Sean Bock

Sean Bock

PhD Candidate in Sociology

Harvard University

Hello!

I am a Ph.D. Candidate and Researcher at Harvard University, where I am also an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences (IQSS) and the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. I have 8 years of experience working on data-intensive projects—both alone and as a part of teams—performing every aspect of the data analysis process, including: collecting, cleaning, and managing data, performing statistical analyses, creating clear narratives with intuitive visualizations, and communicating insights through peer-reviewed publications and presentations at national conferences. I love finding creative ways to leverage data and building tools to help facilitate research workflows.

My academic research relies on large-scale surveys and text data to draw insights about politics, culture, and social change in the United States and Western Europe. My work has appeared in several top peer-reviewed journals and has been covered by news outlets, such as the New York Times, New Yorker, and Washington Post.

Download my resumé or Academic CV

Interests
  • Quantitative Research
  • Text Analysis
  • Survey Research
  • Data Visualization
Education

  • PhD in Sociology, 2023

    Harvard University

  • AM in Sociology, 2020

    Harvard University

  • BA in Sociology and Political Science, 2016

    Indiana University, Bloomington

Skills

R
Data Analysis
Stata
Data Visualization
Text Analysis
Machine Learning

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
PhD Researcher
Harvard University
Sep 2017 – Present Cambridge, MA

Responsibilities include:

  • Designed, managed, and executed all aspects of 5 large-scale research projects using R and Stata
  • Analyzed large longitudinal and cross-national surveys using advanced statistical techniques, including multivariate regressions, cluster analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing
  • Communicated insights to different audiences in 6 first- and co-authored publications in top peer-reviewed journals, a non-technical article published in the Washington Post, presentations at national conferences, and interviews at media outlets
 
 
 
 
 
Research/Data Science Consultant
Washington University in St. Louis
Jun 2022 – Present Remote

Responsibilities include:

  • Consulted clients on research and data analysis strategies
  • Constructed tailored R package to improve research workstreams
 
 
 
 
 
Research Assistant
Harvard University
Aug 2017 – Jun 2021 Cambridge, MA

Responsibilities include:

  • Led team of research assistants on data cleaning, analysis, synthesis, and organization tasks
  • Extracted insights from survey and text data using unsupervised machine learning, regression, GLM, factor analysis, and other statistical techniques using R, Stata, and Latent Gold
  • Constructed intuitive data visualizations to convert research and data analysis into clear narratives
  • Managed large collaborative projects using version control (Git) and automated reporting with R Markdown
 
 
 
 
 
Teaching Assistant
New York University
Jan 2022 – Dec 2022 New York, NY

Responsibilities include:

  • Assisted in teaching over 30 NYU graduate students on text mining (natural language processing) methods using R
  • Developed and conducted weekly 1-hour coding demos on topics including: Machine learning, topic modeling, networks, web scraping, and visualization machine learning, regression, and decomposition techniques
  • Led weekly lab meetings and consulted students on coding assignments and research projects

Projects

Data science | Data Analytics

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All R Shiny app Web scraping Text analysis Package development Machine learning Data visualization
Golf Match Simulator App
An R Shiny app to predict outcomes in golf matches
Code
Golf Match Simulator App
kmodesFlow package
An R package to improve workflow with k-modes modeling. I demo package functionality by identifying latent customer groups of a telecom company, which are then used to predict customer churn.
Code
kmodesFlow package
Political Speech N-gram Viewer
An R Shiny app to search trends in words used in U.S. Presidential campaign speeches from 1954 to 2020
Code
Political Speech N-gram Viewer
The Prevalence of Exclusionary Nationalism across Party Manifestos, 1920-2020
Using data from the Comparative Manifesto Project, I analyze trends in the prevalence of exclusionary nationalism present in party platforms. Results are shown with an interactive plot and heat map table.
Code
The Prevalence of Exclusionary Nationalism across Party Manifestos, 1920-2020
Using sentiment analysis to identify the scariest season of Stranger Things
I analyze scripts from the popular show, Stranger Things, and use sentiment analysis to identify the scariest season. (Featured in Blog post).
Code
Using sentiment analysis to identify the scariest season of Stranger Things

