Her work focuses on the language, history, culture, and social circumstances of the Arapesh people of Papua New Guinea. She is the author of numerous publications on language documentation, the history of anthropology, and the changing status of linguistic and anthropological research, especially vis-à-vis processes of language shift and language activism. A strong advocate for ethics education in the humanistic field sciences, Dr. Dobrin has chaired the ethics committees of both the American Anthropological Association and the Linguistic Society of America.