Sociology, '17 working with Professor Robert Sampson

I have had the opportunity to work for Professor Robert Sampson and Dr. Daniel O’Brien on a study that plots and maps neighborhood characteristics in Boston. We take government administrative data that records 911 calls and requests for public services and use it, integrated with many other data sources, for academic research. The goal is to better understand the roles neighborhoods play in a variety of sociological outcomes and to theorize about the interplay between the individual and the community. My role is to do data manipulation using ArcGIS, python scripts and other statistical software.

Working as a research assistant has been a wonderful learning experience. The task of repurposing large amounts of government data has given me insight into how sociologists can leverage the incredible amount of information we all produce in this digitized "age of big data." Learning ArcGIS has also been very useful and it has been great to practice and further develop different data manipulation skills. More than anything else though, this work has shown me the possibility for creativity in quantitative sociology. Professor Sampson and Dr. O'Brien are both very creative in the way they think about what data sources to use, how to repurpose and combine them, and how to verify their contents. These are very important skills, especially as more data that was not originally intended for academia is produced in everyday life.