The undergraduate student Leonardo de Campos Gomes, from the undergraduate program in Economics at Insper, already has almost two and a half months of international experience at the University of Chicago in his curriculum. He was one of five students who participated in the Summer Institute in Social Research Methods program, a partnership between Insper and the University of Chicago. The American university, with its 130 years of history, is one of the most traditional in the country and has hosted, among faculty and students, 97 Nobel Prize winners. “I am interested in public policy evaluation and have already worked in research assistantship for the Center for Public Management & Policy. This program in Chicago made a lot of sense for me, as we are trained in social research methods. This encompasses many subjects, ranging from economics to history and psychology,” says Leonardo.
Research in social sciences has proven to be a recurring theme in a world that needs to measure the effectiveness of its public policies. "The goal is to discover, from the data the researcher has access to, what is actually happening in the day-to-day of a social phenomenon. For this, it is necessary to interpret these informations through a theory or model that proves to be effective. The goal is to design studies that allow us to understand whether a policy is or is not producing the desired effects on the target population. The quality of a study depends on the interaction among three essential elements: well-designed procedures to ensure the study's integrity; appropriate statistical methods to analyze the results; and a solid economic theory, which helps us interpret the mechanisms behind the findings," states the student. These conclusions, according to Leonardo, will depend on the quality of the researcher's theoretical argumentation. "The work of the social scientist is to bring rigor to the research, using creativity in this process without losing sight of objectivity in the methods used to interpret the data," he notes.
Leonardo explains that the program involves a series of activities with the guidance of the university's researchers. There are daily workshops from different areas of social sciences to familiarize students with the research universe. "We have contact, for example, with tools for literature review, organizing this literature, and managing references. The workshops provide general knowledge on how to conduct research in social sciences," highlights Leonardo. The second part of the program is personalized and focuses on the subject chosen by the student — in Leonardo's case, psychology, but other students opted for spatial data analysis or digital ethnography, for example.
In Leonardo's research assistantship, the work focused on the experimental evaluation of a social program in the city of Chicago, which covers the entire US territory, with the valid premise for the social scientist of bringing the same scientific rigor as in natural sciences. This process involves observing two control groups: one benefiting from a specific social program, and the other not — similarly to what happens in natural sciences with vaccines, involving the actual vaccination of one group and not the other (placebo effect) so that results can be compared.
The social program analyzed involves visits by municipality agents to families at social risk, such as single mothers who have just had a child. This service involves a 90-minute weekly conversation about best practices for maternal care, such as breastfeeding and early childhood development stimulation. "The goal is to discover whether the program truly functions in producing effective results for the targeted needy population, such as better school performance for children and improved child health indices," explains Leonardo.
The student worked on selecting statistical methods that corrected any factors that might compromise the results or cause confusion about them. Among these factors was the use by the non-program beneficiary group of other similar actions offered by the Public Power or by non-governmental organizations — by other federative entities like the federal government. "In other words, to correctly evaluate, it is not enough to divide the sample into two groups: one benefiting from the program and the other not. It is necessary to go further and remove any factors that might compromise the results achieved or the experiment's integrity," he says.
Leonardo, who is interning at an economic consultancy, liked the experience so much that he is considering working in the academic world in the future. "I gained a much deeper understanding of what it means to work with research. I observed the posture of intellectuals when thinking about how to solve society's challenges. There are various social problems still unsolved. Academics are trained to think about all aspects of a problem, and I have already been using this methodology in my daily life," he concludes.