Master Thesis
📌 Key facts
Contents
💡 Background
In his 2010 book "Who's your city", Richard Florida, one of the world's leading urbanists, proposed the hypothesis that cities and regions adopt collective personalities. He tests this hypothesis by analyzing 350,000 individual personality profiles across the United States together with his team. More specifically, they investigated whether the "Big Five" fundamental personality dimensions accumulate in certain regions of the United States. In this respect, they revealed, for example, that open-minded people are most likely to live in large urban areas. They tend to cluster in certain regions that offer new and exciting experiences. Conversely, conscientious and agreeable types, who are less adventurous and more attached to traditional relationships, are more likely to spread out near their established locations. These are just two of the exciting insights that Florida et al. have gained from studying geographic personality patterns.
The present thesis will replicate and eventually extend Florida et al.'s findings by studying personality profiles across Germany.
🦾Who We Are
The Chair for Strategy and Organization is focused on doing research with impact. This means we do not want to repeat old ideas and base our research solely on the research people did 10 years ago. Instead, we currently research topics that will shape the future. Topics such as Agile Organizations and Digital Disruption, Blockchain Technology, Creativity and Innovation, Digital Transformation and Business Model Innovation, Diversity, Education: Education Technology and Performance Management, HRTech, Leadership and Teams. We are always early in noticing trends, technologies, strategies and organizations that shape the future, which has its ups and downs.
🎯 Goals
- Systematically searching and contacting psychology researchers across Germany to acquire personality profile data in Germany.
- Pre-processing, analyzing, and visualizing the data with the aim to identify geographical patterns.
🎓 Profile
- Reliable, self-driven, organized
- Interested in economic dynamics / urbanism / data science
- Coding savvy (the second part of the thesis involves working with the data in R or Python)
📚 Further Reading
Florida, R. (2010). Who's your city?: How the creative economy is making where to live the most important decision of your life. Vintage Canada.
Rentfrow, P. J., Gosling, S. D., Jokela, M., Stillwell, D. J., Kosinski, M., & Potter, J. (2013). Divided we stand: Three psychological regions of the United States and their political, economic, social, and health correlates. Journal of personality and social psychology, 105(6), 996.
Rentfrow, P. J., Mellander, C., & Florida, R. (2009). Happy states of America: A state-level analysis of psychological, economic, and social well-being. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(6), 1073-1082.
📄 Requirements to any Work
We do not want your research to gather dust in some corner of a bookshelf but make it accessible to the world. Thus, we warmly encourage you to create some or all of the following:
- Infographic - visually represent some of your work (find examples here)
- Slide Deck - summarize your research and possibly present it
- Extract most important sequences from podcasts, videos, and other media
- 3-4 Tweets about the most important findings and summarizing the topic
- optional: Medium Article - let people outside university know about your research and start your personal brand
📬 How to Apply
If you are interested, please send your application with a short motivational statement, your current grade sheet, CV, and possible starting date to Isabell Welpe.
We're greatly looking forward to hearing more about you!