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JOB DESCRIPTION AND POSITION REQUIREMENTS

The College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State is seeking two part-time – undergraduate

research assistants for the Department of Sociology and Criminology.

The role will be supervised by Dr. Jeffrey Ulmer. Work will primarily be conducted online with periodic in-person meetings. Junior or senior students who are knowledgeable about the field are preferred, but all Penn State undergraduate students are encouraged to apply.

Are you interested in learning more about how courts function? Are you eager to explore the backgrounds of court actors? We are searching for two undergraduates to 1) clean court actor names and 2) search online for the background information of these court actors.

Currently, we have 10 million PDF court dockets from the Pennsylvania Courts and are currently parsing the dockets associated with the Court of Common Pleas. We need assistance with data cleaning and data collection pertaining to the court attorneys involved in these cases. This work is part of an ongoing project focused on how the background of court actors may contribute to racial disparities in sentencing decisions.

Job Duties

• Reading tables in R and court dockets to determine whether two court actors are the same person with the difference being name misspellings and/or nicknames (e.g., Bob vs. Bobby vs. Robert)
• Identifying instances of a court actor being the same person and filling out a template in R to group the various names of that one court actor under one Pennsylvania Supreme Court number
• Searching online websites including LinkedIn, the Disciplinary Board of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, attorney firm websites, and news articles to collect the background information of each court actor which includes their race, ethnicity, gender, undergraduate university, law school, year of admission to the Pennsylvania Bar, and any disciplinary action
• Attend periodic meetings (online or in-person) to review progress

Requirements and Qualifications

• Must be a full-time Penn State undergraduate student living in State College over the summer
• Available to work at least 10 hours per week
• Familiarity or interest in learning about the court system and court dockets
• Familiarity or interest in basic R coding
• Strong attention to de