IPUMS International Team

Derek Burk

Research Scientist

burkx031@umn.edu

IPUMS Data Projects

IPUMS International

Research Interests and Project Expertise

Data Cleaning and Reformatting; Data Quality Checking; R Language for Statistical Computing; IPUMS International Research Data Enclave

Biography

I joined the IPUMS International team in 2017 and earned a PhD in sociology from Northwestern University in 2020. My dissertation research investigates the politics of bicycle policy making in large U.S. cities, attempting to explain variation in cities' adoption of bicycle-friendly policies. Other collaborative research projects include work on gendered trends in economic self-reliance in the U.S., the relationship between Americans' beliefs about income inequality and economic opportunity, and the relative merits of traditional and computer-aided text analysis. As part of the IPUMS International team, my efforts are focused on developing and maintaining tools and workflows for data quality checking, data reshaping, and the calculation of development indicators using IPUMS data.

Selected Works

Nelson, L.K., Burk, D., Knudsen, M. and McCall, L. 2021. "The future of coding: A comparison of hand-coding and three types of computer-assisted text analysis methods." Sociological Methods & Research, 50(1), 202-237.

Bloome, D., Burk, D. and McCall, L. 2019. "Economic self-reliance and gender inequality between US men and women, 1970–2010." American Journal of Sociology, 124(5), 1413-1467.

Burk, D. 2017. "Infrastructure, Social Practice, and Environmentalism: The Case of Bicycle-Commuting." Social Forces (3), 1209-1236.