41 - 50 of 228 results for: SOC

What are the consequences of sexual assault? How much does a sexual assault cost a person of their time, educational attainment, income, and ambitions? The goal of the course is to introduce undergraduate students to the relevant perspectives and academic research on the educational and economic consequences of sexual assault. Using a sociological lens, we will explore how experiences of sexual assault are consequential for individuals' lives beyond their physical or emotional well-being by examining how sexual assault may affect individuals' abilities to make ends meet. After briefly surveying the social determinants of sexual assault, this course will dive deeply into exploring the costs of sexual assault including the costs of reporting and engaging in the legal system, the costs to an individual's educational trajectory, the costs to an individual's ability to seek and maintain employment, the costs to making ends meet financially, and the macro-level costs for society. After surveying the literature, students will have the opportunity to apply their knowledge by learning about conducting research on sexual assault as an undergraduate student, designing their own research proposal, or volunteering with an organization that engages in work on sexual assault.

(Graduate students register for 226.) Theory, methods, and research. Concepts such as density, homogeneity, and centrality; applications to substantive areas. The impact of social network structure on individuals and groups in areas such as communities, neighborhoods, families, work life, and innovations.

You have some experience coding in R or Python. You've taken a class or two in basic stats or data science. But what's next? How can you use data science skills to make the world a better place? If you're asking those questions, then "Data Science for Social Impact" is for you. In this class, you'll work in four areas where data are being used to make the world better: health care, education, detecting discrimination, and clean energy technologies. You'll work with data from hospitals, schools, police departments, and electric utilities. You'll apply causal inference, prediction, and optimization techniques to help businesses, governments, and other organizations make better decisions. You'll see the challenges that arise when analyzing real data (for example, when some data are missing, or when the randomized experiment gets implemented wrong). You'll get ideas for an impactful and meaningful senior thesis, summer internship, and future career. Concretely, you'll have weekly problem sets involving data analysis in R or python. You'll learn and apply techniques like fixed effects regression, difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, regularized regression, random forests, causal forests, and optimization. Class sessions will feature active learning, discussions, and small-group case studies. You should only enroll if you expect to attend regularly and complete the problem sets on time. Prerequisites (recommended): Experience programming in R or python, or willingness to learn very quickly on your own. A basic statistics or data science course, such as any of the following: DATASCI 112, ECON 102 or 108, CS 129, EARTHSYS 140, HUMBIO 88, POLISCI 150A, STATS 60, SOC 180B, or MS&E 125.

Data science has rapidly gained recognition within the social sciences because it offers powerful new ways to ask questions about social systems and problems. This course will examine how tools from data science can be used to analyze pressing issues relating to disaster, inequality, and scarcity in the Anthropocene (the current period in which humans are the primary driver of planetary changes). We will explore how a range of computational methods can be used to garner new meanings from sources such as weather monitors, press releases, websites, government programs, and more. This is a hands-on, interactive course culminating in a social data science project designed by the student or a team of up to four students. Most class sessions will be taught interactively using Jupyter Notebooks. Students will follow along with workshop-style lectures by using and modifying the provided R/Python code in real time to analyze data and visualize results. The course will cover such topics as the South African water crisis, Hurricane Katrina, the California Wildfires, and water rights along the Colorado River. Students will learn to explore text data with tools such as word embeddings, topic models, and sentiment analysis. Students will gain experience with Python and R and will learn about a range of packages for cleaning data, linking and matching records, and mapping their results.

There are few issues more important for human life than those concerned with sustainability. Current global trends, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and increasing urbanization, raise critical questions about future environmental and social sustainability. Changes are necessary for the survival of our species, especially around how and what we eat. But how can we bring about the changes needed? In this course, we explore the historical and cultural diversity of human-environment interaction as it pertains to food and agriculture, and analyze sustainability in a variety of contexts: from the local to the global, in the past and present, in the U.S. and among small-scale societies. We'll look at development through the lens of food, and discuss sustainability in the context of globalization: whether social movements around food justice or the new world of lab-based meats. From behavioral psychology and how it contributes to environmental action, to the individual choices we make every day, this course will help you reflect on the world, your own behaviors and assumptions, and how to act in greater accordance with the Earth's limits.

(Graduate students register for EDUC 212 or SOC 229X). Combination of social science and historical perspectives trace the major developments, contexts, tensions, challenges, and policy issues of urban education. This is a Cardinal Course certified by the Haas Center for Public Service.

The effects of schools and schooling on individuals, the stratification system, and society. Education as socializing individuals and as legitimizing social institutions. The social and individual factors affecting the expansion of schooling, individual educational attainment, and the organizational structure of schooling.

Dreamed up in the heat of the Cold War, game theory has encouraged generations of strategists in politics, law, the military, and academia to see conflicts as games with rules, players, choices, and payoffs. But game-theoretical situations hardly resemble the games people play in their everyday lives. During this course we study and develop social theory based on how people play games outside of behavior labs and thought experiments. What causes people to join games and how do games keep players engaged? Topics begin with traditional game theory and then expand focus to studies of competitions in settings as disparate as chess, mushroom hunting, schools, and markets.

In early education, children are often taught to think of the human body in terms of facts - for example, by learning the names of bones or the way that different bodily systems work together. Thinking of the body in this way is to employ a biomedical understanding of the human body - in the realm of science, doctors, and data. Yet, cultural understandings pervade the way that bodies are perceived, categorized, studied, and understood. What is described as 'normal' functioning of the body, and what is considered a pathology? A disability? What type of bodily variation (in body size, eyebrow shape, foot size) gets deemed as meaningful or important? What historical and social processes have shaped the types of traits that we value in a body and what we consider to be a problem? As we critically think about the human body and the social processes that drive our understanding of it, we will engage in some of the core dynamics of the field of Sociology. Throughout the course, students will learn to think about systems of inequality and stratification and power dynamics, with the human body being the application of our analyses.