Biography
Dr. Corey M. Abramson (Ph.D., Sociology, UC Berkeley) is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Center for Computational Insight on Inequality and Society at Rice University (CIISR). His empirical research examines the connections between inequality, health, and culture over the life course. Dr. Abramson’s methodological work integrates computational social science (CSS), AI, and traditional qualitative analysis in innovative ways, in order to address social science and policy questions.
Dr. Abramson’s scholarly works have examined the connections between health and society using a variety of empirical methods including participant observation in urban communities and clinics, quantitative modeling of national health survey data, in-depth interviews with people diagnosed with terminal diseases, analyses of health narratives employing artificial intelligence (AI) to visualize language patterns, and team-based mixed-method approaches. These works have consistently received funding, including support from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Abramson is the author of books including The End Game: How Inequality Shapes Our Final Years (Harvard University Press), an award-winning ethnography on later life featured in national media outlets, positively reviewed in the U.S. and abroad, and translated into Korean. Dr. Abramson co-edited Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography (Oxford University Press, with Neil Gong), a methodological volume examining how various approaches to comparative field methods contribute to social scientific knowledge and evidence-based policies. His new book project (Oxford University Press, under contract) examines how social inequalities and health are intertwined in various domains of American life, and why the combination is central to social stratification.
Professor Abramson regularly shares his methodological and substantive expertise with students, colleagues in a range of disciplines, policy audiences, and organizations such as hospitals, school districts, and international scientific consortia. Prior to moving to Rice, Dr. Abramson was Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona.
Recent Publications
BOOKS
Abramson, Corey M. 2017. The End Game: How Inequality Shapes Our Final Years. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paperback ed. ISBN: 9780674979680
Abramson, Corey M. and Neil Gong. 2020. Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780190608491
ARTICLES
Abramson, Corey M. (lead author), Zhuofan Li, Tara Prendergast, Daniel Dohan. 2026. "Qualitative Research in an Era of AI: A Pragmatic Approach to Data Analysis, Workflow, and Computation." Annual Review of Sociology. (forthcoming)
Arteaga, I., Hernandez de Jesus, A., Ginn, B., Abramson, C., & Dohan, D. 2025. "Understanding how social context shapes decisions to seek institutional care: A qualitative study of experiences of progressive cognitive decline among Latinx families." The Gerontologist. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnaf207
Farber, Orly N., Corey M. Abramson, Amanda Reich. 2025. "Utilizing Artificial Intelligence to Facilitate Qualitative Surgical Research." Annals of Surgery Open 6(2):e577. https://doi.org/10.1097/as9.0000000000000577
Abramson, Corey M. (lead author), Tara Prendergast, Zhoufan Li, Martín Sánchez-Jankowski. 2024. “Inequality in the Origins and Experiences of Pain: What 'Big (Qualitative) Data' Reveal About Social Suffering in the United States.” Russell Sage Foundation Journal, Special Issue: Building an Open Qualitative Social Science (Editors: Edin, Fields, Grusky, Leskovec, Mattingly, Olson, Varner). 10(5): September. https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2024.10.5.02
Abramson, Corey M. 2024. "From Carbon Paper to Code: Crafting Sociology in an Age of AI." Contexts: Guest Commentary. https://contexts.org/blog/soc-ai/
Li, Zhuofan, Daniel Dohan, Corey M. Abramson (senior author). 2021. “Qualitative Coding in the Computational Era: A Hybrid Approach to Improve Reliability and Reduce Effort for Coding Ethnographic Interviews.” Socius: 7. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/gpr4n/