Corey M. Abramson is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Center for Computational Insights on Inequality and Society (CIISR) at Rice University. His research examines how inequality, health, and culture converge to shape the course of our lives. Abramson combines ethnography, surveys, and computational social science (CSS) to analyze granular data at scale, from urban neighborhoods and hospitals to workplaces and leisure, connecting individual experience and societal structures.
Dr. Abramson directs the Computational Ethnography Lab (CEL), where he integrates CSS, artificial intelligence (AI), data science, and qualitative field research to address social science and policy questions. His methodological work emphasizes rigor and reproducibility. This has included operationalizing logics of comparison and pairing machine learning with human verification to triangulate patterns and surface consequential edge cases, keeping interpretation grounded in firsthand knowledge of the field sites. His data-architecture work spans multiple NIH- and PCORI-funded studies of aging, cancer, and dementia, building systems to help analyze thousands of in-depth interviews and field observations produced by teams of experienced field researchers embedded in communities and clinics. Abramson is Co-PI (with Wang) of the new CAUSE-AI Cluster (Causal, Network-Aware, and Uncertainty-Quantified AI in Social Systems), in collaboration with the Ken Kennedy Institute.
Professor Abramson’s books include the award-winning ethnographic monograph The End Game (Harvard 2015; Korean translation 2016; featured in The New York Times and The Atlantic) and the co-edited Beyond the Case (Oxford 2020, with Gong). Recent works include an American Sociological Review article on terminal cancer and unequal agency and an Annual Review of Sociology piece arguing for the value and sociological precedent of pragmatically combining advanced computation and qualitative methods. Abramson’s current book project, Unequal Anatomies (Oxford University Press, under contract), draws on more than two decades of field observations to examine how social inequalities and health are intertwined across domains of American life, and why that combination is central to social stratification. Collaborative works also appear in top journals in sociology and beyond, including Health Affairs, The Gerontologist, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Ethnography, Socius, Sociological Methodology, and the Russell Sage Foundation Journal.
Beyond research, Abramson regularly shares his methodological and substantive expertise with students, colleagues across disciplines, policy audiences, and organizations including hospitals and school districts. He serves on the elected council of the American Sociological Association’s Methodology Section and the editorial board of Sociological Methodology. He has advised the National Academy of Medicine, the AARP, the European Research Council’s GENDHI project on gender inequality, and state, local, and tribal institutions, while working to advance open-source approaches and tools for computational social science.
Abramson earned a PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley. Prior to moving to Rice, he was Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona. In 2026-27, Abramson will be in residence as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford.
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), Tara Prendergast, Zhuofan Li, and Daniel Dohan. 2026. "Qualitative Research in an Era of Artificial Intelligence: A Pragmatic Approach to Data Analysis, Workflow, and Computation." Annual Review of Sociology 52 (in press). https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-011824-104836
Li, Zhuofan, Daniel Dohan, and Corey M. Abramson (senior author). 2026. "Temporal Misalignment and Unequal Agency: What Terminal Cancer Patients Teach Us about Time and Inequality." American Sociological Review. OnlineFirst. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224261448220
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
Abramson, Corey M. (lead author), Tara Prendergast, Zhuofan 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/