Harnessing data to enhance youth wellbeing - YEDI Affiliated Project
Sean Darling-Hammond, Professor
Public Health
Applications for Fall 2026 are closed for this project.
The THESIS Lab (Thriving and Health Equity through Social Inclusion in Schools) features a vibrant team of postdoctoral scholars / staff, PhD students, Masters students, and undergraduate students. Led by Dr. Sean Darling-Hammond with support from Dr. Stephanie Guinosso, we are conducting an array of quantitative methods projects using data from the California Healthy Kids Survey, the California Health Interview Survey, and other sources that we have unique access to. Our goal is to identify actionable insights that can improve school practices and, as a result, enhance child wellbeing.
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If you are selected for this research project, you will also be invited to join the Youth Equity Discovery Initiative (YEDI) Program, a research mentorship program that aims to build supportive pathways into research careers, service, and leadership addressing adolescent wellbeing. The year-long program provides weekly skill-building workshops, cascading mentorship, and professional development training to a cohort of 20-30 undergraduate scholars working on faculty-led youth equity research projects (like this one). Past scholars have benefitted from YEDI’s mentorship and professional development opportunities (including faculty and graduate student speakers). The program culminates in an end-of-year research poster symposium. Participation in the YEDI Program is not required for this research project, but is strongly encouraged.
The 2026-2027 YEDI cohort will meet on Tuesdays from 11:00am - 12:30pm beginning September 22nd. In order to take part in the YEDI program, you MUST be able to attend the workshops at this time. As a YEDI scholar, you will sign up for a PH198 (independent research) class and receive 1 unit in addition to the units you will receive for this URAP project. For any questions about YEDI, please contact Marieka Schotland at mschotland@berkeley.edu or visit our website (https://i4y.berkeley.edu/youth-equity-discovery-initiative-yedi-program).
Role: We aim to hire a student who will work directly with a graduate student using STATA on a variety of quantitative projects. The URAP student will initially serve as a "second coder," meaning they will write STATA code, run analyses, and see if they have the same results as the "first coder," who will be a Master's student who has already been trained to use STATA at a high level. This approach ensures code is accurate and streamlined. If you become sufficiently conversant in STATA during the course of the apprenticeship, you will have an opportunity to graduate to a "first coder" on appropriate projects. The code you write will be designed achieve one or more of the following ends:
- Cleaning data
- Merging data
- Summarizing samples
- Running a variety of analyses
- Producing tables and visualizations
The learning outcome of this work is to become extremely adept at managing and working with data "in the wild." Classroom projects provide a helpful sandbox to practice working with data tools, but real social science typically presents novel (and exciting) challenges. Working in a coding team allows you to learn, practice, refine, and master a variety of extremely practical and marketable data analysis skills. To put it bluntly, few hire for the skills you learn in class. Many hire for the skills you learn in practice. This is practical learning in every sense of the word.
Qualifications: Students must already have a strong command of introductory statistical analysis (including data cleaning, conducting multivariate regression analyses, and presenting the results of these analyses in tables and figures). They also must be proficient in a data analysis software, but it need not be STATA. Students can learn STATA if they already know, for example, R, SPSS, or SAS. That said, they must have familiarity with (be able to estimate a multivariate regression) in at least one statistical analysis software so they can port that knowledge over to STATA.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Sean Darling-Hammond
Hours: 6-8 hrs
Social Sciences Education, Cognition & Psychology