Gerard Chung

  • Research Fellow, Social Service Research Centre, NUS
I am a research fellow at the Social Service Research Centre, National University of Singapore. I have a Ph.D. in social work from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work. I had also practiced as a social worker in a family service centre in Singapore.
As a social work researcher, I am interested in researching parenting, family services in the community, and risk assessment. I am especially interested in intervention research and development. With the increased availability of administrative data as a form of BIG data, I am interested to advance the use of admin data in the social service sector to improve social work practices, develop prediction models for risk assessment, and to evaluate social in‑ terventions. I also identify as a methodologist where the through line connecting my research interests involved the use of computational social science methods and advanced statistical methods.
Recently, I started various text-as-data analysis projects. See this latest article where I used natural language processing techniques to understand how 1,500 news articles reported about social service agencies during the pandemic in Singapore. See this on how to analyze open-ended survey responses. I am also extracting textual data from SSAs' annual reports from 2016 to 2022 to look at how directors/CEOs report about their agencies before and during the pandemic. Join my GitHub to follow these projects. My other active work includes two longitudinal studies: Enhancing Positive Outcomes in Youth and the Community and In-Work Poverty and the Challenges of Getting by among the Young
My scholarly work can be accessed at Google Scholar – ResearchGate – GitHub
Interests. Parenting, Family Services, Intervention research, Evaluation, Administrative data, Risk assessment, Text-as-data analysis, Computational social science

Projects

Publications

2022
2021
2020
Preprints