Participation in the School of Sociologists "Kazakhstan Sociology Lab"

The Institute’s employees are constantly working to improve their professional skills. Applied research in the field of ethnopolitics requires updating and deepening knowledge and skills in using methods of data collection and analysis. This opportunity was presented by the project of the School of Sociologists "Kazakhstan Sociology Lab", organized by the Nursultan Nazarbayev Foundation. I became a participant in this project from February to November 2023. In this article I want to share my experience of participating in an interesting and professional project.

The School of Sociologists is an educational and research project within which sociologists and social researchers master new applied methods of data collection and analysis. The peculiarity of this project was that preference in training was given to data science skills, that is, programming. Upon completion of the School, participants were required to conduct policy-oriented research in various areas.

I submitted an application to participate in the competition for this project back in November 2022. For this purpose, I prepared a resume, a motivation letter and two letters of recommendation. As a result, I passed the first stage of the competition, which was followed by the next one – taking an independent course in statistics. Having gone through both stages, I became a participant in this project.

The School program consisted of 4 modules. Classes were held online, on average for three hours, 2 times a week. At the beginning of each module, a two-day offline workshop took place, during which participants gathered together and listened to lectures from famous researchers and sociologists, underwent training, got to know each other and communicated during coffee breaks and lunches.

The period from the moment of submitting the application until the completion of the School totaled a year, of which 7 months we, the students of the project, actively underwent training in 3 modules, each of which consisted of two online courses. Participants mastered new research methods through the following courses: “Introduction to Statistics”, “Programming in R”, “Qualitative Methods”, “Research design”, “Causal Inference” (experimental methods), “NLP”, “Network Analysis”, "Spatial Analysis". In addition, we were divided into research groups and, within the framework of the 4th module of the project, in the remaining 3 months, we worked in teams to conduct our own research and write a policy paper.

On November 29, 2023, the final conference was held within the School of Sociologists – “Graduation Conference-2023”, at which participants presented the results of group project research. The team I was a part of was studying gender issues. The topic of our research is “Dynamics of perception of cases of partner violence in social networks”. As part of the study, we studied how the discourse about partner violence in Kazakh media and blogs has changed in recent years using YouTube as an example (from 2019 to 2023). The main focus of our research was on analyzing comments using NLP (natural language processing in R) methods.

It is also worth noting the importance of well-coordinated teamwork, without which we would not be able to complete the work efficiently. Despite the fact that the topic we chose was quite sensitive and complex, we managed to complete the work at a decent level and present it to the research community and journalists. At the graduation conference, I presented the final results of the study on behalf of the team. The Working paper written by our team is presented on the School’s website (https://sociologylab.kz/school/ru) in the “Research Center” section.

I would like to emphasize that this project gave me not only new knowledge and skills, but also networking. The School's lecturers and mentors were well-known Kazakh and foreign sociologists and researchers. I also met other project participants who were sociologists, political scientists and social researchers from other fields. Among other things, I increased the level of my expertise on the topic of the research. I plan to continue to use the knowledge and skills acquired at the School of Sociologists in my professional activities.