Michael Rickles, the VP of Research at Sharecare, is a sociologist and epidemiologist working to bring data-informed solutions to community and population health issues, with a specific focus on improving health equity and resiliency.
Here are some links Dr. Rickles shared for further research:
CWBI link to primary project: https://wellbeingindex.sharecare.com/
Contact: michael.rickles@sharecare.com
Dr. Rickles is happy to work with students in his available capacity. For those in/around Atlanta, there may be internship opportunities for upper-level undergrads and grad students.
Daniela: Welcome to Why Sociology?
Angela: a podcast series featuring many interviews with sociology majors who have taken career pathways beyond academia in applied and clinical careers. And to show not only tell
Daniela: why and how sociology matters in today's world
Angela: we are Angela Adkins from Stark State College and
Daniela: I'm Daniela Jauk from the University of Akron,
Angela: both located in rubber city, Akron, Ohio,
Daniela: but we feature sociological movers change makers and shakers from all over the US in the globe. Daniela: Welcome Dr. Michael Rickles, our esteemed and beloved friend. I want to say we were a graduate student colleagues at the University of Akron. But Michael, you have come many places. In the meantime, Michael, what are you doing?
Michael: So that is a very hard question to answer. Today my official title is the vice president of research. But I don't know if I can adequately summarize what that means. But I'll give it a shot. Most of what I do revolves around an instrument that we have at my company Sharecare, called the community wellbeing index. What that is, is essentially every year we go out and collect information from individuals on their subjective well being their biometric health, and some psychometric indicators as well, like perceptions of safety and connectedness to their community. And we pair that with data that we collect on communities, essentially, the social determinants of health variables that we that we gather. And from that kind of primary practice that I lead the scientific aspect of, we do reporting, we do engagement, not just just lots of different things, and lots of research as well. So I can give specific examples of any of that, if that would be helpful. But kind of kind of broad strokes, most of my most of my work is related to the data that we collect through the instrument. Yeah, I guess to go a little bit more into what that is. Last year, we collected about 450,000 responses to that survey instrument, we generally collect an aggregate over 600 data elements to create a series of indices. We do a lot of principal components analysis and stuff to actually derive what's important for communities from those variables. My job is essentially to ensure that we're collecting a sample that's representative around the country. So again, as you're thinking, how do you collect a nationwide sample of well being to ensure that we're adequately accounting for racial groups and age bands and different segments and different states. I developed the sampling strategy for that and go after the sample itself. And then I work with academic partners to ensure that the V SDH data that we collect are scalable, completely representative of the country. And then I work with to do the transformations on the data to ensure that we're creating indices that are scientific.
Angela: Wow, that is fantastic. You you wear so many hats, as you mentioned to us before. But what's really interesting and I think what we're really want to know is, how does sociology specifically how does it inform what you do? And and perhaps what did you learn as a sociology major that was most useful to what you do now.
Michael: So in my career arc to now, sociology is always actively present in what I'm doing. So I mentioned again, that we're collecting information on individuals, their perceptions, the places that they live, if you kind of go back to, I guess, the core tenants of theory, like understanding of person's space, place time, and the people that live there, understanding how differing socio demographic factors can lead to vulnerability or resilience inside of populations and how you account for that and deliver resources to those populations. I guess what I do is essentially like intersectional sociology, because we try to understand how the compounding effects of, again, like race, and gender, and access, all of those things kind of play out for people and not only their health outcomes, but the access to services that they receive their perceptions of their environments, and how safe they are. So, sociology is kind of a core focus of, what we're doing. And it's, again, it's like everything that I've been doing for the past, the past 10 years or so, what has really helped the most, I guess, in terms of police or finding a job is probably the methods, understanding how to define, deploy a survey, or a research study or a formal, you know, inquiry into something has been incredibly helpful. Once you get outside of academics, you generally find that most people will say, we can plug our data into a machine learning algorithm, but they don't understand the assumptions of normality that go with a regression analysis, or how to really kind of account for you know, non normal distributions in their data. So, understanding how to, I guess, apply methods to, to real world problems is, is very helpful. But more recently, and what's probably more, more salient to what I do on a day to day basis is just understanding, like inequality. There's been so much in the past, like 10 years, or I guess, probably the past 10 years really, where people just don't take into account how to, advocate for different groups that are disadvantaged as socially, economically, culturally, or things like that. And then if you can bring that to bear in your analyses to really highlight the differences and showcase how you can provide support and interaction to those populations. It's, it's just like staggering, how much that's lacking. So if you can bring that to the public space, or to the business space, it's, it's a very valuable skill.
