David L. Elliott

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT DAVID L. ELLIOTT

I am a sociologist (Ph.D, University of Missouri) trained in both qualitative and quantitative methods. However, my current focus in Family Medicine is on qualitative methods for the DoD Child Study for which I am conducting and analyzing qualitative interviews with military family clinicians caring for children and adolescents with mental health, behavioral health, or developmental delays and disabilities. My main research skills and interests for my research role here includes qualitative design, data collection (interviews, focus groups, ethnography, and documents) and analysis (constructivist grounded theory, conversation analysis, narrative analysis, and NVivo). However, my skills and interests also relevant to the department include social network analysis and the ethnomethodological approach to work including human-machine interaction and AI tools. This includes a conversation analytic framework for study human engagements with conversational AI. The theoretical approaches that continue to influence me are social interactionist and relational. My prior research with the Aging, Chronic Illness, and Long-Term Care Program at UNC included the areas of dementia care, end-of-life care and hospice, human-centered care and practices, medication administration, caregiver training and education, fall prevention, health care screening, and nursing services. My role on that team was as senior data analyst. Before that, I worked in diversity, equity, and inclusion research, including health disparities and criminal justice reform and equity at CSU. My doctoral research, entitled \"Discourse Structure as the Scaffolding of Stance Structure: Developments in a Central Concept in a Central Site of Discursive Interaction in Bioethics,\" used a mixed methods approach in the study of academic discourse, particularly in its written form. The main focus was on the patterns and dynamics of stancetaking in written academic discourse, including the sociocultural formations that provide its contexts. I was seeking to contribute to methods in the study of written academic discourse as well as to theory, building upon the relational sociology approach of Harrison White, Charles Tilly, and numerous others, as well as upon discourse or cognitive-functional, systemic functional, and anthropological linguistics. My teaching specialties include research methods (both qualitative and quantitative), statistics, social network analysis, and social organizations and institutions (with a special interest in economic sociology). However, I have taught many other courses.