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.

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Analytical sociologists develop deeper, mechanism-based understandings of important social, political, and cultural processes.

Through a combination of agent-based simulations, social network analysis, and statistical models applied to survey, population register, social media, and text data, researchers at IAS seek to explain why people do what they do and the societal consequences of their behaviour. In other words, we build detailed understandings of behaviours at the micro levels of individuals, families and firms, and relate these to empirical regularities—like segregation and inequality—at the macro levels of cities, states, industries, and beyond.

A considerable part of the research at IAS is concerned with individuals’ mobility within three important, interdependent socioeconomic domains: the labour market, the housing market, and the school system. This research area is concerned with the dynamic processes that lead to a concentration of individuals with certain socio-demographic characteristics in different workplaces, schools, and neighbourhoods, and the consequences this has for organisations, institutions, and the individuals themselves. Combining micro-level statistical analyses with computer simulations is key to this research area.

Another core area of IAS research advances computational text analysis in sociology. Large-scale text analysis offers new ways to measure what people feel, think, and talk about. Researchers at IAS are using corpora of digitised texts as “social sensors” to understand meaning making in the context of widespread social change, including the European migration crisis, and the rise of new radicalised political movements. IAS research in this area focuses on the social dynamics of public discourses arising from interactions between the public, the media, and a country’s political actors as they react to current events.

IAS is an interdisciplinary research environment featuring faculty and affiliates from sociology, political science, philosophy, management studies, and statistics. The researchers deploy a variety of techniques from text mining, machine learning, network science, choice modelling, causal inference, and agent-based modelling. The disciplinary character of the institute makes it possible for IAS researchers to make innovative use of methods and analytical tools developed in other fields than their own.

IAS was established in 2014. It is administratively linked to the Department of Management and Engineering. Maria Brandén is the Director of the Institute and Jacob Habinek  and Károly Takács are the Deputy Directors. The institute is located in Central Norrköping, in the beautiful industrial landscape by the Motala River.

If you are interested in the relationship between Analytical Sociology and Computational Social Science, do read our article on the subject in the first issue of Journal of Computational Social Science 2018.

Here you find IAS channel on Youtube with seminars, lectures and interviews.

News from IAS

People networking at scientific conference in Sweden.

IAS hosts the conference on sociology in the digital world

On 14–16 August 2024, over 150 sociologists from all over the world gathered in Norrköping to participate in the Nordic Sociological Association's 31st conference.

People chatting in the library.

Kickoff Conference for SweCSS

On 15 April, a kickoff conference for the Swedish Center of Excellence for Computational Social Science (SweCSS) was held at the Museum of Work in Norrköping. The event gathered around 30 researchers from Linköping University.

Three glad persons celebrating.

Our first doctoral student completed her PhD

Dr Hurtado Bodell successfully defended her dissertation “Mining for Meaning: Using Computational Text Analysis for Social Inquiry” on 13 May, 2024. This marks the first Ph.D. completion within our research environment.

Follow us on Social Media

Twitter @IAS_LiU

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Facebook @Instituteforanalyticalsociology

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Youtube

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Calendar

Excellence Centre and Research Programs

Research areas

Events

Representative articles

Books.

Articles

Hedström, P. & Ylikoski, P. (2010). Causal mechanisms in the Social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology.

To article

Keuschnigg, M., Lovsjö, N. & Hedström, P. (2017). Analytical sociology and computational social science. Journal of Computational Social Science.

To article

Jarvis, B.F. & Song, X. (2017). Rising intragenerational occupational mobility in the United States, 1969-2011. American Sociological Review.

