Research Assistant for Prof. Maria Bautista

Opportunity Description:

• Description of job duties: The main aim of the project is to understand the potential diffusion, adoption and adaptation of socio-political institutions, with a particular emphasis on female power positions. Among others, we expect the candidate to perform the following tasks: 

• Supporting the research team in the digitization of colonial administration intelligence reports made by British officers in Nigeria. This consists of reading machine-typed reports and filling out four datasets regarding the reports, the villages included in such reports, the administrative levels of each of the villages and the traditional positions of power. After an initial digitization round, the candidate will receive feedback and review the work before moving to the next  intelligence report;

• The candidate is expected to make thoughtful contributions to the digitization process and analysis of the data: potential improvements to the definition of the variables collected, suggestions of other potentially interesting information aligned with the project goals, relevant checks to run during the data cleaning,  and additional analysis questions (correlations, maps, etc).

• Organizing and continue building the catalogue of available intelligence reports available to the research team;

• Contribute to the mapping of villages identified in the reports and other map-related tasks;

• Provide support in other areas of cleaning and analysis as needed.
• Reviewing the qualitative digitized data and contributing to the coding of the open-ended variables into more concrete multiple choice variables;

• Candidate description: We are looking for a student that is interested in development, history and socio-political institutions. Previous experience or courses related to qualitative research, statistics and database management is a plus.  We expect the student to have time during the week to be part of work sessions and attend meetings with the rest of the team. We expect that this position will take approximately 10h per week.

Application Process: 

Application Form