About

Kevin Kiley is a sociologist whose research explores the social, cultural, and cognitive sources of attitude and opinion stability and change over the life course. He is broadly interested in how we measure culture and beliefs, and his work often focuses on developing new methods for measuring opinion behavior over time. His research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Sociological Science, and Social Psychology Quarterly, and has received recognition from the culture section of the American Sociological Association. Kiley holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from Duke University, an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in Journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at NC State University.

Research topics

• Social Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Econometrics
• Social psychology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Statistics
• History
• Medicine
• Mathematics
• Geography
• Law
• Demography

Selected publications

• Quantifying the Importance of Change for Understanding Differences in Personal Culture

  2026-01-13

  article

  Studies in the sociology of culture have converged on a general conclusion that while people sometimes make substantial shifts in their personal culture over time, most elements of personal culture are characterized by low rates of persistent change during adulthood. Recent developments have begun to quantify change over time and initial differences, but it is unclear how to use these components to understand the relative importance of change, especially when change is modeled non-linearly. To advance this debate, we introduce a measure for quantifying the proportion of systematic variance in panel data attributable to intrapersonal change. Applying this measure to 610 items from seven surveys in five countries, we find that although intrapersonal change is common, it does not explain a large share of systematic variance.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond statistical variables: Examining the duality of persons and groups in structuring cultural space

  Poetics · 2025-01-08 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• What Are You Talking About? Discussion Frequency of Issues Captured in Common Survey Questions

  2025-03-27

  preprintOpen access

  Social science surveys regularly ask respondents to generate opinions or positions on issues deemed to be of political and social importance, such as confidence in government officials or federal spending priorities. Many theories assume interpersonal deliberation is a primary mechanism through which people develop positions on such issues, but it is unclear how often the issues captured by such questions become a topic of conversation. Using an original survey of 2,117 American adults, we quantify how often people report discussing the issues tapped by 88 questions in the General Social Survey’s core questionnaire, as well as how often respondents say they individually reflect on these issues, how important they believe them to be, and how sensitive they believe it would be to discuss those issues. We find the majority of respondents report discussing the majority of issues fewer than once or twice a year, with the modal response that respondents have never discussed an issue in the past year. At the same time, some topics—including religious beliefs and generic appraisals of political leaders—come up quite frequently, and a small number of respondents report frequently discussing most items. We consider the implications of these findings for theories of belief formation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What Are You Talking about? Discussion Frequency of Issues Captured in Common Survey Questions

  Sociological Science · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Social science surveys regularly ask respondents to generate opinions or positions on issues deemed to be of political and social importance, such as confidence in government officials or federal spending priorities. Many theories assume that interpersonal deliberation is a primary mechanism through which people develop positions on such issues, but it is unclear how often the issues captured by such questions become a topic of conversation. Using an original survey of 2,117 American adults, we quantify how often people report discussing the issues tapped by 88 questions in the General Social Survey’s core questionnaire, as well as how often respondents say they individually reflect on these issues, how important they believe them to be, and how sensitive they believe it would be to discuss those issues. We find that the majority of respondents report discussing the majority of issues fewer than once or twice a year, with the modal response that respondents have never discussed an issue in the past year. At the same time, some topics—such as religious beliefs and generic appraisals of political leaders—come up quite frequently, and a small number of respondents report frequently discussing most items. We consider the implications of these findings for theories of belief formation.

  PublisherDOI

• To the Extreme: Exploring the Rise of a Deviant Culture in a Misogynist Digital Community

  Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World · 2024-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Recent instances of lethal mass violence have been linked to digital communities dedicated to misogynist and sexist ideologies. These forums often begin with discussions of more conventional or mainstream ideas, raising the question about the process through which these communities transform from relatively benign to extremist. This article presents a study of the Reddit incel community, active from mid-2016 to its ban in late 2017, which evolved from a self-help forum to a hub for extremist ideologies. We use computational grounded theory to deduce empirical patterns in forum composition, psychological states reflected in language use, and semantic content before refining and testing an interactional process that explains this change: a shift away from drawing on real-world experiences in discussion toward a greater reliance on cognitively simple symbols of group membership. This shift, in turn, leads to more discussions centered on deviant ideology. The results confirm that understanding the dynamics of conversation—specifically, how ideas are interpreted, reinforced, and amplified in recurrent, person-to-person interactions—is crucial for understanding cultural change in digital communities. Implications for sociology of groups, culture, and interactions in digital spaces are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• Intersectional Group Agreement on the Occupational Order

  Social Psychology Quarterly · 2024-06-18 · 6 citations

  articleSenior author

  When a group shares a viewpoint on a status order, their consensus imparts legitimacy to their shared understanding of that order. Conversely, a group espousing multiple viewpoints undermines the notion that one “true” hierarchy exists. To build empirical knowledge about how social groups contribute to the construction of status orders, we take the occupational hierarchy as a case study and map the structure of agreement across intersectional groups. First, we quantify the extent to which groups (1) agree internally on their occupational rankings (within-group consensus) and (2) agree with other groups (intergroup consensus). Using General Social Survey data on occupational perceptions, we find a cluster of privileged groups—namely, highly educated White men and women—who agree internally and with each other on the occupational status order. Lesser advantaged groups exhibit less internal agreement and do not cohere around an alternative conceptualization of value, leaving unchallenged the consensus of privileged groups.

