Research and teaching are closely connected at our institute. This section will give you an insight into the focus of our research approaches.
We are harnessing troves of digital trace, text, and social network data to answer sociology’s core questions in novel and rigorous ways. Our theory-guided approach forges closer ties between sociology and computational social science.
Our research uses large, time-stamped, relational datasets and the tools of computational social science to assess the interdependencies between social actors, trace the dynamics implied by such interdependencies, and study their cumulative effects.
We believe in the power of sociological theory. The substantive significance of empirical findings often only emerges through theory as an interpretive lens. Rather than just identifying empirical effects, our research unearths the underlying social mechanisms by reference to generalizable theories. Only so we are able to isolate policy levers that generalize to other settings in a quest to solve social problems. Our research helps to bridge the gap between theoretical and empirical work in sociology and contributes to relevant questions of our time.