Dr. Baron has extensive experience in the field of social research, evaluating national, state, and local social and educational programs. Dr. Baron started working as a consultant to the PhD in Leadership and Change Program in 2003 and formally joined as half-time Core Faculty in the 2007 program year. Dr. Baron will be retiring from Antioch at the end of the 2021 program year. During her career at Antioch, Dr. Baron has served as chair or methodologist on over 40 dissertation committees. Her primary focus in the program has been on teaching and mentoring students in quantitative and mixed methods research and statistics.
Dr. Baron has also developed, and made accessible to students and faculty, a wealth of student learning resource materials covering research and survey design and statistics. Dr. Baron has a particular interest in survey design and scale building and authored the Surveys and Scales in EDI Research chapter for the Handbook of Research Methods in Diversity, Management, Equality, and Inclusion at Work (2018). She also co-authored articles with program graduates, including “Measuring Mechanisms of Student Voice: Development and Validation of Student Leadership Capacity Building Scales”(AERA, 2020) with Dr. Lindsay Lyons and Dr. Marc Brasof and “Cross-cultural professional experiences of female expatriates: Finding success through agility, resilience, and essential relationships” (Cross Cultural & Strategic Management, 2019) with Dr. Tami France and Dr. Lize Booysen.
Dr. Baron’s career in social research included serving as Director of Sampling at the National Opinion Research Center, as Research Associate at the Virginia Commonwealth University Survey Research Center, as Director of Research and Statistics at the Virginia Department of Social Services, and as a research consultant to national and local nonprofit agencies. Dr. Baron earned her PhD from the Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Education in 2003 and her Master’s in Social Research from the University of Chicago. Dr. Baron has worked in the educational field in both teaching and program evaluation roles, including teaching adult education, social and survey research, and statistics for the VCU School of Education as well as for The Union Institute and University.