Daniela: It's amazing. Thank you for showing how relevant sociology is really everything you are doing in method in content. But you did not know that not 15 years ago, why? Why did you pick sociology as a major? and Why should one pick sociology as a major in this day and age?
Michael: Right? So I've always had a fundamental preoccupation with understanding why people do what they do. Before I was exposed to Sociology, I was in a business school trying to figure out marketing and Calvin, we effectively message people to do a thing. But then when I got to college and took sociology courses, and realized, that's probably the wrong standard, it's not why you should make somebody do something. But it's understanding the fundamental motivations or the cultural implications that try the action, understanding that to lead people to healthier choices, or to better choices, or even just to give them the tools to do you know, whatever they need to do on their own, because you don't have to always have a guide for books. That's kind of been the reason why it just kind of appealed to my just kind of fundamental curiosity about the world and, I get the question Why do people do what they do? When we were teaching you act? And that was the question they tried to answer or show students how to answer and the intro to social courses that that I taught, it was we're going to spend 15 weeks trying to get you a baseline understanding of why this question is important. So that that's kind of kind of my answer.
Angela: That's wonderful. That is, that's the epitome of sociology right there, right? Is, is understanding, why these questions are important. So it's exciting that you get to apply that in that way. Um, can you give us a few more nuts and bolts about your specific field just for an audience who might be interested? what kind of professional networks do you hook up with? How did you find this career? how did you get into it, especially since a great deal of academia, you know, trains you to go into academia? And so what might someone expect going into this field are trying to go into this field? Sure.
Michael: So my field broadly is health. And I guess I can walk through my path to my current position, because it was kind of a kind of a long one. But out of grad school, that's really my orientation. sociology has always been public sociology, I wanted to engage with populations and communities and be kind of out amongst individuals to do something. So in grad school, I took on research analysts jobs and positions and nonprofits, I doing research, we were part of a CDC grant, that was a community transformation grant. Essentially, we were looking at how we could improve the health of populations around cardiovascular disease and diabetes by fundamentally changing the infrastructure of Summit County. So how do you improve or install bike lanes? How do you transform public housing into non smoking stuff? Like what are the policy interventions that you can use to drive people or drive people in charge towards actions that make the default choices, healthy choices? So that really appealed to me it's kind of a, an engaged public sociology. As an angle. From there, I really started to get into, the field of epidemiology, specifically, how do you really map disease prevalence inside of populations? Again, because when I was looking at, the disease burden inside of Summit County, I noticed Oh, well, there's an incredibly high, almost quadruple the rate of the normal populations of diabetes and elderly, black Americans. So how do you reduce disparities inside of those groups? So from from Ohio, I actually started working with a program in Nashville, doing HIV prevention among a whole slew of individuals there. So again, really being community focused going out showing people that there were resources to connect them to housing and to food, and to curative therapy, or at least viral suppression therapy. It's not curative. I'm sorry, I misspoke there. But again, just trying to do outreach to individuals. I was actually working with a hospital there. in Nashville when we started to notice the uptake of the hepatitis C epidemic that hit Well, I guess it was the opioid epidemic masking, or it was a hepatitis epidemic that was driven by opioid use, like in 2014. So we started to kind of identify side of the HIV population that, you know, I'm sorry, I'm going on with the thing. But essentially, it's epidemiology, and health and sociology kind of all combined into one to really understand why, you know, different disease, prevalence rates are more, certain populations are more susceptible or vulnerable to them. My professional networks are public health associations. We do a lot of work with business groups, governments. I'm actually working with the United Nations right now on their sustainable cities. initiative. So if you kind of think about how you can make cities more healthy and more readily available or engaged. I mean, there's there's tons of networks, like we work with the World Economic Forum. We work with pretty much every level of city and state government that you can think of, again, to try to drive policy change and to use data for for very actionable results. And, I mean, if people really want to get into this field, it's pretty See, all you have to do is have a focus on health and know how to do data. Data Analysis. I mean, that's how I got started. I wasn't an epidemiologist at the start, I didn't really know anything about disease prevalence rates or things like that. But I knew how to model data, and I knew how to do analysis. And again, that's something that is a valuable social skill that doesn't necessarily translate over into the medical world. they still don't really understand that, you know, health exists outside of hospitals, I mean, it's becoming a thing that's more, readily apparent as bleach and other you know, health related topics are you know, becoming becoming more common, since, 2015, I think that's been a really big uptake. But yeah, just having a sociological lens, and an ability to do analyses or focus groups or, or anything like that. I mean, that's really how you break and break into this.
