The Department of Population and Public Health Sciences is seeking a full-time Project Assistant to be part of the Social Media Analytics (SOMA) Lab at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. SOMA Lab comprises a multidisciplinary team of researchers conducting studies at the intersection of public health, communication, and marketing. In general, research projects at SOMA Lab include: (1) identifying, quantifying, and describing promotional practices of companies across various industries and determining how such practices affect offline behaviors; (2) examining user experiences with popular new tobacco products to understand their appeal, and the social and environmental characteristics surrounding their use; (3) identifying the extent of unsubstantiated health claims (or misinformation) pertaining to substances like nicotine, cannabis, and products like electronic cigarettes. More information about SOMA Lab can be found at https://somalab.usc.edu/.
The Project Assistant will help the Lab director meet the aims of a study funded by the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program. The main goal of the project is to inform tobacco control policy efforts by identifying kid friendly tobacco marketing strategies and understanding their impact on tobacco-related attitudes and behaviors in high school students. Employment involves following established data collection and management procedures to collect, record and enter data. Additional responsibilities include codebook creation for content analysis with text-and-image-based data.
Overall, a successful candidate should have a bachelor’s degree and one year of experience working in an academic research setting, have excellent organizational skills, work well as a member of a research team, be able to work independently, and have good interpersonal skills. Interested candidates should submit a cover letter outlining their experiences, resume, and names of three references.
Minimum Education: High school or equivalent Minimum Experience: 1 year Minimum Field of Expertise: Knowledge of data collection procedures and some experience with proposal preparation and production of technical documents.
