About
Carisa Carlton
Carisa Carlton is CEO of Carlton Research, LLC. She is the author of the upcoming publication, Codebook for Identifying Coercive Control in Longitudinal Artifacts, written for judges, attorneys, and evaluators.
Ms. Carlton runs Carlton Research as its principal force: cultural anthropologist, forensic sociologist, behavioral scientist, and linguistic analyst. Her work is a method under pressure. Ethnographic coding and statistical reasoning meet peer-reviewed literature that already maps coercive control patterns. The result is a testable method, a provable finding.
Ms. Carlton holds an M.A. in Demographic and Social Analysis from the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and a B.A. in Anthropology, summa cum laude, from the same institution, including the Ethnographic Honors Research Program. Sociologist Dr. Evan Stark, the most influential legal and academic scholar on coercive control, influenced her pursuit of coercive control research in both law and the social sciences. His mentorship guided her prioritization of deeper judicial education of coercive control.
Ms. Carlton’s research expertise includes linguistic decoding, discourse analysis, systematic classification of artifacts against published literature, ethnographic grounded theory, and statistical analysis. She trained under anthropologists Dr. George Marcus and Dr. Angela Jenks. Coercive control study was guided by psychologist and forensic expert Dr. Al Valdez. Graduate statistical and methodological work in Qualitative Comparative Analysis was completed under sociologist Dr. Charles Ragin. The credentials authorize the foundation of the work. They are not the product.
Field authority comes from the rooms and regions where patterns of coercive control emerged as grounded theory. An 18-month, grant-funded courtroom ethnography at the Lamoreaux Justice Center in Orange County, California, placed her inside domestic-violence proceedings that largely hear coercive control matters. Victim credibility, competing claims, children used as instruments of control, and the live application of legal remedies were the objects of study. A multi-year ethnographic study in Mexico then followed digital coercive control across longitudinal communication records and across cultures. Approximately 22 years of work across five countries outside the United States, including teaching, translation, cross-cultural interviews, and medical anthropology, sharpened attention to cultural context and to alternative explanations that look like ordinary conflict until the corpus is analyzed temporally.
Prior international corporate and institutional research, including Microsoft Xbox R&D, belongs to the firm’s history. The forthcoming Codebook for Identifying Coercive Control in Longitudinal Artifacts is the public instrument that locks her method.
Carlton Research, LLC, founded in October 2020, consults, reviews case material, writes analysis, and testifies. Instruments and tools are designed by Ms. Carlton.
Carlton Research does not perform clinical evaluations, does not recommend custody or parenting time, does not engage in victim advocacy work, and does not treat patients.
The product is coercive control pattern analysis a court can test.