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Corey M. Abramson
Corey M. Abramson is Associate Professor of Sociology at Rice University, principal investigator of the Computational Ethnography Lab, and Co-Director of the Center for Computational Insights on Inequality and Society at Rice University. He also holds research appointments at UC San Francisco’s Medical Cultures Lab and UC Berkeley’s Center for Ethnographic Research.
Professor Abramson’s scholarship traces the links between social inequality, culture, and health across the life course. His comparative ethnography The End Game: How Inequality Shapes Our Final Years (Harvard University Press) received the American Sociological Association’s Outstanding Publication Award for Aging and the Life Course. Collaborative work appears in venues such as Sociological Methodology, Health Affairs, Ethnography, BMJ Open, Socius; a recent study in the Russell Sage Foundation Journal uses large qualitative datasets to illuminate how pain is patterned and experienced by social background.
Methodologically, Abramson combines participant observation, in-depth interviewing, computational social science, and AI-enabled text analysis in individual work and team science. His co-edited volume Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography (Oxford University Press) outlines how comparative fieldwork—and methodological pluralism more broadly—advance cumulative social science. Ongoing projects extend this line, demonstrating how machine learning and natural-language processing can make large, multi-site qualitative studies more transparent, scalable, and replicable.
With more than twenty years of experience teaching and conducting qualitative and mixed-methods research, Abramson has advised individual investigators and interdisciplinary teams in social science, medicine, public health, policy, community and industry. He has used ATLAS.ti since 2003 and regularly develops training programs on contemporary CAQDA, qualitative analysis, and mixed-methods.
Before joining Rice as tenured faculty, Abramson earned a Ph.D. in Sociology at UC Berkeley, completed a post-doctoral fellowship in UC San Francisco School of Medicine, and served on the faculty at the University of Arizona where he taught courses in advanced research methodology.
You can visit his university webpage here.
You can visit his personal webpage here.
Read Qualitative Coding Simplified, a blog post by Corey M. Abramson, to learn what qualitative coding is and how it can be used in a multitude of ways to enhance researchers’ data and help make sense of texts.
In his Sub-setting Qualitative Data for Machine Learning or Export blog post, Abramson discusses ‘sets’ for analyzing qualitative data, including what sets are, how they can be used, and examples of how to sub-set data in Atlas.ti.
