2/5/21 2/5/21

Experiments and Quantitative Research

Learn about experimental research designs and read open-access studies.

2/4/21 2/4/21

Teaching Black Lives Matter Principles to Shape Humanizing Research and Methods Pedagogy

Why does Dr. Sharon Ravitch start a qualitative methods course with a unit on Black Lives Matter?

Chris Burnage 2/4/21 Chris Burnage 2/4/21

Uncovering new keys to countering anti-Black racism and inequity using computational social science

A new Summer Institute in Computational Social Science organized by Howard University and Mathematica promises to bring the power of computational social science to the issues of systemic racism and inequality in America. This marks the first time the successful SICSS model is being hosted by a Historically Black College or University.

2/3/21 2/3/21

Meet the Mentors-in-Residence for February

Meet the collaborative team behind Making Sense of Social Research Methodology! They were our Mentors in Residence for February 2021.

2/3/21 2/3/21

Watch the Methodspace Live Webinar: Research Ethics in Practice

Ethical research involves much more than a pre-study review or forms to explain how the study adheres to the institution’s rules about protection of human participants. This webinar features a cross-cultural conversation about critical ethics issues in research.

2/2/21 2/2/21

Qualitative Methodologies: Phenomenology

In this part of our phases of research series, we look at how Phenomenology (the reflective study of pre-reflective or lived experience) can be applied and can carry quite different meanings depending on theoretical and practical contexts.

2/1/21 2/1/21

Research Questions: Summary

Find all the posts from the January 2021 focus on research questions.

Chris Burnage 1/27/21 Chris Burnage 1/27/21

text: An R-package for Analyzing Human Language

In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), Transformers have revolutionized language analysis. Never before has a new technology universally improved the benchmarks of nearly all language processing tasks: e.g., general language understanding, question - answering, and Web search. The transformer method itself, which probabilistically models words in their context (i.e. “language modeling”), was introduced in 2017 and the first large-scale pre-trained general purpose transformer, BERT, was released open source from Google in 2018. Since then, BERT has been followed by a wave of new transformer models including GPT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT, XLNet, Transformer-XL, CamemBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, etc. The text package makes all of these language models and many more easily accessible to use for R-users; and includes functions optimized for human-level analyses tailored to social scientists.