Professor Scollo's area of specialization is the Ethnography of Communication, which involves descriptive and interpretive analysis of cultural patterns of communication in local contexts of use and in cross-cultural perspective.

One of her recent projects looks at the intersections of media, culture, language, and social interaction.  The project focuses on media references (e.g., quoting lines from movies or television shows) in social interaction in U.S. American culture with comparison to similar practices in Western Apache, Zambian, German, and Dominican American cases.  She is expanding this research to examine German and Russian media references in-depth, which will culminate in a cross-cultural comparative analysis of media references in multiple cultures. 

Another research interest of Professor Scollo's is environmental communication, within and across cultures. One recent project was a cross-case study of nonverbal ways of communicating with nature.  She is currently in the process of developing an ethnographic study on the communication and culture of a community with an environmental connection.