Undergraduate research opportunities

About: This project examines how immigration advocates—namely, nonprofit leaders, workers, or volunteers—understand their work to change the U.S. immigration system, given the numerous structural impediments to changing it.

Student Academic Year Responsibilities: Depending on experience and interests, the student RA will 1) conduct targeted literature and news media reviews, 2) analyze transcribed interview data; 3) use Stata or other statistical analysis software to test insights emerging from the in-depth interviews statistically. Students with experience using qualitative and/or statistical methods are highly encouraged to apply.

About: Research in sociology and public health has mainly focused on aging in carceral settings--particularly long-term stays in prisons--but in this project, we aim to capture the health profile of older adults who have experienced lower levels of criminal legal system contact, such as arrests, jail incarceration, and parole/probation violations. These forms of criminal legal contact occur often before formal conviction or punishment is meted out. Research will leverage a combination of administrative and survey data. 

Part Time Academic Year Responsibilities: The student RA will work with the research team to 1) conduct targeted literature reviews in sociology, public health, and criminology on the relationship between criminal justice contact, aging, health, and mortality 2) conduct descriptive analyses of survey data. Prior coursework in the criminal legal system, stratification, and inequality preferred, and experience with statistical software (e.g., STATA) is a plus. All work can be done remotely, if needed.

About: American society is experiencing myriad crises--in democracy, policing and incarceration, sexual assault and gender-based violence, and environmental degradation. Legal change could either alleviate or worsen these problems. What motivates people to go to law school today? How does law school influence their ideas about law, social order, and social change? How might law school students influence law school curricula? This project is following a diverse sample of people in the Bay Area several years as they apply to law school, attend law school, and decide what to do with their law degree.

Full time Summer Responsibilities: A full-time summer quarter RA will work with Professor Clair and two graduate student researchers to conduct and transcribe interviews from the second wave of the project (i.e., students who have just completed their 1L year) and conduct literature reviews.

About: This project will examine how gentrification and declining housing affordability affect residential instability in the Bay Area more broadly and in the City of Oakland, CA. The project involves analyzing patterns of residential displacement, financial instability, and housing conditions  through large-scale consumer data, surveys, and interviews.

Academic Year Responsibilities: The research assistant will engage in the following activities: (1) analyzing survey, interview, demographic, and local housing data; and (2) assisting in developing academic publications. Strong communication skills required. Experience with qualitative coding (e.g., NVivo) and/or statistical software (e.g. R) are a plus.

About: This project will develop, validate, and test the reliability of automated methods (based on large language vision models and deep machine learning) to measure the visible conditions of neighborhoods and changes within them from street-view imagery. We will use these measures to examine the impact of changes in the physical conditions of urban environments on individual and community well-being.

Academic Year Responsibilities: Research assistants will engage in the following activities: (1) developing and assessing training data and AI-generated measures of neighborhood conditions; (2) assembling and cleaning databases of measures of neighborhood conditions and indicators of well-being; (3) assisting with analyzing trends and relationships on urban change and well-being; and (4) developing a platform for visualizing and sharing data. Experience with and/or willingness to learn R and mapping tools required.

About: This project examines factors influencing rates of right-wing activity by violent right-wing groups in U.S. cities from 2020 to the end of 2023. Political violence is the use of violent tactics by a group having political purposes or motivations. Using Large Language Models, we will evaluate the violent and hateful content of the transcript of videos posted on the Parler social media platform. We have information on right-wing activity from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). This  study will  apply event-history methods to  estimate the effects on the rate of right-wing activity.  The  research aims to assess the impact of violent and hateful postings on social media platforms using newly available LLMs (Large Language Models).

Academic Year Responsibilities:This student will use Large Language Models to score postings from transcript (on hand) from the Parler website. Students will organize the event data in an excel spreadsheet for subsequent analysis alongside characteristics of U.S. cities and states. We will then create event-history models from the ACLED data on right-wing activity at the national and county-levels of analysis

About: This project will examine how people meet romantic partners, how they use online dating and phone apps, and how they find partners who are looking for the same commitment level as they are, and how relationships and dating have been affected by COVID and COVID social distancing.

Academic Year Responsibilities: The undergraduate RA will assist in coding and testing survey data from a 2025 nationally representative survey of American adults, to understand how the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic has affected relationships and the prevalence of singleness.

