Surveys, Sampling & Interviews

Deibi Sibrian

Data Science for Social Justice Fellow 2024
Deibi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, centering critical interdisciplinary ecology and multispecies justice. Deibi coined the term "Cryptonocene," an interdisciplinary framework, to study the socio-environmental health impacts of cryptocurrencies and related technologies, such as AI. With over two years of experience as a graduate instructor, Deibi now is a Graduate Student Researcher, NSF Digital Transformation Fellow, and Mentored Research Fellow. Before joining Berkeley, Deibi was the project manager for an interdisciplinary team...

Deya Chic

Data Science for Social Justice Fellow 2024
Graduate School of Education

Deya is deeply committed to supporting underrepresented students and contributing to policies that address oppression in higher education. She aims to influence fellow professionals and researchers to adopt a comprehensive approach to addressing systemic issues in the higher education system.

Hellina Hailu Nigatu

Data Science for Social Justice Senior Fellow 2024
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)

I am a PhD student at UC Berkeley in the EECS department co-advised by Prof. Sarah Chasins and Prof. John Canny. My research interest broadly lies in the intersection of AI and HCI, with a focus on making usable AI tools accessible to end users.

I am currently looking into making NLP tools usable and accessible for low-resourced languages. I am also interested in the impact of AI on society, specifically in how it affects Global Majority countries and communities. Outside of research, I like to read books, make and drink traditional Ethiopian coffee, knit,...

Survey Fundamentals

February 21, 2024, 1:00pm
This two-hour workshop offers a comprehensive introduction to designing and conducting survey studies. Tailored for beginners, it provides clear, step-by-step guidance complemented by concise examples, practical considerations, and useful support materials. Participants will learn the entire process, from formulating a research question to creating, administering, and analyzing surveys, as well as interpreting results and communicating their findings.

Survey Fundamentals

April 11, 2024, 3:00pm
This two-hour workshop offers a comprehensive introduction to designing and conducting survey studies. Tailored for beginners, it provides clear, step-by-step guidance complemented by concise examples, practical considerations, and useful support materials. Participants will learn the entire process, from formulating a research question to creating, administering, and analyzing surveys, as well as interpreting results and communicating their findings.

Transparency in Experimental Political Science Research

April 9, 2024
Kamya Yadav
by Kamya Yadav. With the increase in studies with experiments in political science research, there are concerns about research transparency, particularly around reporting results from studies that contradict or do not find evidence for proposed theories (commonly called “null results”). To encourage publication of results with null results, political scientists have turned to pre-registering their experiments, be it online survey experiments or large-scale experiments conducted in the field. What does pre-registration look like and how can it help during data analysis and publication?

How can we use big data from iNaturalist to address important questions in Entomology?

February 26, 2024
Leah Lee
by Leah Lee. Large-scale geographic data over time on insect diversity can be used to answer important questions in Entomology. Open-source, open-access citizen science platforms like iNaturalist generate huge amounts of data on species diversity and distribution at accelerating rates. However, unstructured citizen science data contain inherent biases and need to be used with care. One of the efforts to validate big data from iNaturalist is to cross-check with systematically collected data, such as museum specimens.

Tonya D. Lindsey, Ph.D.

Data Science Fellow
Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS)

Tonya D. Lindsey is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies and the project director of CRB Nexus: Where Policy Meets Research, an initiative of the California Research Bureau (CRB) at the California State Library. As project director of CRB Nexus, she is developing a community of practice space for California’s policy staff and public scholars. As a CRB senior researcher she uses her expertise in research methods to analyze a wide variety of policy questions at the request of legislators, the governor’s office, and their staff. She received her PhD in sociology...

Exploratory Data Analysis in Social Science Research

November 14, 2023
Kamya Yadav
by Kamya Yadav. Causal inference has become the dominant endeavor for many political scientists, often at the expense of good research questions and theory building. Returning to descriptive inference – the process of describing the world as it exists – can help formulate research questions worth asking and theory that is grounded in reality. Exploratory data analysis is one method of conducting descriptive inference. It can help social science researchers find empirical patterns and puzzles that motivate their research questions, test correlations between variables, and engage with the existing literature on a topic. In this blog post, I walk through results from exploratory data analysis I conducted for my dissertation project on political ambition of women.

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.