Data Night Podcast
Episode 13: Keon Gilbert, Kelly Jackson, Rashawn Ray
ResearchTalk has partnered again with the Odum Institute to co-host the 18th Annual Qualitative Research Summer Intensive (July 26–August 6, 2021). This interdisciplinary event features 18 online courses on important topics in qualitative inquiry taught by leading scholars in the field.
In this episode, we spoke with three scholars who will be teaching courses addressing issues of social justice at this year’s Intensive: Keon Gilbert, Kelly Jackson, and Rashawn Ray. Each course aims to use qualitative inquiry as a foundation for designing programs and policies to inform social change and social justice efforts.
- Dr. Jackson’s course, Qualitative Research with Historically Oppressed Populations: Using Cultural Attunement across the Research Lifecycle, will explore how qualitative researchers can conceive and implement meaningful research that matters to the lives of individuals, families, and communities from historically oppressed racial and ethnic groups.
- Dr. Gilbert’s course, Photovoice: Powerful Images that Communicate Current Realities to Direct Social Change, presents an overview of photovoice as a participatory qualitative method that provides a way for community members to take and share photographs that express the strengths and needs of their community.
- Dr. Ray’s course, Using Qualitative Inquiry to Contribute to Social Justice, explores how we can use qualitative research via stories, first-person accounts, in-depth interviews, content analysis, and observations to draw attention to underlying mechanisms that define social problems.
- A course co-taught by Dr. Ray and Dr. Gilbert, Learning from Marginalized Voices in Community-based Participatory Research, provides researchers with principles and tools to conduct qualitative-focused community-based participatory research.
Learn more about the courses discussed in this episode and register for QRSI courses at www.researchtalk.com/qrsi-2021/.
Episode 12: Angela Zoss
In collaboration with RENCI and the National Consortium for Data Science, Odum will host Data Matters 2021, a week-long series of one and two-day courses aimed at students and professionals in business, research, and government.
In this episode, we spoke with Data Matters course instructor, Angela Zoss. Dr. Zoss is an Assessment & Data Visualization Analyst with the Duke University Libraries, where she has taught visualization practices and tools for over 10 years.
Her course, Visualization for Data Science using R, will provide skills in visualization design using R, a tool commonly used for data science. She has designed the course for both experienced visualization designers and data science professionals with little experience in this area. The course will also discuss ways to make your data visualizations more accessible.
Data Matters 2021 will be held virtually from August 9 – 13 via Zoom. Learn more about her course in this episode and register for short courses online today.
Episode 11: Eric Monson
In collaboration with RENCI and the National Consortium for Data Science, Odum will host Data Matters 2021, a week-long series of one and two-day courses aimed at students and professionals in business, research, and government.
In this episode, we spoke with Data Matters course instructor, Eric Monson, PhD. Dr. Monson is a data visualization specialist with the Duke University Libraries’ Data and Visualization Services.
His course, Introduction to Effective Information Visualization, will enable participants to use freely and commonly available software to create effective visualizations and structure data with impactful figures.
Data Matters 2021 will be held virtually from August 9 – 13 via Zoom. Learn more about his course in this episode and register for short courses online today.
Episode 10: Khristopher Nicholas
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Currently a fourth-year Nutrition PhD candidate at UNC Gillings School of Public Health, Khristopher Nicholas is interested in the intersections of health, food, and sustainability. In this episode, we discuss his current research, which involves food and water security in the Galápagos islands of Ecuador.
In his project “Food Environments in the Galápagos,” Khristopher is using a three-pronged approach to tackle his research questions, which includes:
- collecting spatial data for food environment maps,
- using factor analysis to determine food purchasing strategies, and
- integrating qualitative methods to explore community perceptions of and attitudes toward their food environments.
We also discuss the challenges and considerations involved in doing community-based research as an outsider, what drew him to nutrition as a field of study and how COVID-19 has influenced his research experience.
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Episode 9: Sebastian Karcher
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What is the difference between quantitative and qualitative data? Why is data preservation and sharing so important? What role does trust play in the data repository world?
We discuss these questions and more in this episode with Dr. Sebastian Karcher, the associate director of the Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) at Syracuse University. QDR is an innovative project dedicated to the longterm management and archiving of qualitative data while most repositories focus solely on quantitative data preservation. By enabling easier data sharing between researchers and offering a variety of support services, the QDR team is facilitating more rigorous research and robust findings.
