Published work
Eiermann, Martin. 2025. The Limiting Principle: How Privacy Became a Public Issue. New York: Columbia University Press.
Eiermann, Martin, Garrett Baker, and Christopher Wildeman. “Discordant Patterns and Adulthood Consequences of Childhood Maltreatment and Foster Care Placement.” Social Forces: soaf077.
Eiermann, Martin, and Sarah Sernaker. 2025. “The Impact of Data Suppression on Re-Identification Risk and Data Access in the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System.” Child Maltreatment 0(0).
Eiermann, Martin. 2025. “The Impact of Data Suppression Rules on Data Access and Re-Identification Risk in AFCARS Annual Files.” Child Maltreatment 30 (3): 512-524.
Eiermann, Martin. 2024. “Algorithmic Risk Scoring and Welfare State Contact Among US Children.” Sociological Science 11: 707-742.
Eiermann, Martin. 2024. “The Process of Legal Institutionalization: How Privacy Jurisprudence Turned towards the US Constitution and the American State.” Law & Social Inquiry 49 (1): 537-568.
Eiermann, Martin, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, James J. Feigenbaum, Jonas Helgertz, Elaine Hernandez, and Courtney E. Boen. 2022. “Racial Disparities in Mortality During the 1918 Pandemic in U.S. Cities.” Demography 59 (5): 1953–1979.
Eiermann, Martin. 2018. “A Topology of Privacy.” European Journal of Sociology 59 (3): 435–441.
Ongoing projects
Algorithmic risk scores at the bureaucratic frontline: I examine how frontline workers in Child Protective Services offices incorporate algorithmic measures of maltreatment risk into child welfare investigations. Some of this work is done jointly with With Maria Fitzpatrick and Chris Wildeman.
The complicated politics of vital records: I am in the early stages of a research project on vital records, examining how the standardization and racialization of birth and death records in the early twentieth century affected government policy and life-course trajectories, from the Jim Crow era into the Civil Rights era.
Childhood adversity and health outcomes among US children: With Chris Wildeman and Garrett Baker, I examine joint patterns of childhood maltreatment and foster care placements. Other work (with Peter Fallesen, Chris Wildeman, Brielle Bryan, Alexander Roehrkasse, and Mikkeline Munk Nielsen) examines racial disparities in maltreatment and foster care across multiple countries, with a special focus on indigenous children.
Consequences of jail and prison incarceration: With Chris Wildeman, Robert Apel, and Alexandra Gibbons, I am investigating how jail vs. prison incarceration shapes long-term economic, health, and family outcomes in the era of mass incarceration. This research, which requires extensive updates to the data infrastructure of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, is generously supported by the Russell Sage Foundation and facilitated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Demobilization in a decentralized social movement: Social movement scholars have focused increasing attention on “networked” social movements: decentralized forms of collective action with relatively short organizational life-cycles. Using email data and meeting records, I reconstruct movement networks and investigate mechanisms that drive movement contraction and organizational fissure.