The Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS)

The researchers at the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS) conduct cutting-edge research on important social, political, and cultural matters. The research at IAS is sociological – in its original and broadly conceived meaning. The researchers at the IAS come from several academic disciplines.

Analytical sociologists seek to arrive at deeper and firmer understandings of important social, political, and cultural processes.

Through a combination of statistical analyses of big data bases, detailed micro research, computer simulations, and computer visualizations, the researchers at IAS seek to explain why people do what they do and the societal consequences of their behavior. The agent-based simulation models are used for understanding the links between micro behavior and macro dynamics. These sorts of simulation models also make it possible to conduct various “virtual societal experiments” that would have been impossible to conduct in reality.
A considerable part of the research at IAS is concerned with individuals’ mobility in different markets - the labor market, the housing market, and the school market.

The main focus is on how these different markets intersect and influence one another. More specifically, we are concerned with the dynamic processes that lead to a concentration of individuals with certain socio-demographic characteristics in different workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods, and the consequences this has for the performance of the organizations and for the individuals themselves.
The interdisciplinary nature of IAS makes it possible for its researchers to make innovative use of methods and analytical tools developed in other disciplines than their own.

IAS was established in 2014. It is administratively linked to the Department of Management and Engineering, but it has a university-wide mission and includes researchers from a range of different disciplines. IAS is governed by a board.Peter Hedström is the Director of the Institute and Sarah Valdez and Karl Wennberg are the Deputy Directors.
You can find us in the beautiful industrial landscape by the Motala River in central Norrköping.

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New MSc Program

Master’s Programme in Computational Social Science

The MSc Programme in Computational Social Science is for students who want to use cutting edge statistical and computational methods to do social research. Learn to analyze complex data to answer questions about the rise of inequality, organizational dynamics, the evolution of culture, and more.

In recent years, there has been an explosion in the size and scope of data related to human choices, affiliations, and interests that can be culled and analyzed in new ways to address fundamental questions about society and human behavior. New computational approaches based on machine learning, agent-based modeling, natural language processing, and network science have made possible ways of analyzing these data that have been heretofore unimaginable. To this end, the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS) offers a two-year MSc program in Computational Social Science that is aimed at developing foundational understanding of theories in the social sciences and skills in computational methods for social science research. Our program uniquely emphasizes the methodological advances and perspectives that come from the application of computational theories and approaches to basic research in the social sciences. Our main aim is to take students with substantive interests in the social sciences and bring them up to speed on cutting edge statistical and computational methods, including social network analysis, simulation methods, distributed computing, and machine learning.