Spotlight on Methodology Alumni: Tze Ming Mok

Every month, the Department of Methodology shares stories from its alumni to inspire and demonstrate the real-world impact of a Methodology education.

Tze Ming Mok is the Research, Evaluation and Data lead at The Social Innovation Unit (TSI), Economic Development Office of Auckland Council. She is also a self-proclaimed “New Zealand Chinese essayist, commentator and researcher on race, human rights and the Asian diasporas”. She graduated from our MSc Social Research Methods (SRM) in 2014.

We asked her to tell us about her time at LSE, and why she chose LSE Methodology.

Tze Ming said:

“In 2013, I was making a mid-career pivot out of NGO comms because I couldn’t face writing the same press release about war crimes in Gaza every year forever. A former press office colleague also making the move back to the frontline development world had started the MSc Social Research Methods and snuck me into a Jouni Kouha lecture. Although I hadn’t done stats in 18 years, in a matter of minutes I came to understand box-plots and stem-and-leaf charts and felt like I was ascending to a higher plane of consciousness.

My instincts and background as a political writer dovetailed neatly with the LSE motto. There’s an intense drive for journalists to find out what is going on here. To know the causes of things, at the end of time.

"The following year I enrolled as a mature student in the MSc Social Research Methods, in the Social Policy stream, alongside a cohort of nerds with the same Chinese zodiac sign as me but 12 years younger. Together we dubbed the departmental computer room ‘The Methlab’, made dorky Breaking Bad posters for our mixers, and came up with cringe yet deeply truthful methodological rapper nicknames for each other, like ‘The Mixed Methodsmaster’ (I think this was me?), ‘Dummy’, ‘R’, ‘Baseline’ and ‘Professor e^x’. I quickly developed a reputation as an absolute pig for methods. ‘Tze Ming, maybe you should use fewer methods?’ ‘NO, MOAR METHODS. MOAR.’ Every new method was a tool to figure out what is going on here. It was heaven.

“The vibe of the MSc SRM circa 2013/14 was like joining a revolutionary nerd army assembling to storm the citadel of causality. There was a pure delight in the mission of an interdisciplinary department that was bringing quantitative and qualitative methods together, demystifying and resolving tired epistemology wars for the Public Good. It was a culture of sheer good-natured collegiality and disciplinary respect in the faculty across specialisms. This level of mutual understanding over the foundation of knowledge and methods in applied interdisciplinary social science can actually be difficult to find or replicate in the professional or consultancy world, where there is a lot of cultural capital generated by talking up interdisciplinary research teams, but often a shallow skill base in deeply integrating quant and qual – let alone the ability for funders to gauge the quality of how well this is done. If you can do both, you’ll get to be called a ‘unicorn’ which is kind of tragic for social research if you think about it. The MethLab made me one of these ‘unicorns’.

“After completing the MSc SRM, I worked for NatCen Social Research (the home of the British Social Attitudes Survey) for a year, mainly working on evaluations of government social programmes. I then returned to LSE to do a PhD in the Social Policy Department, during which I taught lab classes for the MethDept’s Intro Quant course that had hooked me in the first place.

“Having done the MSc SRM had a clear advantage in PhD applications and first year MPhil territory, as we had essentially trained for a year in writing tight, achievable research proposals. I ended up with the Social Policy departmental award for my doctoral thesis, either despite or because of my tendency to use MOAR METHODS (including not only endless regression outputs but also nested qualitative sampling from large-scale survey data, comparative case method, and just a little Bayesian process tracing).

“For family reasons, for my final PhD year I had to move back to New Zealand after a decade in London. I joined the academic centre of excellence for complexity studies Te Pūnaha Matatini and behavioural psych-based political communication thinktank The Workshop. On completion of my PhD, I took on my current role heading data, insights, research & evaluation in a Māori and Pasifika-led local government economic development team.

“In my own time still write, advocate and occasionally guest-lecture on Asian diaspora, race, immigration, human rights and even methodological issues. I am active in, and am a former council member for, the Population Association of New Zealand. New Zealand is small, and even if you are not a jobbing academic in the shrinking university sector, you seem to be required to do time as a public intellectual because otherwise there’s not enough of them.

“One of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most globally cited academic works is Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonising Methodology, which should act as the Māhutonga (Southern Cross) or navigational constant for the New Zealand researcher. My methodology degree lets me support the movement for tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake (economic, social and political self-determination and sovereignty of the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand), in a new way in my life. Previously with agitprop manifestos, now with substantive skills to integrate insights and methods from mātauranga Māori (traditional precolonial Māori knowledge, including social and physical sciences) and contemporary kaupapa Māori research, into the conversation of ‘what is robust’, ‘what is valid’, and ‘what is possible’ in creating decolonial community prosperity.

When asked if she has a favourite memory from LSE, Tze Ming replied:

“Although this was from my PhD years, it is methodology-related: Attending a masterclass on Intersectionality with the Kimberlé Crenshaw, I suppressed my fangirling and explained how I was using interaction effects in a regression model to quantify intersectionality. And she had never heard of such a thing being done before but confirmed that it was exactly what she meant. I felt both spiritually and methodologically validated.

My advice for current students is to audit everything you can fit into your schedule, even partway. Even if you don’t fully master a method, it’s so valuable to at least know something about the things you don’t know a lot about, and to be able to sense beyond the threshold, the shape of the things that you don’t know.

"That thirst, that greed for MOAR methods, more knowledge, is the driver behind every new thing you get motivated to learn. As addictions go, it is very wholesome.”

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