Qualitative Methods

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Fundamentals

November 7, 2022, 12:00pm
Are you starting a research project at UC Berkeley that involves human subjects? If so, one of the first steps you will need to take is getting IRB approval.

Getting Started with Surveys

October 18, 2022
Getting Started With Surveys

Surveys can be an extremely useful tool for gathering information from individuals and groups. They are used across disciplines and industries to help researchers learn more about populations and gain actionable insights. I’ve done extensive survey research in nonprofit and industry settings, using these data to improve programs, make changes to technology, design communications plans, make content acquisition decisions, and much more. In this blog post, I’ll focus on one of the most important parts of survey research — planning....

Bo Yun Park, Ph.D.

Postdoc
D-Lab

I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in the D-Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. My research lies at the intersection of political, cultural, and transnational sociology. I am particularly interested in dynamics of social inclusion and exclusion, social change, technology, and digital politics. My dissertation investigated how political strategists in France and the United States craft narratives of political leadership for presidential candidates in the digital age. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology at Harvard University, where I was affiliated with the Institute for Quantitative Social...

Abhishek Roy

IUSE Undergraduate Advisory Board
Economics
Data Science

I'm Abhishek Roy and I'm double majoring in Economics and Data Science. I've been a part of D-Lab's IUSE project since Spring 2020 and have truly found an organization that is not only passionate about Data Science but also strives to expand its reach equitably to all communities. I am involved in Research and Project Management roles in various departments and labs at Berkeley and I'm an Editor at the Berkeley Economic Review. I love diving into anything at the intersection of Data Science, Economics, Business, and Computational Social Science. Whenever I'm free, I love writing...

Seyi Olojo

Instructor, Researcher
School of Information

Seyi is a PhD Student in the School of Information and is a member of the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group. Her research broadly explores the problem space of digital memory, specifically the social discourse surrounding algorithms, ethics, and engagement. Additionally, her work often explores histories of quantification and the politics of categories within emerging technologies. She uses a mixed methods approach to research; this includes ethnography, interviews, grounded theory, surveys, data analysis and values-based design. Here at the D-lab, she leads the qualitative...

Diana Casanova

Consultant
Graduate School of Education

Diana Casanova is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate with the Graduate School of Education. Diana’s research is focused on the policies and practices that empower family and community stakeholders to act collectively and affect social change. Specifically, she studies the implementation of California’s school finance reform, which includes a more structured and democratic process of stakeholder engagement, seeking to illustrate the relationship between a state initiative aimed at bringing families into policy-making spaces and the ways that families find and make meaning in these spaces...

Racism Narratives in Medical Literature

Systemic racism is a driving factor in unequal health outcomes, but it is rarely the subject of study in top medical journals (see a 2021 analysis by Krieger et al.). This project, a collaboration between the UC Berkeley D-Lab and the American Medical Association's Center for Health Equity, aims to measure progress in acknowledging, studying, & dismantling racism by creating tools to track racism-related narratives in influential medical research.

Erin Manalo-Pedro

Research Fellow
Community Health Sciences (UCLA)

Erin Manalo-Pedro is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health with a minor in education. She focuses her racial health equity research on curriculum, the health workforce, and political interventions for communities of color. Drawing from Public Health Critical Race Praxis and Pinayism, she aims to use methods, like natural language processing and counter storytelling, to document the subtleties of structural racism and resistance from marginalized groups.

To guide her interdisciplinary approach, Erin leverages
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Caroline Figueroa, MD, Ph.D.

Research Fellow, Digital Health Social Justice Project Lead
School of Social Welfare
Digital Health Social Justice

Caroline Figueroa, MD Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare. She obtained her MD degree and Ph.D. degree at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her Ph.D. research took place at the University of Amsterdam and at the University of Oxford, where she studied cognitive and neurobiological vulnerability factors for recurrence of depression in patients remitted from Major Depressive Disorder. Current research interest is on digital interventions for depression, with an emphasis on developing cutting-edge innovations that tailor to the needs of...

Swetha Pola

Research Fellow
School of Information

Swetha (she/her) is a 5th Year Master of Information and Data Science student at the School of Information, with experience in Cognitive Science, Psychology research, and product management. Her research interests include building ethical, transparent AI and the impacts of technologies (specifically, mass media, surveillance, and algorithms of bias) on longitudinal behavioral health. She is happy to help with questions on Python, R, SQL, machine learning, neural networks, statistical analysis, and research design!

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