Dr. Mikytuck's research translates developmental evidence into juvenile confinement facility contexts. Her scholarship focuses on barriers to maintaining family contact while youth are in facilities and promoting family engagement.

This line of research also focuses on employees in confinement facilities. Dr. Mikytuck has worked with Randolph-Macon students on youth behavior and staff safety in confinement facilities and predicting staff use of restraints. 

Funding for some of this work has come from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Performance-based Institute.  

Dr. Mikytuck has investigated how expected developmental tasks, like developing friendships, are influenced by justice system involvement. 

Dr. Mikytuck is currently collaborating on a project focused on expectations for and behavior in the career and education domain with youth adjudicated for a serious offense. She is identifying patterns of gainful (e.g., in career and education) expectations and behavior, distinguishing among those patterns using demographic, peer, and romantic partner protective and risk characteristics, and modeling the co-development of expectations and behaviors with dual trajectory modeling.    

This line of work focuses on how psychological science engages with public policy and informs the perception of policy initiatives.