Statistics plays a central role in the social sciences, applying rigorous quantitative methods to understand and address some of the greatest challenges affecting human societies. Statistics is especially critical in today’s world where complex data and models are transforming the social sciences. Additionally, many statistical applications in the social sciences center around novel causal inference and survey methods. 

Berkeley Statistics faculty study pressing problems from across the social sciences: economics, policy evaluation, and quantitative finance; the census, official statistics, and demography; political science, election integrity, and security; education and psychometrics; and racial justice in the legal system. Faculty have close connections and joint appointments with other departments (including Demography, Political Science, Public Policy) and are core members of the campus’s Computational Social Science Training Program (CSSTP) and Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System (CRELS) training program. Faculty also have active collaborations with social science researchers, non-profit organizations, companies, and government agencies from across the world.

The innovative work today builds on our department’s long history of work at the intersection of statistics and the social sciences. This is particularly true in the use of statistics in the law—in a landmark case on census adjustment in 1990, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of an analysis from faculty Ken Wachter and (the late) David Freedman. Current faculty continue to serve as leading experts on related matters.