Meet Frontiers Intern Sidney Johnson
By Kelly Hale, Communications Coordinator
Nov 07, 2024
Sidney Johnson, currently a student at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has been an intern in the Frontiers office, working directly with Maggie Padek Kalman.
Johnson is a sociology major who has an interest in helping fill the gap of including qualitative data in the area of substance abuse.
“There’s a lot of research on the quantitative side of interventions for substance abuse, but I’m really interested in working on the qualitative side and how that impacts the person,” she said. “I think it’s really important to understand both quantitative and qualitative research to help with interventions.”
Johnson started her college career in chemistry but after taking an anthropology class was intrigued by the impacts society and culture can have not just on the person but also on how they respond to interventions.
“I was just so struck in that anthropology class about human interactions and the impacts they can have,” she said. “I think sometimes the qualitative part of research can be overlooked and ideally, I’d like to be able to combine both quantitative and qualitative data into better interventions.”
During her time at Frontiers, Johnson has worked with Padek Kalman on coding of various projects and articles and at an upcoming Frontiers meeting, will review her time with Frontiers.
“I am collaborating on a publication content coding project to target which areas of research Frontiers has had the most impact,” Johnson said. “I am also working on analyzing data from the 2024 Annual Member Survey and creating visualizations.”
Johnson is currently looking into opportunities for post-graduation.