Yiyang Gao
Postgraduate Researcher
Sociology
About me:
I am a PhD candidate specialising in quantitative social science. My primary research interests are in the areas of race and immigration, segregation and inequality in education, and social mobility and stratification. My current research examines demographic change in England due to multiculturalism and immigration, socio-economic and ethnic segregation in the school-aged population, as well as the impact of different degrees of segregation on academic achievement. I have experience working with national administrative data and large-scale survey data. Prior to entering my doctoral programme, I had worked in the tech industry on policy-related social media matters. Both in industry and academia, I have been exploring how data can be better used to tell stories related to public policy and social well-being in the context of the digital age.
Research Unit:
Q-Step Centre
Research Project:
Research topic: An Investigation of Ethnic Segregation in English Schools
As part of broader concerns regarding social inequality and exclusion in multicultural England, ethnic segregation of the school-age population in communities and schools remains a subject of policy concern. For a full picture of the segregation experience of the school-age population in both schools and neighbourhoods, we need to know at which geographical scale segregation happens and what the drivers are. Treating segregation as a multiscale phenomenon, this study uses a decomposition approach to study differences in ethnic school segregation in England across space and time. The contributions are two-fold. First, this study distinguishes segregation taking place within and between local educational authorities (LEAs). Segregation between LEAs is primarily driven by immigration, while segregation within LEAs is affected by both ethnic diversity and socioeconomic factors. Second, this paper examines how changing ethnic diversity, together with other factors of policy concerns, collectively affects the direction of school segregation. This allows us to better tell whether local authorities go through an exacerbation of substantial segregation. I find schools in most areas have seen an increase in racial diversity and a sustained decline in segregation in the past two decades, including some northern towns that were considered "spaces of failed multiculturalism". The cross-sectional comparison illustrates that more than half of the school segregation in London and East Midlands takes place between local authorities. This reflects the spatial concentration of particular ethnic groups in certain local authorities within these two regions, primarily driven by immigration. Within each local authority, schools in London and the East Midlands do better than those in northern towns at reflecting local ethnic composition. In other regions, school segregation predominately occurs within local authorities. Schools in Yorkshire and The Humber are found with particularly high levels of segregation. The high school segregation in the north possibly reflects its residential segregation, which is related to the overcrowding and the socioeconomic disparity.
Research Supervisory team:
I work with Dr Alexey Bessudnov and Dr Chris Playford at the Q-Step Centre.
Research Wider Research Interests:
Ethnicity, immigration, spatial mobility, educational inequality
Professional/research experience:
November 2017 June 2018
Bytedance Think Tank/Public Policy Institute
Public Policy Internship. Key job responsibilities include
(1) writing newsletters and empirical reports on topics such as fake news and hate speech dissemination, information cocoons, privacy, personalized recommendations, algorithmic fairness, Internet governance, and artificial intelligence;
(2) conducting web scraping and sentiment analysis on personalization algorithms; (3) assisting the AI lab with roadshows, hosting visits from MIT, Stanford, Google, and Sequoia Capital representatives to demonstrate Bytedance's natural language processing and artificial intelligence-based product offerings;
(4) Salesforce project manager for the corporate development team, responsible for developing customized customer relationship management systems and delivering training to global offices in Tokyo, Los Angeles, Moscow, and Sao Paulo.
Education:
January 2018 January 9999
Q-Step Centre, University of Exeter
Mphil/PhD Advanced Quantitative Methods
Specialities in R: Data Visualisation (ggplot2), Data Wrangling (tidyverse), Interactive Web Apps (Shiny), Text as Data (caret, quanteda), multilevel models (lme4)
January 2016 January 2017
Institute of Education, University College London
MSc Quantitative Research Methods
Dissertation: Educational Pathways, Family Socioeconomic Status, and Autonomous Admissions Policies
Specialities in Stata: Longitudinal Data Analysis, Impact Evaluation Methods (Casual Inference), International Comparisons for Educational Attainment
January 2012 January 2016
Shandong University
BSc in Law (Sociology), A-class qualification of Autonomous Admission
GPA: 91.44/100
Professional Development:
2021-10-00
Postgrad Seminar-Research Impact in a Digital Culture
Presented as a keynote speaker to share experience in working with administrative data and cooperating with public policy departments.
2020-01-00
Working Placement-Department for Education
Presentation of "Residential Segregation and School Segregation in Multicultural England" as part of the inaugural PhD internship programme of the Department for Education Data Science Lab.
