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 trained qualitative researchers.
Ms. Carlton runs Carlton Research as its principal force: a forensic sociologist and cultural & linguistic anthropologist.
Her 10+ years of research in coercive control forms her method under pressure: Pattern analysis of coercive control conduct measured against peer-reviewed literature, mapped through ethnographic method and statistical reasoning. Factfinders receive evidence they can test.
Ms. Carlton is among the first forensic experts to complete a full coercive control analysis, and to testify, under Arizona’s Alec and Lydia Act (HB 2995), signed June 22, 2026, which added coercive control to the definition of domestic violence in legal decision-making and parenting-time cases.
Field authority comes from the rooms and regions where patterns 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. A multi-year study in Mexico then followed digital coercive control across longitudinal communication records and across cultures.
Ms. Carlton has 22 years of cross-cultural immersion across five countries outside the United States, including ethnography, survey design, pattern analysis, teaching, and medical anthropology, sharpening her attention to cultural context and to alternative explanations that look like ordinary conflict until the corpus is analyzed spatially and temporally.
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, shaped her research agenda in both law and the social sciences.
Ms. Carlton’s research expertise includes linguistic decoding and analysis, artifact classification, pattern analysis, grounded theory, and statistical analysis. She trained under the most notable scholars in ethnography and Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Drs. George Marcus and Charles Ragin. Those credentials authorize the foundation of the work.
Ms. Carlton serves on the Family Violence Appellate Project (FVAP) Advisory Board (as of September 2026).
Carlton Research, LLC, founded in October 2020, consults, reviews case material, writes analysis, and testifies. Instruments and tools, grounded in established methodology and peer-review, are designed by Ms. Carlton.
Prior international corporate and institutional research, including Microsoft Xbox R&D, belongs to the firm’s history.
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.