Broadly, Professor Smith's research focuses on understanding the intersection of social change and social reproduction, particularly as it unfolds in population processes and health-related behavior. Smith’s work also examines political culture in Nigeria, especially issues related to inequality and development. Much of this work focuses on understanding the intersection of social imagination, politics, and contemporary issues in Nigeria, including democracy, violence, vigilantism, and corruption. His first book, "A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria," examines ordinary Nigerians' participation in corruption, even as they are its main victims and its loudest critics. His second book, a co-authored volume, The Secret: Love, Marriage, and HIV, presents comparative findings from a five-country study of gender and HIV risk. Smith’s second single-authored book, "AIDS Doesn’t Show Its Face: Inequality, Morality, and Social Change in Nigeria," analyzes popular responses to the AIDS epidemic as a prism to understand wider phenomena. His most recent book, "To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job: Masculinity, Money, and Intimacy in Nigeria," focuses on men’s lives in Nigeria, exploring the intertwining dynamics of money and intimacy, as gender sits at the center of complex social transformations. His current research project examines how Nigerians’ entrepreneurial and informal economic responses to failed infrastructure and woeful social services paradoxically constitute a key arena for the exercise of state power and the everyday experience of citizenship.