A collection of personal research projects—including ongoing and past work—and areas I explore on my own time. This section excludes published research, projects conducted through my professional and academic appointments, and any work I do not directly lead. All of these were undertaken at the doctoral level or higher.
dopplR package for R. (GitHub Repo).
Dr. Ryan Kennedy, The Ohio State University
This package generates and evaluates synthetic survey data. It can simulate responses based on real respondents profiles, create synthetic respondents and datasets that mirror the structure and distributions of real data, and generate multiple synthetic data variations. Additional features include weighting synthetic respondents to match target marginals, summarizing dataframe structures, comparing distributions with Komolgorov-Smirnov (KS) tests, and flagging synthetic data that may be too similar to the original.
2025-2026. Echoes of Conspiracy: Tracing Deep-State Rhetoric in Congressional E-Newsletters.
Dr. Joanne Miller, University of Delaware
We examine how members of Congress amplify or challenge deep-state conspiracy theories in their constituent communications and track how conspiracy-laden narratives spread across Congress. I trained an LLM to analyze a comprehensive database of congressional e-newsletters, creating a coding framework to identify conspiracy-related language and test its reliability against human annotations. I then use these classifications to track when and where conspiracy references appear, compare patterns across parties and individual legislators, and assess how these narratives move through the institution over time.
* Project funded by the Institute for Humane Studies (Grant No. IHS019471).
Dissertation. Negative Public Opinion: How Normalized Out-Group Biases Shape Politics. The Ohio State University.
More information and relevant files and links can be found here: https://stephpedron.com/dissertation/.
Stephanie Pedron 