UNC-Chapel Hill is now a proud institutional member of QDR – but what does that mean for Carolina’s researchers? Listen to find out!
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Episode 5: Sara Algoe
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In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Sara Algoe, associate professor and Kenan Scholar in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at UNC-Chapel Hill. Dr. Algoe has devoted her career to studying positive social connections, specifically the moments that characterize our very best relationships. We discuss her recent project, The LOVE Consortium, a global network of researchers striving to facilitate the collaborative use of archived data to advance the study of social connections.
Due to the in-depth nature of studies in her field, collecting data tends to require huge amounts of time and funding — which can be prohibitive, particularly for early-career researchers. Meanwhile, often only a small portion of the data collected by these large-scale projects winds up being used in the short term, while the rest is left untouched until researchers are able to circle back to it in future projects.
By building The LOVE Consortium Dataverse with the help of Odum archivists, Dr. Algoe and her team have created a digital space where researchers can share and find data to analyze that might have otherwise gone unused and undiscovered, expanding scientific discovery while encouraging new collaborations.
We also chat about what drew her to the field of social psychology in the first place, what challenges she has faced in her own career, and what she loves most about her work.
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Episode 4: Pegah Kamrani
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In this episode, recorded over the summer break, we chat with Pegah Kamrani. Kamrani is a fourth-year doctoral student at the UNC Adams School of Dentistry and the most recent recipient of the International Association for Dental Research’s (IADR) Craniofacial Biology Group Award for her work studying Class III malocclusions in an ongoing project at Adams. She believes this award represents the appealing translational dimension of her research.
This project has a rich 15-year history and began with Dr. Frazier-Bowers and other orthodontists identifying Class III subtypes in the early 2000s. This later paved way to a research project done by Gustavo Zanardi in 2011, a graduate of the orthodontics residency program at UNC-CH. Pegah’s project is similar to Zanardi’s but with a deeper focus on each patient’s surgical risk. Both projects used the help of our mathematician, Xingye Qiao.
Kamrani acknowledges that this award was a team effort and would not have been possible without Dr. Frazier-Bowers, for her mentorship, Dr. Wiesen from the Odum Institute, for his collaboration, as well as Dr. Wright and Dr. Slade for their feedback on her presentation.
Episode 3: Amanda BenDor
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In this episode, special guest Amanda BenDor, MPH, compares her experiences working with the Ebola outbreak in West Africa to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, providing insight into how global health systems and management strategies have changed between the two in the time that has elapsed, and how those changes have shaped the world’s COVID-19 response.
Listen as BenDor, an alumna of the UNC Gillings School of Public Health, discusses her work in global and digital health spaces in her role as the Partnerships and Community Manager at PATH. PATH is a “global organization that works to accelerate health equity by bringing together public institutions, businesses, social enterprises, and investors to solve the world’s most pressing health challenges.”
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Information Source Recommendations:
- Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center
- New York Times Coronavirus Live Updates
- The Daily podcast, by the New York Times
- IHME COVID-19 Projections
- Tableau COVID-19 Data Hub
Episode 2: Kyle Chan
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PhD Candidate and Odum Institute statistics consultant Kyle Chan joins us to chat about his work using computational social science, including textual analysis, to examine multilevel governance in Europe and develop measures to study phenomena in that space more efficiently.
Images of plots from his research results:
- Structural Topic Model Estimate of Positive Issue Salience Across Catalan Parties
- Structural Topic Model Estimate of Negative Issue Salience Across Catalan Parties
Be sure to check out:
- Odum Institute Statistics Help Desk — now offering online support!
- UNC R Open Labs
- UNC Libraries Python Open Labs
- UNC Regional Authority Dataset
- Eurostat Database
Episode 1: Tyler Steelman
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PhD candidate and longtime Odum Institute Qualtrics consultant Tyler Steelman joins us to chat about his work examining gerrymandering and its effects on political participation.
Find out more about the work he and his collaborator John Curiel have done so far in this article from the Washington Post: Here’s one way to end partisan gerrymandering: Don’t break up Zip codes.
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