  PublisherDOI

• Quantifying the Importance of Change for Understanding Differences in Personal Culture

  2023-10-13 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  When researchers want to understand differences in personal culture---a person's attitudes, beliefs, values, and practices--how much attention should they pay to adult experience? Recent work has reached substantially different conclusions on this question. We argue that this disagreement is an unintended consequence of the "tournament of models" approach researchers have used, which focuses on whether people change and not how much they change. To advance the theoretical debate, we refocus attention on the relative importance of personal change over time for explaining differences between people. We introduce a new measure for quantifying the proportion of systematic variance in panel data attributable to intrapersonal change. Applying this measure to 609 items from seven surveys in five countries, we find that although intrapersonal change is common, it is generally small in magnitude. As an extension of the theoretical debate, we demonstrate that this measure provides new insights when comparing social groups, showing that intrapersonal change is less common among U.S. college graduates than among those without a college degree. Our findings provide a new perspective on several important theoretical debates, as well as a tool to address new questions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cohort Succession Explains Most Change in Literary Culture

  Sociological Science · 2022 · 57 citations

  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Political Science

  Many aspects of behavior are guided by dispositions that are relatively durable once formed. Political opinions and phonology, for instance, change largely through cohort succession. But evidence for cohort effects has been scarce in artistic and intellectual history; researchers in those fields more commonly explain change as an immediate response to recent innovations and events. We test these conflicting theories of change in a corpus of 10,830 works of fiction from 1880 to 1999 and find that slightly more than half (54.7 percent) of the variance explained by time is explained better by an author’s year of birth than by a book’s year of publication. Writing practices do change across an author’s career. But the pace of change declines steeply with age. This finding suggests that existing histories of literary culture have a large blind spot: the early experiences that form cohorts are pivotal but leave few traces in the historical record.

  PublisherDOI

• Prenatal Lead and Depression Exposures Jointly Influence Birth Outcomes and NR3C1 DNA Methylation

  International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health · 2021-11-19 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Many gestational exposures influence birth outcomes, yet the joint contribution of toxicant and psychosocial factors is understudied. Moreover, associated gestational epigenetic mechanisms are unknown. Lead (Pb) and depression independently influence birth outcomes and offspring NR3C1 (glucocorticoid receptor) DNA methylation. We hypothesized that gestational Pb and depression would jointly influence birth outcomes and NR3C1 methylation. Pregnancy exposure information, DNA methylation, and birth outcome data were collected prospectively from n = 272 mother–infant pairs. Factor analysis was used to reduce the dimensionality of NR3C1. Multivariable linear regressions tested for interaction effects between gestational Pb and depression exposures with birth outcomes and NR3C1. Interaction effects indicated that higher levels of Pb and depression jointly contributed to earlier gestations, smaller infant size at birth, and asymmetric fetal growth. Pb and depression were also jointly associated with the two primary factor scores explaining the most variability in NR3C1 methylation; NR3C1 scores were associated with some infant outcomes, including gestational age and asymmetric fetal growth. Pb and depression can cumulatively influence birth outcomes and epigenetic mechanisms, which may lay the foundation for later health risk. As toxicants and social adversities commonly co-occur, research should consider the life course consequences of these interconnected exposures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Model-Based Method for Detecting Persistent Cultural Change Using Panel Data

  Sociological Science · 2021-01-01 · 36 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Recent work argues that changes in people's responses to the same question over time should be thought of as reflecting a fixed baseline subject to temporary local influences, rather than durable changes in response to new information. Distinguishing between these two individual-level process-a settled dispositions model and an active updating model-is important because these individual-level processes underlie different theories of population-level social change. This article introduces an alternative method for adjudicating between these two models based on structural equation modeling. This model provides a close fit to the theoretical models outlined in previous work. Applying this method to more than 500 questions in the General Social Survey's three-wave panels, we find even stronger evidence than previous work that most survey responses reflect settled dispositions developed prior to adulthood.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Stephen Vaisey

  Duke University

  7 shared

• Paul Burcher

  5 shared

• Jazmine Gabriel

  Geisinger Medical Center

  4 shared

• Lisa Campo‐Engelstein

  4 shared

• Peter E. Nielsen

  4 shared

• RICHARD B. JACKSON

  Landstuhl Regional Medical Center

  4 shared

• KAREN KOSMAN

  Landstuhl Regional Medical Center

  4 shared

• Brook Thomson

  Lymphatic Education & Research Network

  4 shared

Labs

• Research and EngagementPI

Education

• Ph.D., Department of Sociology

  Duke University

  2021

Awards & honors

• recognized by the culture section of the American Sociologic…