The research assistants will support the research initiatives under the guidance of research faculty. They will have the opportunity to work with UBC Professor Matt Lowe (https://mattlowe.site/). Areas of inquiry include: behavioural economics, labour economics, microeconomics.

Professor Lowe's research project hopes to understand the ways in which public figures utilize social media to reflect their values. Currently at the stage of data collection, we are looking for motivated, energized, and hard-working students to gain exposure to research and academia.

This stage of the position requires skills in data retrieval and manipulation, along with strong organization and time management abilities. This stage will focus on completing sentiment analysis on excerpts of social media data.

The project may include, but is not limited to:

• Create data classifying social media posts, data management, analysis and storage.
• Using knowledge on North American politics, public debate, and academia to make correct classifications and catch mistakes.
• Validate the created data collection with a data analysis exercise.
• Attending triweekly meetings and contributing to study methodology and development.

Our main goal here is to correctly interpret what North American public figures say on social media about divisive topics.

Ability to work with spreadsheets is necessary, and some knowledge of Stata or R is helpful.

Students will receive mentorship through tri-weekly meetings with professor Matt Lowe and a 3-hour R crash course on data cleaning and analysis.