Katherine Bruce

Background

About Katherine Bruce

I love sociology and I love data. That is why, after serving in the Peace Corps in Paraguay for two years, I went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina. I received my Ph.D. in 2012 after conducting research and Pride parades that included demographic analysis, survey, ethnography, semi-structured interviews, and archival research. Studying these events was such a research challenging, requiring many different methods, because they happen once a year across the U.S. and draw participants that scatter when the day is over. One of the coolest things I did for this project was to interview 10 people who participated in the very first parades in 1970 in New York and Los Angeles. My book on this project comes out in August 2016, through NYU Press. I teach sociology at Salem College and conduct mixed-method research on collective behavior and public opinion on issues of LGBT rights. To satisfy my data nerdiness, I learned SQL and R and put these in practice analyzing donor, communication, and fundraising data for a local nonprofit. These programs enable a much broader conceptualization of data than in the single dataset framework of Stata and SPSS; it is exciting to delve into all the new possibilities for analysis.Specialties: social science, qualitative and quantitative research, data management and analysis, survey research, writing, and teaching.