Virtual Coworking: Analyzing LinkedIn Data
Aruna Ranganathan, Professor
Business, Haas School
Closed. This professor is continuing with Fall 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Spring 2025.
Virtual Coworking platforms (e.g. CoFocus, Focusmate, Flow Club, Groove) have experienced a surge in popularity during the pandemic, especially among students, remote workers, and entrepreneurs/solopreneuers. We are in the early stages of analysis, so we are primarily seeking additional employment and demographic information of virtual coworkers from their LinkedIn profiles. We plan to conduct interviews, collect ethnographic observation through active participation, and design/implement interventions. So far we have acquired a user list from a dominant virtual coworking platform. Questions we are interested in asking are: who uses virtual coworking platforms? Are they currently a remote worker? How many years of work experience did they have? There is an opportunity to renew the contract in Spring 2024.
Role: For the initial stage of the work, you will be matching users to their LinkedIn profiles based on their name, location, and job title. Later, there will be opportunities for empirical analysis of the LinkedIn/user data, generating qualitative insights, conducting user interviews, as well as implementing the intervention programs. No technical experience necessary; we will train you in the use of any technical software (could include Stata, R, Atlas.ai, etc.).
Qualifications: An undergraduate who is interested in understanding the initial processes of data collection, LinkedIn search algorithms, interviewing, and generating hypotheses would be a great fit for this project. Any majors are welcome to apply, but those in the social sciences, economics, and area studies departments are especially encouraged to submit.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Angela Shea Tran
Hours: 9-11 hrs
Social Sciences