Medical Sociology on Wheels was created by Heather Sue M. Rosen in 2020 as a space for featuring artwork, essays and commentary on experiences with disability and chronic illness, COVID-19 safety resources and campaigns, sociological research, and open access educational resources on sociology, data science, and quantitative research methods for students, educators, and the public.
About the founder of
Medical Sociology on Wheels,
Heather Sue M. Rosen
Medical Sociologist
Health beliefs about risk, behavior, and mitigation
Clinical and online interactions between healthcare professionals and disability/chronic illness communities
Experiential medical expertise within the disabled and chronically ill community
Medical social control, “deviant” behavior, and “compliance”
Drug and alcohol use when disabled and chronically ill
Quantitative Methodologist
Social media data collection methods
Network Analysis
Multilevel Modeling
Topic Modeling
Time Series
Software and Developer Tools
R, RStudio, Quarto publishing, Tidy methods
Stata
SPSS
CSS, html, javascript
Data Crawling/Scraping and API Access
Disability Rights Activist and Advocate – Chronically ill, Disabled, and AuDHD
Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
ADA Accommodations – High School Students, University Students (Undergraduate, MA, PhD social science/humanities), University Staff, University Faculty
#IMaskBecause Campaign to Reduce COVID-19 Transmission
Navigating Adult and Pediatric (Teen) Healthcare with Complex Chronic Illness
Artist
Digital Art
Oil/Oil Pastel on Canvas
Sketching, pencil
Educator
Writing Intensive Pedagogy
Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
Hybrid and Flex Course Structure
Accommodations – Going above, beyond, and around the ADA requirements
Accommodations – Accommodating students without ADA paperwork on file (disability and/or other life circumstances)
Medical Sociology for Health Practitioners
Medical Sociology for Medical School Faculty
Critical Realist and Crip-Crit Frameworks for Medical Sociology and the Sociology of Alcohol and Drug Use
Medical Sociology Theories of Health Beliefs, Behavior, and Risk
Non-credentialed expert research and writing related to medical sociology, disability, and chronic illness
Navigating Academic Ableism in the Social Sciences
DuBoisian Sociology
I am a medical sociologist and quantitative methodologist specializing in the use of digital methods to study health beliefs about risk, behavior, and disability. My new approach to structural topic modeling, the seeded structural topic model, allows for models using seed-word embeddings as prevalence and content covariates. In addition to running Medical Sociology on Wheels, I serve as a consultant on social science and social media research for the science content and data science teams at the World Health Network.
I earned my BA in sociology at Auburn University in 2015, with minors in History and French Language. I received my MA in Sociology at the University of Georgia in 2018. I completed my PhD in sociology at the University of Georgia in 2023.
My dissertation, titled, “What do the People Say? Tweeting as a tool for establishing the social facts of risk during COVID-19,” is part of a larger ongoing research project aimed at establishing a comprehensive overview of the “social facts” of COVID-19 risk and mitigation that accounts for change over time. I began my transition away from higher education during my final semester of graduate school to allow myself the flexibility to continue my research on COVID-19 risk/mitigation as an independent scientist while devoting more time to my activist work advocating for abolition and disability rights in the United States.
My prior research has assessed the robustness of the DSM diagnostic protocol for Major Depressive Episode (MDE) for people diagnosed with arthritis, and separately, the applicability to the Labeling Theory of Social Interaction and Identity to explain differences in how existing literature discusses opioid use by disabled versus non-disabled patients.
Active Projects:
Research-based Publications
– “What do the People Say? Tweeting as a tool for establishing the social facts of risk during COVID-19”
-“The Seeded Structural Topic Model”
-“Emotion and Covid-19 Risk Mitigation”
-“Combatting popular misconceptions about covid-19 risk and prevention”
Covid-19 Prevention/Eradication Efforts
– WHN Mask Selfie Project
– #IMaskBecause Series
(She/Her)
Masked
What kind of resources and content can you find through Medical Sociology on Wheels?
