Her current research focuses on punishment preferences and police-citizen relations in the United States and the Caribbean, with an emphasis on understanding racial and ethnic differences in public opinion. Professor Johnson has received awards for her research from the American Association for Public Opinion Research and the Law and Society Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and she is a recipient of the Teaching Excellence Award at Mason. Professor Johnson is affiliated faculty in Sociology and in African American Studies. Prior to her appointment at Mason, she was a research associate at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty at UCLA.