Blog

R, data analysis, text analysis, and more

Identifying the scariest season of Stranger Things using sentiment analysis
In this post, I walk through how to use the tidytext package to perform a simple sentiment analysis on the scripts of the show Stranger Things to identify the scariest season. I also create a fun Stranger Things-themed plot!
Oct 31, 2022 19 min read
Identifying the scariest season of Stranger Things using sentiment analysis
How to recreate plots produced by geom_smooth()
This post demonstrates how to manually recreate smoothed line plots produced by ggplot2’s geom_smooth() and stat_smooth() functions. This is actually a fairly invovled process, but I’ve found this to be a useful excerise for better understanding what’s going on under the hood with ggplot and for learning how to manually produce similar-looking plots with more fine-tuned model specifications.
Aug 25, 2022 8 min read
How to recreate plots produced by geom_smooth()
Creating Local Variables Within Pipe Chains
Did you know that you can create local variables within a pipe? I’ve found that this can be a nifty tool to avoid creating unnecessary objects in your environment. I show an example of how to use this technique in the context of creating a table.
Aug 17, 2022 4 min read
Creating Local Variables Within Pipe Chains

Featured Publications

Sean Bock
October, 2022 In Golf.com
This clever handicapping app predicts whether you’ll win any given golf match
This clever handicapping app predicts whether you’ll win any given golf match

Article on the origins and creation of the Golf Match Simulator App.
Cite Source Document
Sean Bock, Landon Schnabel
April, 2022 In PLOS ONE
Distressed Democrats and relaxed Republicans? Partisanship and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic
Distressed Democrats and relaxed Republicans? Partisanship and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic

A comparison of wellbeing trends between Democrats and Republicans and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cite
Sean Bock, Landon Schnabel
December, 2021 In The Washington Post
More Americans than usual have been changing parties. Why?
More Americans than usual have been changing parties. Why?

Analysis piece written in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage on partisan switching and the consequences of this for the 2022 midterm elections.
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Sean Bock, Landon Schnabel
November, 2021 In Socius
Visualizing Partisan Identification Switching in the General Social Survey Panel, 2016-2020
Visualizing Partisan Identification Switching in the General Social Survey Panel, 2016-2020

An analysis of partisan ID switching in the General Social Survey between 2016 and 2020.
Cite
Bart Bonikowski, Yuval Feinstein, Sean Bock
September, 2021 In AJS
The Partisan Sorting of America How Nationalist Cleavages Shaped the 2016 US Presidential Election
The Partisan Sorting of America How Nationalist Cleavages Shaped the 2016 US Presidential Election

This paper measures measures latent classes of nationalism in the U.S. over time and examines their impact on the 2016 primary and presidential elections.
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Sean Bock
May, 2021 In Socius
Conflicted Religionists: Measuring Political Backlash on Salient Issues
Conflicted Religionists: Measuring Political Backlash on Salient Issues

This paper develops a measure of experienced conflict between religionists’ views on social issues and the teachings of their churches, and then analyzes the relationship between this conflict and church attendance.
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Landon Schnabel, Sean Bock
November, 2018 In Sociological Science
The Continuing Persistence of Intense Religion in the United States Rejoinder
The Continuing Persistence of Intense Religion in the United States Rejoinder

A response to Voas and Chaves (2018) demonstrating the persistence of intense religion and discussing the importance of avoiding unfounded assumptions in age-period-cohort analyses.
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Landon Schnabel, Sean Bock
November, 2017 In Sociological Science
The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research
The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research

We show that rather than religion fading into irrelevance as the secularization thesis would suggest, intense religion—strong affiliation, very frequent practice, literalism, and evangelicalism—is persistent and, in fact, only moderate religion is on the decline in the United States.
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Recent Publications

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Sean Bock (2022). This clever handicapping app predicts whether you’ll win any given golf match. In Golf.com.

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Sean Bock, Landon Schnabel (2022). Distressed Democrats and relaxed Republicans? Partisanship and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. In PLOS ONE.

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Sean Bock, Landon Schnabel (2021). More Americans than usual have been changing parties. Why?. In The Washington Post.

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Sean Bock, Landon Schnabel (2021). Visualizing Partisan Identification Switching in the General Social Survey Panel, 2016-2020. In Socius.

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Bart Bonikowski, Yuval Feinstein, Sean Bock (2021). The Partisan Sorting of America How Nationalist Cleavages Shaped the 2016 US Presidential Election. In AJS.

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Sean Bock (2021). Conflicted Religionists: Measuring Political Backlash on Salient Issues. In Socius.

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Landon Schnabel, Sean Bock (2018). The Continuing Persistence of Intense Religion in the United States Rejoinder. In Sociological Science.

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Landon Schnabel, Sean Bock (2017). The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research. In Sociological Science.

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