Social Research Methodologies

Mei-ki (Maggie) Chan

Maggie Chan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to this role, she served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Utah State University from 2023 to 2025. She earned her Ph.D. in Combined Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2023 and completed her pre-doctoral internship at the Hawai‘i Psychology Internship Consortium. She is a Nationally Certified School Psychologist.

Dr. Chan’s research focuses on advancing equity in education by studying...

Jose Eos Trinidad

Jose Eos Trinidad is Assistant Professor of Education Policy at the University of California Berkeley. He is a sociologist focused on the study of organizations outside schools and the study of schools as organizations. He received his Joint PhD in Sociology and Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago.

Research
Bringing together the sociologies of organizations and education, his research interrogates education policy, civil society, and institutional change. He is author of...

Erin Murphy-Graham

Erin Murphy-Graham works in the field of comparative and international education. Her research focuses on three inter-related areas: 1) the process by which education can foster the empowerment of girls and women, and the theorization of what empowerment entails; 2) the role of education in changing how students relate to others, particularly in their intimate relationships and in building trust; 3) the rigorous evaluation of educational programs that have demonstrated potential to empower youth and adults in Latin America. She is currently engaged in a design-based research-practice...

Linda Morell

Linda Morell - leveraging learning theory and analytics.

She researches and lectures on critical issues in educational assessment and evaluation. She teaches program evaluation in the School of Education. Her courses address evaluation theory, design, and methodology. She also conducts original research through the BEAR Center. She is Co-PI on an NSF-funded project, Learning Progressions in Science: Analyzing & Deconstructing the Multiple Dimensions in Assessment. This study investigates student understanding of the science practice of argumentation, the crosscutting...

Sarah Goulart

Sarah Goulart is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Berkeley School of Education, specializing in social research methods. As a first-generation student with a strong interest in the transfer student experience, Sarah's research focuses on the challenges in the transfer process. She examines the intersection of institutional policies and AI models aimed at facilitating cross-campus planning.

As a Chancellor's Fellow and a Gardner Fellow, Sarah is committed to fostering equitable educational systems. Drawing from her own experiences and a passion for advocacy, she believes that...

Xingyao (Doria) Xiao

Doria Xiao is a Ph.D. candidate in Social Research Methodologies at the University of California, Berkeley, with an anticipated graduation in Spring 2025. Her research focuses on psychometrics and quantitative methods in education, with particular emphasis on Bayesian statistical modeling, latent variable modeling, longitudinal and hierarchical modeling, as well as integrating machine learning into educational assessments. A significant part of her work addresses identifiability challenges in Bayesian Growth Mixture Models (GMMs) and improving model evaluation.

Doria's...

Joshua Sussman

Joshua Sussman is a researcher at the Berkeley Evaluation and Assessment Research (BEAR) Center where he uses data-driven approaches to improve educational assessment, policy, and practice. He uses generalized latent variable modeling and hierarchical modeling in quantitative studies that aim to translate basic knoweldge about children's learning and development into recommendations for more effective and more just systems of early childhood education.

Interests and...

Sophia Rabe-Hesketh

Sophia Rabe-Hesketh is a statistician whose research interests include multilevel/hierarchical modeling, item response theory, longitudinal data analysis, and missing data. She has over 130 peer-reviewed articles in over 70 different journals including Psychometrika, Journal of Econometrics, Biometrics, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, with an h-index of 74 in Google Scholar. She has developed a modeling framework for a wide range of multilevel and latent variable models called GLLAMM (Generalized Linear Latent and Mixed Modeling) and...

Michael A. Ranney

Michael Ranney's research explores the nature of explanation and understanding, in both formal and informal domains. His work is intended to foster the incorporation of challenging information (e.g., on global climate change; see the website for HowGlobalWarmingWorks.org). Regarding explanatory coherence, he, his students and his collaborators study and model the nature and utility of reasoning involving both supportive and contradictory relations. They also generate curricula, methods, and artificially intelligent software...