Tamkinat Rauf

Congrats Fumiya! Look forward to reading this!

NYU is hiring two postdocs at the Center for Social Media, AI & Politics:
csmapnyu.org/jobs

And a grant manager in Sociology with the Social Science Research Hub:
uscareers-nyu.icims.com/jobs/15327/g...

I'm part of both groups--please share with anyone who is interested!

This is really cool! Congrats, BK!

Happy to share our new paper published in PNAS!

Using epigenetic clocks and egocentric network data, we find each additional "hassler" in your close social network is associated with ~9 months of extra biological age and 1.5% faster pace of aging.

kieranhealy.org/blog/archive...

SPQ is excited to announce a Special Issue on Social Status! We are inviting scholars to submit their theoretical and empirical articles that examine status by December 15th, 2026.

Below is the information for the Call for Papers. #SPQ

A counterintuitive example where a strong prior pulls an estimate in the wrong direction–and how to see the problem
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/02/02/a...

Is academia a job, career, or calling? Yes, yes, and yes. The answer is not defined by the role, it is defined by the person in the role.

It is perfectly acceptable to decide it is any of these for one's interests and well-being, and to live and work accordingly.

After 5 years I can finally share a full WP of our project conducting cognitive interviews of life satisfaction reporting.

Main findings:
1. LS scales are psychometrically valid, but...
2. Standard statistical assumptions made when analysing LS data are not credible.

osf.io/gv5e3/files/...

People who grew up in a high SES families have virtually no association b/w anxiety PGI & anxiety symptoms. But childhood SES did not moderate the association between depression PGI & depressive symptoms.

[US sample of older adults]

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Markets and Mobility: How Employers Structure Economic Opportunity

Intergenerational mobility, measuring the ability to achieve economic success regardless of family background, is a critical reflection of a society’s commitment to equality of opportunity. Rising income inequality has raised concerns about the potential erosion of upward mobility. While education has traditionally been viewed as the path to mobility, its transformative power is facing challenges in a rapidly evolving job market. This project reorients the focus of intergenerational mobility research by highlighting the labor market as an arena for the reproduction of advantage. It employs a comparative approach, using administrative data from four countries: Sweden, Austria, England, and the United States. It also incorporates evidence from a broader set of nations through cross-national surveys, longitudinal household surveys, labor force surveys, secondary data, and digital trace data. The project employs cutting-edge empirical methods, including quasi- experimental designs, event studies, within-family comparisons, decomposition analyses, counterfactual simulations, and diagnostic checks to rigorously assess the extent of inequalities in the labor market. The research investigates how family background influences the sorting of individuals to employers and workplaces, accounting for education and occupation, and explores variations in career progression within and between employers. It comprehensively catalogues and assesses mechanisms shaping workplace inequality, contributing to the development of social closure theory. Additionally, the project evaluates intervention strategies, encompassing both employer practices and government actions, to promote fair opportunity in the labor market.

JOB! I'm hiring a postdoc for 2 years on my ERC MaMo project.

Looking for someone with strong quant methods, ongoing work close to the project's aims, and a desire to publish in sociology. Start flexible in the next 12 months.

Formal call out shortly, but contact me first.

Writing is thinking

Outsourcing the entire task of writing to LLMs will deprive us of the essential creative task of interpreting our findings and generating a deeper theoretical understanding of the world.

Within-twin differences in birthweight are assoc. w/ cognitive ability in midlife, but b/w family differences is in birthweight are not.

Authors think this is because nutritional differences (within twin) affect development differently than other prenatal exposures (e.g. maternal smoking).

Why is the Mental Health of the Youngest American Workers in Decline? Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

The young report lower job quality than other workers in the USA potentially contributing to their declining mental health. But other factors (employment selection and changing work orientations) may be at play www.nber.org/papers/w34696 @sriucl.bsky.social @dannyblanchy.bsky.social

Industry Influence in High-Profile Social Media Research To what extent is social media research independent from industry influence? Leveraging openly available data, we show that half of the research published in top journals has disclosable ties to indus...

Who is the Big Tobacco of today?
In new work, we find 50% of high profile social media papers are connected to big tech through funding, collaboration and employment. Most connections aren't disclosed. @jbakcoleman.bsky.social @jevinwest.bsky.social @carlbergstrom.com 1
arxiv.org/abs/2601.11507

1/ Does growing up poor always lead to political apathy?

Very happy to share my first paper published (open access) in @electoralstudies.bsky.social, where I show that parents' influence mitigates the poverty gap in participation, while economic mobility does not.

🔗 shorturl.at/p5Bac

College students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds often report worse well-being compared to their more privileged peers. This study investigates whether disparities in well-being are associated with relational experiences, with a focus on friendship dynamics. Using a year-long multiwave survey, we investigate key features of friend networks that are linked to well-being among first-generation, low-income (FLI) students and their continuing-generation, higher-income (CHI) peers. We find that, for FLI students, better well-being is uniquely and consistently linked to similarity and academic support in their friend networks. Furthermore, disparities in well-being between FLI and CHI students are largest when FLI students' friend networks are more socioeconomically diverse and completely mitigated when they are less diverse. These findings underscore that in socioeconomically diverse college environments, friendships are not one-size-fits-all in their ability to meet the needs of individuals.

"For first-generation, low-income students, ... better well-being is uniquely and consistently linked to similarity and academic support in their friend networks."

Paywall: doi.org/10.1177/0146...

This paper looks extremely interesting. Nice work!

Or that science is hard :)

Thank you!!

Exactly, yes! Thanks for the helpful clarification!

Thank you!!

I think it is more accurate to think of this as the rate at which the hypotheses were supported by the data. The TESS archive was useful for this exercise because it includes studies regardless of publication status.

That's very interesting! Just to clarify, we didn't replicate the experiments (i.e., didn't collect new data). So the one-third number doesn't say anything about reproducibility per se.

Finally, the POQ editorial team and reviewers were simply FANTASTIC! Very grateful to them all for thoughtfully, carefully, and constructively engaging with this work.

Experience mattered! Researchers' seniority and co-authorship (vs. sole-author) predicted higher rates of significant findings.

Hypotheses involving moderation of main effects tend to be particularly underpowered.

(Useful explainer about sample size needed to estimate interaction effect: statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/03/15/n...)

This does not imply that we should indiscriminately throw larger samples at all experiments.

We found Daniel Lakens' (@lakens.bsky.social) work on the "smallest effect size of interest" especially relevant for thinking about implications.

The biggest takeaway was that researchers are often too optimistic about effect sizes, and underestimate how large of a sample they need to conduct a well-powered test.

An Audit of Social Science Survey Experiments Abstract. Survey experiments have become a popular methodology for causal inference across the social sciences. We study the efficacy of survey experiment

This is a belated post about our paper in @poqjournal.bsky.social.

We analyzed 100 survey experiments fielded by TESS (tessexperiments.org), using only information from the proposals to identify intended hypotheses.

Here are some of the things we learned: