutionalized in American welfare and health governance. Her current book project examines how state and professional organizations shape socioeconomic inequalities in American maternal and child welfare. Related research investigates the rise in US maternal morbidity, racial disparities in medical reporting of substance-exposed infants, and the development of risk discourses in social work and medicine. In a second stream of research, she has studied educational advocacy, organizational change, and religious community. Her work has been recognized by the ASA Political Sociology section and supported by multiple fellowships and research grants.
 
You can learn more about Dr. Lichtenstein’s work by visiting www.mattylichtenstein.com. She has partnered with non-profits to conduct research on maternal health and educational policy, and she is affiliate faculty with the Florida Atlantic University Department of Jewish Studies.
 

Selected Works:

 Lichtenstein, Matty. “Unseeing Poverty: Tracing the Origins of Inequality in American Child Welfare.” Forthcoming in Policing or Providing: The Child Welfare System as Poverty Governance. Eds. Jennifer Randles and Kerry Woodward. New York University Press, 2024.
 
Edwards, Frank, Sarah Roberts, Kathleen Kenny, Mical Raz, Matty Lichtenstein, Mishka Terplan. “The Prevalence and Racial Inequity of Child Protection Investigations Resulting from Medical Professional Reports in the US, 2010-2019.” Health Equity, October 2023, (653-662). http://doi.org/10.1089/heq.2023.0136.
 
Lichtenstein, Matty. “Legitimizing Discourses: Hasidic Schools, Non-Compliance, and the Politics of Deservingness.” American Journal of Sociology, May 2022 (127:6). DOI: 10.1086/719926
**Best Graduate Student Paper Award, Political Sociology Section, American Sociological Association, 2021.
 
Lichtenstein, Matty and Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana. “Contextual Text Coding: A Mixed Methods Approach for Large-Scale Textual Data.” Sociological Methods and Research, February 2021. DOI: 10.1177/0049124120986191
 
Lichtenstein, Matty. 2019. “‘Younger People Want to Do It Themselves’ - Self-Actualization, Commitment, and the Reinvention of Community.” Qualitative Sociology 42(2):181–203. DOI: 10.1007/s11133-019-9414-6