Research Design

Americanist Linguistics: on Ethics and Intent

October 17, 2023
Anna Bjorklund
by Anna Björklund. In this post, Anna Björklund investigates the origin of the linguistic study of indigenous American languages, its inextricable ties to settler-colonialism, and how linguistics can move forward as a field.

FSRDC 2023 Annual Meeting and Research Conference

October 2, 2023
Renee Starowicz, Ph.D.
by Renee Starowicz. Renee Starowicz, Co-Executive Director of the Berkeley Federal Statistical Research Data Center, provides an overview of the takeaways from the 2023 Annual Federal Statistical Research Data Center Business Meeting and Annual Conference. She provides a brief overview of the Berkeley FSRDC. Then, she describes the priorities for collaboration across national directors to improve outreach to diverse researchers and transparency. Additionally, she points out the other key topics of conversation at this year’s meeting.

Introduction to Field Experiments and Randomized Controlled Trials

July 24, 2023
Leena Bhai
by Leena Bhai. This blog post provides an introduction to field experimentation and its significance in understanding cause and effect. It explains how randomized experiments represent an unbiased method for determining what works. It delves into essential features of experiments such as intervention, excludability, and non-interference. It then works through a fictional example of a randomized controlled trial of the efficacy of an experimental drug Covi-Mapp.

Understanding how organizational structures interact with psychology to influence academic-related behavior

September 8, 2021
Michael Ruiz
The ways in which educational organizations develop programs, approach pedagogy, and emphasize community building result in similarities and differences across different organizations’ structures. However, past research hasn’t developed a conceptual framework for understanding how differences in organizational structures might influence the educational outcomes of students from different backgrounds. The D-Lab NSF IUSE (Improving Undergraduate STEM Education) team sought to develop such a framework by leveraging past research from the fields of education, history, psychology, and sociology.

Assessing the Effectiveness of a Social Norms-Based Sexual Violence Prevention Digital Campaign on the UC Berkeley Campus

August 31, 2021
Swetha Pola
In collaboration with the prevention team at the PATH To Care Center (PTC) at the University of California, Berkeley, we experimentally assess the effectiveness of a sexual violence & sexual harassment (SVSH) prevention social media campaign on perceived social norms. Content Warning: This blog post mentions sexual violence & sexual harassment (SVSH)

Julia Lane, Ph.D.

Guest Speaker
Professor at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
Professor at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress
NYU Provostial Fellow for Innovation Analytics

Julia Lane is a Professor at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress, and a NYU Provostial Fellow for Innovation Analytics. She cofounded the Coleridge Initiative, whose goal is to use data to transform the way governments access and use data for the social good through training programs, research projects and a secure data facility. The approach is attracting national attention, including the ...

Organized Code Repositories Accelerate Science and Facilitate Reproducubility

March 2, 2021
Pratik Sachdeva, Ph.D.

Computational and data-driven research increasingly requires developing complex codebases. At the same time, many scientists don’t receive training in software engineering practices, resulting in, for some, the perception that scientists write terrible software. As scientists, good software should accelerate our work and facilitate its reproducibility. While building good coding practices takes some time and experience, it doesn’t require a...

The Importance of Design Plans for Data Science

April 20, 2021
Alex Stephenson

Since becoming a Data Fellow at the D-Lab, I have had the opportunity to assist many talented social scientists through the D-Lab’s Consulting service. A regular consulting request is to help with the research design for a new project. These requests are understandable. For empirical researchers, a high-quality research design makes or breaks a research project. In this post, I suggest a few benefits of writing a skeleton design plan before writing any code whatsoever.

One of the exciting aspects...

COVIDENCE: A Game Changer for Systemic Reviews

March 9, 2021
Lawrence Y. Tello

If you are planning on conducting a systematic review consider using Covidence for your next project! Your UC Berkeley account gives you access to an unlimited number of reviews and citations per review, as well enhanced support.

As part of my Masters of Public Health Capstone Project, I completed a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess suicides among previously incarcerated persons. Covidence streamlined the most time-consuming and error-prone parts...

Improving Research Transparency in the Social Sciences through Pre-Analysis Plans

March 23, 2021
Jordan Weiss, Ph.D.

Openness, transparency, and reproducibility in research are critical to scientific progress. Yet, according to a 2016 internet-based survey of 1,576 researchers, 90% of respondents felt there was a slight or significant reproducibility crisis.1 Moreover, there are longstanding concerns that scientific journals favor positive or significant results—often referred to as publication bias—which may produce bodies of evidence that are incomplete or misleading (i.e., because studies which report null findings are not published).2 Publication bias can also arise when researchers choose...