The methods cluster brings together faculty and students with a shared interest in traditional sociological methods and newly emerging computational social science methods. Members in the cluster seek to employ and improve these methods by integrating social dimensions with spatial dimensions to address substantive social science problems. The blending of small data from social surveys or field experiments with large-scale data from social media, dynamic networks, mobility trajectories, and social simulations to provide new sociological insights is encouraged.

This cluster will work closely with the Computational Social Science Laboratory in Faculty of Social Science to run seminars/webinars with speakers from the academy and industry to discuss and consider the critical sociological questions with which the research continues to grapple, and the cutting-edge methods and new types of data (or big data) with which actionable social knowledge can be elicited.

A research workshop is held once a month. Each meeting may have two presentations. This monthly group meeting is a combination of a journal club and a conventional workshop cell. The presentations may be based on one of the following sources:

(1) your own dissertation chapter, working paper before journal submission;

(2) job talk;

(3) research grant proposal;

(4) a recent publication that you think will benefit other members in the cluster because of its innovative research design or methodology.

Enrollment for Core Participants or Joining the Mailing List

We welcome faculty and students from any department to enroll in the workshop series of the Inequality & Methods Cluster. Please email soc.cpr@cuhk.edu.hk to indicate your intention to enroll in the workshop as a core participant. Core participants enrolled in this research workshop are expected to participate and contribute regularly and fully in the meetings, just as participants would do in a graduate research seminar.

However, we will also send the presentation information to everyone in our mailing list, and you are welcome to join whichever presentation that you are interested in even if you do not want to enroll as a core participant. If you would like to be on our mailing list, please send your request to soc.cpr@cuhk.edu.hk and indicate that you are willing to join the “inequality & methods cluster” mailing list.