Back at Macalester College, I completed an Honors Thesis on the causes of home advantage in professional soccer. Although home advantage is a well-studied topic, I wanted my work to focus more specifically on women’s soccer data, since so little of the literature I found engaged seriously with women’s sports. In that way, the project let me work on a question I genuinely cared about while also thinking carefully through foundations of causal inference and research design.
This project began as a final paper for a causal inference course during my junior year and grew into one of my first long-term research experiences. Over more than a year of work, it gave me a much clearer sense of what it means to stay with a research question over time: refining ideas, working through uncertainty, and building an argument carefully. I developed my coding, research abilities, and collaboration skills while also learning how a larger independent research project comes together.
Even though my research has since moved more toward longitudinal development in health data, this thesis was an important foundation for me. It set me up well for later work by showing me how statistical ideas can be connected to substantive, real-world questions. My final thesis paper is publicly accessible here.