Dr. Corey M. Abramson (Ph.D., Sociology, UC Berkeley) is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Co-Director of the Center for Computational Insight on Inequality and Society at Rice University (CIISR), and an Incoming Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University (2026-2027). His empirical research examines the connections between inequality, health, and culture over the life course. Dr. Abramson directs the Computational Ethnography Lab (CEL), where his methodological work integrates computational social science (CSS), artificial intelligence (AI), data science, and traditional qualitative analysis in innovative ways 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 to understanding life with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. These works have consistently received funding, including support from the National Institutes of Health. Abramson has also served as data methodologist and data architect on large-scale qualitative studies that integrate computational methods for data linking and analysis.
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, Unequal Anatomies (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. His work appears in top scientific journals in sociology and beyond, including American Sociological Review (accepted), Annual Review of Sociology (forthcoming), Sociological Methodology, Health Affairs, BMJ Open, The Gerontologist, and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, as well as Socius and the Russel Sage Foundation Journal.
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. Current work in this area involves open-sourcing and sharing tools for computational social science. 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), Tara Prendergast, Zhuofan Li, Daniel Dohan. 2026. “Qualitative Research in an Era of AI: A Pragmatic Approach to Data Analysis, Workflow, and Computation.” Annual Review of Sociology (in press). Preprint: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.12503
Li, Zhuofan, Daniel Dohan, and Corey M. Abramson (senior author). (accepted). "Temporal Misalignment and Unequal Agency: What Terminal Cancer Patients Teach Us about Time and Inequality." American Sociological Review.
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/