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Caroline Lancaster

Pronouns: She/Her

Caroline is a quantitative social scientist specializing in data analysis, program evaluation, and reproducible research.

Caroline Lancaster joined NORC’s Methodology & Quantitative Social Sciences department in 2022 as a research methodologist. Caroline has over eight years of experience in data analysis and is well-versed in a variety of quantitative methods, including statistical modeling, psychometrics, causal inference, and natural language processing. She also regularly works with project teams to implement best practices for reproducibility, reporting, and quality control.

At NORC, Caroline applies her expertise to both large- and small-scale projects. For the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE), Caroline builds and maintains reproducible pipelines for data quality monitoring. She also authored a methodological brief using hierarchical modeling to understand families’ search and selection of child care and early education providers. For ISAPPP, Caroline served as lead methodologist, overseeing data analysis and reporting for four projects evaluating sexual assault prevention programs in military settings. For the Cyber-Abuse Research Initiative (CARI), Caroline contributed data analysis and visualizations for a study on technology-facilitated abuse among older adults, published in the Journal of Elder Abuse and Neglect.

Prior to joining NORC, Caroline was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied attitudes and public opinion and published her work in journals such as the British Journal of Political Science. While at UNC, she also worked as a data and code verifier at the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science. In this role, she replicated and verified results for manuscripts accepted for publication in peer-reviewed social science journals and advised authors on best practices for reproducibility.

Education

PhD

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

MA

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

BA

Furman University

Honors & Awards

Employee Recognition Award | 2022

NORC at the University of Chicago

Project Contributions

Evaluating the U.S. Military’s Sexual Assault Prevention Programs

Rigorous evaluation of five initiatives aimed at preventing sexual harassment and sexual assault

Funder:

U.S. Department of Defense

Evaluation Training and Technical Assistance Center (ETAC)

Evaluation training, TA, and rigorous evaluations for DoD sexual assault prevention activities

Client:

Department of Defense (DoD)

Growing Up with Guns Study

The first nationally representative longitudinal survey of youth and young adults on exposure to firearm violence

Client:

Centers for Disease Control & Prevention

Positive Adolescent Interpersonal Relationships (PAIR)

Expanding NORC’s STRiV research to reflect diverse adolescent experiences and communities

Client:

National Institute of Justice

Publications