Qualitative Analysis

A Recipe for Reliable Discoveries: Ensuring Stability Throughout Your Data Work

November 19, 2024
Jaewon Saw
by Jaewon Saw. Imagine perfecting a favorite recipe, then sharing it with others, only to find their results differ because of small changes in tools or ingredients. How do you ensure the dish still reflects your original vision? This challenge captures the principle of stability in data science: achieving acceptable consistency in outcomes relative to reasonable perturbations of conditions and methods. In this blog post, I reflect on my research journey and share why grounding data work in stability is essential for reproducibility, adaptability, and trust in the final results.

Python Data Processing Basics for Acoustic Analysis

November 12, 2024
Amber Galvano
by Amber Galvano. Interested in learning how to merge data and metadata from multiple sources into a consolidated dataset? Dealing with annotated audio and want to automate your workflow? Tried Praat scripting but want something more streamlined? This blog post will walk through some key domain-specific Python-based tools you will need in order to take your audio data, annotations, and speaker metadata and come away with a tabular dataset containing acoustic measures, ready to visualize and submit to statistical analysis. This tutorial uses acoustic phonetics data, but can be adapted to a range of projects involving repeated measures data and/or work with audio files.

Human-Centered Design for Migrant Rights

October 29, 2024
Victoria Hollingshead
by Victoria Hollingshead. In honor of the 2024 International Day of Care and Support, Victoria Hollingshead shares her recent work with the Center for Migrant Advocacy’s Direct Assistance Program and their innovative approach to supporting Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) using generative AI. OFWs, especially female domestic workers in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), are vulnerable to exploitation from foreign employers and recruitment agencies while having limited access to legal support. Using a design thinking framework, Victoria and CMA’s Direct Assistance team co-designed a proof of concept to enhance the legal and contract literacy among OFWs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a top destination country. This project shows promise in leveraging emerging technologies to empower OFWs, enhancing the Philippines' reputation as a migrant champion and supporting the nation's broader push for digital transformation.

Concepts and Measurements in Social Network Analysis

October 22, 2024
Christian Caballero
by Christian Caballero. We live in an interconnected world, more so now than ever. Social Network Analysis (SNA) provides a toolkit to study the influence of this interconnectivity. This blog post introduces some key theoretical concepts behind SNA, as well as a family of metrics for measuring influence in a network, known as centrality. These concepts and measurements help form the basis for a theoretically informed study of social relationships in an era where the availability of relational data has dramatically increased thanks to technological advances.

Leveraging Large Language Models for Analyzing Judicial Disparities in China

October 8, 2024
Nanqin Ying
by Nanqin Ying. This study analyzes over 50 million judicial decisions from China’s Supreme People’s Court to examine disparities in legal representation and their impact on sentencing across provinces. Focusing on 290 000 drug-related cases, it employs large language models to differentiate between private attorneys and public defenders and assess their sentencing outcomes. The methodology combines advanced text processing with statistical analysis, using clustering to categorize cases by province and representation, and regression models to isolate the effect of legal representation from factors like drug quantity and regional policies. Findings reveal significant regional disparities in legal access driven by economic conditions, highlighting the need for reforms in China’s legal aid system to ensure equitable representation for marginalized groups and promote transparent judicial data for systemic improvements.

Causal Inference in International Political Economy: Hurdles and Advancements

September 9, 2024
Yue Lin
by Yue Lin. What are the key challenges and opportunities of applying experiments in the International Political Economy (IPE) research? In this blog, I reviewed an enduring methodological battle between statistics and experiments, and pointed out that the difficulties of randomization and locating credible counterfactuals have served as main hurdles for IPE scholars to widely adopt experimental tools. However, I further demonstrated some new progress in applying survey, field, and lab experiments in the recent IPE scholarship. I concluded that it is crucial for future researchers to think innovatively about how to combine different research methods to make causal claims in IPE studies.

Claudia von Vacano, Ph.D.

Availability: By appointment only

Consulting Areas: Digital Humanities, Mixed Methods, Qualitative methods, Surveys, Sampling & Interviews, MaxQDA, Career Development

Data for a Just U.S. - Using Data Science to Empower Marginalized Communities

September 3, 2024
Elijah Mercer
by Elijah Mercer. In this blog post, I share how working with marginalized communities through data science has transformed my understanding of the field. My journey from crime analysis to founding Data for Just US reveals the profound impact data can have when used to empower and uplift underserved populations. I explore the challenges and rewards of this work, illustrating how data science can drive social change and foster a more equitable future.

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,...

Minding the Gaps: Pay Equity in California

July 9, 2024
Tonya D. Lindsey, Ph.D.
by Tonya D. Lindsey, Ph.D. The gender pay gap continues to reflect that, on average, men outearn women. California is among the states with the smallest pay gaps (outpacing the national number at 13%) and is unique in that it enacted legislation aimed at eliminating pay gaps by sex and race categories. This blog post reflects on California’s pay gap as students study it in an undergraduate social statistics course. Independent variables indicate three theoretical frameworks: 1) human capital, 2) occupational segregation, and 3) discrimination. While the work students do is rigorous using a representative sample of full-time year-round California workers, there remains work to be done and caveats to the data and analyses.