About: Recent data suggests that workplace sexual harassment has declined sharply in the US, but what explains this apparent change? This project will examine available data on workplace sexual harassment in the US and attempt to consolidate different data sources and literatures into a comprehensive picture of change over time.

Academic Year Responsibilities: The undergraduate RA will assist in interviews with subjects who have experienced workplace sexual harassment, and will work with the transcripts of completed interviews.

About: The partisan political divide in the US is so great that we hardly ever listen to people we disagree with. This project will gather people from each political identity group, one group at a time, and engage them in discussion. How do people know what they know?

Academic Year Responsibilities: The Undergraduate RA will assist in focus groups and will work with transcripts of completed focus groups to learn if there are differences in how people from different political identities reason about different political subjects.

About: Although society has begun to question binary notions of gender and recognize identity categories beyond “man” and “woman,” social science research that also considers diversity within these categories, for both cisgender and transgender people, is less common. This project aims to catalog the range of existing nonbinary approaches and uncover what is known about contemporary gender inequality based on research using more continuous or gradational measures of gender. 

Full time summer Responsibilities: The primary tasks will involve assisting with literature review, including finding relevant research, summarizing readings, and identifying takeaways across studies. The student will produce annotated bibliographies and analytical memos and present project updates at bi-weekly meetings.

About: This project examines the discourse of racism "denial," particularly in state-level interactions with the United Nations' Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). It addresses a blind spot in race and racism studies by analyzing often underdiscussed non-Western contexts from a sociohistorical-comparative perspective. The research began with an analysis of racism denial in Asia and extends into cross-regional comparisons with Africa, Latin America, and Europe to further develop and refine a typology and framework.

Part Time Student responsibilities: RAs will assist with online and physical archive data collection, including CERD state party reports, evaluations and recommendations from the Committee, information from civil society organizations, and summary records. They will also reach out to UN officials to obtain documents for building a comprehensive text dataset. Upon completing data collection, they will conduct manual content analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, under the guidance of the faculty leader and postdoc fellow. RAs are required to participate in team meetings to discuss the findings and their theoretical implications.

About: Stanford Japan Barometer consists of two main components – survey experiments and social media analysis – that measure public opinions on important political, economic, and social issues in Japan. Deploying cutting edge technologies in computational social sciences, this project aims to take the pulse of Japan more accurately and timely than existing approaches and produce innovative academic publications as well as impactful media releases.

Part Time Academic Year Responsibilities: We are looking for undergraduate RAs with skills in survey experiments and analysis of social media postings in Facebook and Twitter. Japanese language skills would be a big plus but even without the language comprehension, we would welcome participation by those who are well versed in computational text analysis and programming survey instruments. 

About: China had only 26 corporations among the world’s largest 500 in 2008. By 2021, it had 133, surpassing the United States. This project is designed to track the growth of these corporations over time through case histories, documenting their history of growth (mergers? Central state finance? Overseas expansion? Capital investment? Innovation?).

Part Time Academic Year Responsibilities: The student RA will search open internet sources in both English and Chinese to document individual corporate histories and compile data across these firms from their public filings, corporate websites, and the global business press. The RA will also be expected to examine datasets that enumerate and list the domestic and foreign subsidiaries of these corporations.

About: The Politics and Social Change Lab (PaSCL) conducts cutting-edge research to address key societal challenges. Our work focuses on three primary areas: pathways to a healthy democracy, strategies for social change, and AI for social good. In 2024-25, we will continue experimental studies investigating political polarization, democratic norms, and the role of AI in addressing societal problems. These studies aim to identify interventions that reduce partisan division, build consensus on structural reforms, and harness emerging technologies for social good.

Part Time AY Student Responsibilities: Research Assistants (RAs) will engage in tasks like recruiting participants, running experiments, conducting literature reviews, and processing data. They will also gradually take on more complex responsibilities, such as designing experimental materials, contributing to data analysis, and even leading smaller research projects. RAs will participate in a collaborative, multidisciplinary team environment, attending lab workshops and seminars, including Soc 375W, to build their research skills and theoretical understanding. Deliverables include study stimuli, data reports, experimental protocols, and literature reviews.

Full Time summer Responsibilities: The summer experience offers a full-time immersive opportunity where RAs will be embedded in the lab’s ongoing projects. Under the mentorship of PaSCL faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students, they will take a more active role in project design, data collection, and analysis. The summer term is designed to provide a comprehensive research experience that will prepare students for independent research or graduate-level work. This includes contributing to high-impact research on political polarization, social change, and emerging social technologies.