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Latest publications

2024

Eszter Vit, Federico Bianchi, Marco Castellani, Károly Takács (2024) Friends Can Help to Aim High: Peer Influence and Selection Effects on Academic Ambitions and Achievement Journal of Early Adolescence (Article in journal) Continue to DOI
Zoltán Hermann, Hedvig Horváth, Dorottya Kisfalusi (2024) Are separate classrooms inherently unequal? The effect of within-school sorting on the socioeconomic test score gap in Hungary Economics of Education Review, Vol. 103, Article 102582 (Article in journal) Continue to DOI
Karin Torpan, Terje Wessel, Guilherme Chihaya Da Silva, Anastasia Sinitsyna, Tiit Tammaru (2024) Migrant residential mobility and tenure transitions within different housing regimes: evidence from three Nordic capital cities Housing Studies (Article in journal) Continue to DOI
Sourabh Balgi, Jose M. Peña, Adel Daoud (2024) ρ-GNF: A Copula-based Sensitivity Analysis to Unobserved Confounding Using Normalizing Flows 12th International Conference on Probabilistic Graphical Models, Nijmegen, September 11 - 13, 2024. PMLR 246:20-37, p. 20-37 (Conference paper)
Sourabh Balgi, Jose M. Peña, Adel Daoud (2024) Counterfactually-Equivalent Structural Causal Modelling Using Causal Graphical Normalizing Flows 12th International Conference on Probabilistic Graphical Models, Nijmegen, September 11 - 13, 2024. PMLR 246:164-181, p. 164-181 (Conference paper)

The past and future of analytical sociology

Twenty-five years now have passed since the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences conference took place that according to many marked the beginning of analytical sociology as we perceive it today. In this talk I reflect on how the field has developed during this period, and I present my set of priorities for the future. 

Education

Computational Social Science, Master's Programme, 120 credits

How do ideas spread? How do cities become segregated? The programme prepares you to harness complex data and advanced computational tools to address these and other important social questions.

Courses

Discrete Choice Modelling, 7.5 credits

This course enables students to perform their own empirical research using discrete choice methods. Students learn how to create discrete choice datasets, estimate discrete choice models, including binomial, multinomial, and conditional logistic r...

Agent-Based Modelling, 7.5 credits

Agent-based modeling is a methodology for analyzing how groups of interacting individuals or other types of agents bring about various macro outcomes. This course provides a detailed introduction to the agent-based modelling (ABM) technique. The c...

Social Network Analysis, 7.5 credits

This course presents key concepts, measures, and statistical techniques needed for the analysis of relational, social network data using a computational approach. Network concepts such as centrality and brokerage are discussed, and popular measure...

Digital Strategies for Social Science Research, 7.5 credits

This course introduces the theories and practices of digital social sciences. The course considers the respective relevance of various digital data sources (sensors, surveys, internet-based media platforms, etc.) for social scientific purposes. In...

Research Education

Contact us

Staff

Affiliated researchers

Peter Bearman
Professor
Columbia University

Love Börjeson
PhD, Director of KBLab, National Library of Sweden

Yunsong Chen
Professor of Sociology
Nanjing University, China

Francois Collet
Associate Professor
ESADE

 

Guilherme Chihaya Da Silva
Research Fellow
Umeå University

Olof Ejermo
Professor
Lund University

Helen Eriksson
Research fellow,
Stockholm University

Kinga Reka Makovi
Assistant Professor
NYU Abu Dhabi

Sophie Mützel
Professor
Universität Luzern

Elizabeth Roberto
Associate Professor
Rice University

Arnout van de Rijt
Professor
European University Institute, Florence


Petri Ylikoski
Professor
University of Helsinki


Anders Ynnerman

Professor
Linköping University

Richard Öhrvall
Postdoctoral researcher
Linköping University

Formerly affiliated researchers

Ali Ahmed
Professor , Linköping University

David Andersson
Assistant Professor, Uppsala University

Chanchal Balachandran
Postdoctoral researcher, Utrecht University

Thomas Grund
Associate Professor, University College Dublin

Petter Holme
Professor, Sungkyunkwan University 

Michael Hörnquist
Professor, Linköping University

Aliaksei Kazlou
Research fellow, Linköping University

Gianluca Manzo
Research Fellow, University of Sorbonne, CNRS

Tim Müller
Research Fellow, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Adis Murtic
Director Localization and Transfers, Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery AB

Rebeca Ibarra Olivares
Research Fellow, Linköpings universitet

Ryszard Szulkin
Professor, Stockholm University

Organisation

IAS a part of Campus Norrköping