Sociology
@medsocionwheels What does #Sociology say about #SocialDistance and #strangers? Believe it or not, “social distance” was not always used to describe physical distancing during the #covid19 #pandemic. The other kind of social distance is also pretty useful for understanding some of the behavior of scientists/MDs towards each other right now. Interested to learn about it? Full #lecture on Sociological #theory up on the website and on facebook! #LinkInBio #FreeEducation #OpenAccess #OldWhiteDudes #GrandTheory #StillRelevant #Philosophy #ChicagoSchool #Mead #Self #Academia ♬ Still Don't Know My Name – Labrinth
Research Methods
COVID-19
@medsocionwheels Me yesterday at #graduation reminding everyone that #CovidIsNotOver and that #CovidDoesntCare whether you declare the emergency is over. And reminding #CriticalSociology what it looks like to live by the ideals you teach/research. #IMaskBecause #SocialJustice includes #DisabilityJustice, and during an #airborne #pandemic there is no #justice in absence of #Covid mitigations. Shoutout to the #MSW graduate who was the ONLY other graduate openly acknowledging Covid yesterday (*clears throat* LOOKING AT YOU #MPH AND #PHD #PUBLICHEALTH GRADS 😟) and shoutout to my committee member Dawn for being the sole #faculty member to openly acknowledge Covid. It’s hard to do the right thing when few other are, when it makes you a target for harassment, when it makes you unpopular. That doesn’t mean we should give up. Some footage from my #CovidSafe graduation celebrations to give an example of what “not giving up” looks like. Thank you to everyone actually #LivingWithCovid by acknowledging risk. Our numbers were small but mighty and I am SO proud to be in this fight with y’all every single day. It’s hard. It’s exhausting. It’s emotionally draining. And it’s the RIGHT thing. #CovidIsAirborne #NEISvoid #Sociology #MedicalSociology #RingTheBell #UGA23 #NeverBarkAlone #HigherEd #HigherEducationTikTok #PhDone #GradSchool #GeorgiaAlum #DoubleDawg #MASociology #PhDSociology #GeorgiaStrong #MaskUp #GoDawgs but also #WarEagleForever #AuburnAlum #HouseDivided #SEC #Sociologist #BASociology #onedegreehotter🤟🏻🔥👩🏻🎓 #DisabledSociologist #DisabledInHigherEd #AbleismInAcademia #DisabilityTikTok #Cane #WalkAndRoll #DisabledAndCute #DisabledFashion #DisabledAndEducated #AccessIsLove ♬ How To Start A Revolution – Some Velvet Morning
@medsocionwheels I’ve been #tracking a #spike in #Google search trends for #microclots for the last week of April. Looking from 2015-2023, the bulk of the search traffic is clustered in the “#covid-era” 🤔 #cooncidence? Doubtful. View the #analysis including additional plots showing over time by country, and my discussion of the #results, on medsocionwheels.com! #TeamClots #Covid19 #pandemic #LongCovid #PostCovidSyndrome #PostCovidSequelae #thrombosis #PostViralIlness #Rcode #Rstats #ggplot2 #CodingExample #Research #SocialScience #Sociology #TimeSeries #DataAnalysis #DataScience ♬ See You Again (Piano Arrangement) – Alexandre Pachabezian
Disability and Chronic Illness
@medsocionwheels We bought a Force of Nature machine to make HOCl at home for cleaning. The bottle isnt great for paper and cardboard packaging because the spray droplets are big. I got a misting bottle for paper and cardboard packaging. It was a great decision! Bonus? The mist bottle is way easier on my finger joints, so they don’t sublux when I’m trying to spray things down. #SpringCleaning #HOCl #NonToxicCleaning #ForceOfNatureClean #CleaningHacksThatWork #Disability #DisabilityTikTok #EhlersDanlos #sublux #DisabilityHacks ♬ original sound – Dr. Heather Sue M. Rosen
@medsocionwheels Voted in-person for the #GARunoff2022 and documented my experience as a disabled voter who usually votes absentee but didn’t have enough time to re-apply (🙄) for the runoff. TLDR: no line and took maybe 5 mins total inside, but wouldn’t have been able to enter the building if I were using my wheelchair today because the access was p much nonexistent. #CripTheVote #GeorgiaVotes #FultonCountyVoters ♬ original sound – Dr. Heather Sue M. Rosen
Artwork
@medsocionwheels Marsh on a cloudy spring day #timelapse #painting #DigitalArt #art #landscape #bananapancakes #ArtistsOnTiktok ♬ Banana Pancakes – Jack Johnson
@medsocionwheels #question from @medsocionwheels inspired by my backyard, and my trees that are hanging in there but hurting from this cold snap. Whats your favorite #Spring bloom? #Flowers #DigitalArt #Painting #Landscape #NotthGeorgia #Magnolia #Dogwood ♬ Flowers – Miley Cyrus
Social Media Profiles Using the @MedSociOnWheels Handle
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Explore Posts
The Last Walk
Mask Week of Action 2023
Exploratory Analysis of Google Search Trends for ‘microclots’ from 2015-2023: Part 1
Build and Interpret a Basic Structural Topic Model in R
Household Chores with Ehlers-Danlos and MCAS Means Getting Creative
Combining Dataframes and Manipulating Variables with dplyr in R
Hidden Lake at Dusk
Is your Accommodation Policy Sending the Right Message to Disabled Students?
What Behaviors do you Consider Deviant?
A Brief Introduction to the Sociological Study of Deviance and Social Control
Different Aids for Different Days: What I mean when I say I “walk and roll”
Two Approaches to COVID Safety, Depicted Two Ways
Sociological Grand Theories of Culture, Society, and Self
Neighboring Backyards, Spring
Analyzing Tweets: A Tidy Approach to Basic Analyses in R with Quanteda and ggplot2
Downloading and Preparing Tweets for Analysis with the twitteR package in R
Marsh on a Cloudy Spring Day
COVID-19 Google Topic Trends, with Widgets
Lakeside Docks
The Breaking Period: Follow-Up
Exploring Google Search Trends Over Time and by Country Using the GtrendsR Package [R, via RStudio]
The Breaking Period: View from My Wheelchair
Landscape Series – View from My Drive Home, Autumn
#IMaskBecause Networking Matters, but Not More than Safety.
Mountain Landscape at Sunset – Digital Oil on Canvas
#IMaskBecause COVID is Not Over
Final Exam Week Coffee Break
”Are You Sure You Shouldn’t Extend Another Semester?”
Sunday Sunset
Navigating higher education as someone at high risk for COVID-19 hospitalization/death #WeAreHopkinsToo
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Latent Dirichlet Analysis (LDA) of Tweets (Example)
“Tweeting Theory”
Medical Sociology on Wheels has Exciting News!
Introducing Dr. Rosen 🥳
Yesterday I successfully defended my #dissertation examining the “social facts” of COVID-19. Here’s me headed to the defense rocking my CAN99 and walker 😷🚶🏼♀️ #IMaskBecause as a scientist who studies #Covid, I signed up to defend my diss, but I didn’t agree to die for it. #PhDone pic.twitter.com/OZGL469jnG
— Heather Sue M. Rosen (@MedSociOnWheels) March 24, 2023
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