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“Good social policy requires a deep understanding of the stakeholders – of who they are, what beliefs they hold, what motivates them, what resources they can marshal, and toward what ends... Arguably, all of these questions are best addressed with different types of qualitative data – including but not limited to fieldnotes based on ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews, surveys and questionnaires, focus groups, and archival/historical documents.” 

 -Sandra Susan Smith, Director, Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy

Faculty Recipients:

Marcella Alsan and

Episodes of incarceration correspond to increases in mortality from infectious diseases, chronic lower respiratory diseases, substance use, suicide mortality, heart disease, diabetes, and cerebrovascular disease. The National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC) is an organization that pioneered standards for jail health care services and operates a voluntary accreditation program based on a set of consensus-driven standards that provide a framework for the care inmates receive. To assess the effect of NCCHC accreditation on health care processes, inmate health outcomes, and racial health equity, Alsan and Yang propose to collect data on experiences of correctional staff and incarcerated patients through both quantitative and qualitative methods.
 

Gordon Hanson

The Reimagining the Economy initiative will undertake a qualitative analysis of place-based economic development organizations around the U.S. This project will study the origin and evolution of these organizations, their institutional relationships with other key actors in their local ecosystems, how they conceptualize impact, and the range of such organizations across the country. This qualitative research will also form the foundation for subsequent analytical work in the area, as the project combines this with quantitative analysis on local labor market conditions and fund flows.
 

Daniel Schneider

Surveillance and automation in the workplace are becoming increasingly common and they have the potential to impact job quality and worker wellbeing. The Shift Project is conducting qualitative research that complements its existing quantitative data to further understand how these technologies are impacting service sector workers across the U.S. and inform policy and practice in this area. The Shift Project plans to conduct 50 remote in-depth interviews with service workers from the project’s existing survey population. These interviews will allow the Project to understand workers’ lived experiences and the stories behind the numbers. They will also help to contextualize and inform findings from the quantitative data analysis, identify new research questions, and inform future survey design.

Student Recipients:

Akshay Govind Dixit

Dixit studies how the caste system in India—among the oldest forms of social stratification in the world—is being remolded by the democratic welfare state. How does an expansion in the welfare state affect households’ economic reliance on their caste group, and the extent to which they identify with their caste?
 

Garry S. Mitchell

Mitchell studies the mobility journeys of those who enter elite spaces with hopes of altering their life trajectories. He hopes to, through his work, inspire others to explore ways to minimize the tradeoffs made by those who seek upward mobility. Through a joint sociological and ethical analysis, Mitchell studies a program he calls "Uplift Academy," a non-profit organization that prepares low-income Black and Brown students to matriculate to and through elite, independent high schools.
 

Charlotte O'Herron

Using in-depth interviews with community college students who are enrolled in health and STEM programs where their gender is underrepresented, O’Herron investigates the cultural processes that enable young adults to pursue “gender-atypical” career paths and counteract gender-based educational and occupational sorting.
 

Cierra Robson

As technologies proliferate throughout the criminal legal system, little work has taken a holistic view of courtroom actors use these tools. To begin to fill this gap, Robson explores how lawyers – prosecutors and defense attorneys – mobilize algorithms to achieve their ends and examines what effect their efforts have on detention outcomes in New Jersey, a state that mandated the use of pretrial risk assessment tools in their groundbreaking Criminal Justice Reform Bill of 2017.