Dr. Corey M. Abramson (Ph.D., Sociology, UC Berkeley) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Rice University. His research examines the connections between inequality, health, and culture over the life course.
Dr. Abramson’s scholarly works have used a variety of empirical methods including participant observation in urban communities and various medical settings, quantitative modeling of national health survey data, in-depth interviews with people diagnosed with terminal diseases, analyses of health narratives employing artificial intelligence (AI) alongside human interpretation, 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, and why the combination is central to social stratification in America.
Dr. Abramson’s current methodological work integrates computational social science (CSS), AI, and traditional qualitative analysis in innovative ways to address core social science questions and contribute to equitable evidence-based policies. 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.
Abramson, Corey M. and Neil Gong 2020. Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
ARTICLES
Abramson, Corey M. (lead author), Tara Prendergast, Zhoufan Li, Martín Sánchez-Jankowski. “Inequality in the Origins and Experiences of Pain: What “Big (Qualitative) Data” Reveal About Social Suffering in the United States.” Forthcoming 2024. the Russell Sage Foundation Journal, Special Issue: Building an Open Qualitative Social Science (Editors: Edin, Fields, Grusky, Leskovec, Mattingly, Olson, Varner). 10(5): September.
Abramson, Tiffany M., Abramson, Corey M., Burner, Elizabeth, Eckstein, Marc, Sanko, Stephen, Wenzel, Suzanne. 2023. “Does Housing Status Matter in Emergency Medical Services Administration of Naloxone?: A Prehospital Cross-sectional Study.” 2023. WESTJEM
Li, ZhuofanΔ, Daniel Dohan, and 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
Fine, Gary Alan and Corey M. Abramson. 2020 “Ethnography in the Time of COVID-19: Vectors and the Vulnerable.” Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa
Abramson, Corey M. (lead author), Jacqueline Joslyn, Sarah Garrett, Katharine Rendle, and Daniel Dohan. 2018. “The Promises of Computational Ethnography: Improving Transparency, Replicability, and Validity for Realist Approaches to Ethnographic Analysis.” Ethnography. 19(2): 254-284