Daniela: Sounds great. I'm gonna go more down to earth. So what if there is really a student interested which platforms to check? Or how to actually find that job? And what do you think might be a beginning salary range that is reasonable in that field.
Michael: So if you're looking to get into public health, the way that I found most of my jobs was actually through networking and just talking to people, but the initial move from Ohio to Nashville was driven by I looked at the, through the Emory School of Public Health, it's the Rollins School of Public Health, they have the job exchange where pretty much lots of employers around the country departments and government agencies will post jobs to the site. So I would say start there, if you're interested in health, the salary range really depends on your degree and your location. So if you're looking for an undergraduate degree, I would say starting out, he'll probably make in the 40 to 50 range. If you have the PhD. That's probably in the 80s. If you're going into public health, if you're going into private service, it can be exponentially more than that. So it's, it's really dependent on your level of degree.
Daniela: I'm making faces here on this. Because I'm immediately thinking in academia, I'm in the wrong field here
Michael: That was the fundamental thing that I was toying with it's or that I kind of, had to think about, it's well, I went into public health to do public good. I wasn't necessarily driven by salary, like I wanted to engage and, you know, promote, health equity and do things. But I found that if you have the skill set to actually solve the problems, you, you can make quite a bit of money as the two are necessarily mutually exclusive.
Daniela: This is wonderful, and so sociological of you to say. Wonderful. One thing, one last thing. Big Question. What would what is the one thing the one advice you would give students, Our primary audience, our students, what is one thing you wish you had known? Somebody told you in undergrad sociology.
Michael: So the thing that I wish I would have done as an undergrad is just to continually read everything, the more articles that you can consume, and the more tools you have in your toolkit. I know that's always the thing that we try to teach methodology students, it actually does pan out I was working with a group today. Actually, it was yesterday. And they were asking about, why their deviance. residuals were weird in their, their regression analysis. And they were running old linear regressions that have a Poisson regression. So I was Well, did you understand the distribution of your outcome variable, and what that means, and they had no idea what I was talking about. So if you can read theory, if you can read methods, if you can read or just do any kind of volunteer work, just build your skill set. That's the most important thing that you can do if you want to go outside of, I mean, inside of academia to you, but definitely outside of it, because you'll encounter so many different kinds of things that it's good to be equipped for, for whatever you might come across. So, it's, it's been fun, meeting sociologists who are hosting out in the world. Like when I was at the for Sorry, I went from hepatitis surveillance to opioid surveillance in Tennessee, and one of the other people who are leading the operations, operations stuff was like a sociologist as well. So, really I, we, should do this stuff. And we were actually able to really, actually state level legislature to go down in action for syringe exchange programs, because we were able to showcase data analysis and was hey, Don't criminalize this stuff actually, help people and put dollars to it anyway, I'm sure you probably, probably, again, like we've done, I guess, I've been involved in community level change of policy adoption, state level change, I'm now trying to go global with that, and then some other stuff. But there really is an opportunity for, for people out there. If you have a passion in a certain area, you can go really make some headway by showing data driven solutions, even like theoretical driven solutions towards, you know, why something might matter. there's just not a lot of thought around it, people do something and have an answer. And if you can give them more than a pretty good reason why it'll work. And the worst they can say is no, really
Daniela: Really cool. And well, what I also love and I don't think I understood that before interview, how intentional you were about this? Because most people say if you ask them, How did you get the job? I, you know, basically, it coincidences, and you were very intentional, intentional about what? Where you want to be. And that's really awesome to hear.
Michael: Well, yeah, I mean, when I went to, to Nashville, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Ryan White program, but it's essentially wraparound services for individuals who don't have resources and also are living with HIV. So it was a really cool probe, because there's so much advocacy in that community and just getting people to overcome, the stigma of an HIV infection. It's a Nashville, a predominantly black population. There's a lot of, again, there's like so many, compounding statements, and getting into that community, working from, a health department is, you know, White says, guy, I'm just, hey, I'm here to help you. And there's like no trust, at first, but I started going to the churches and the community groups and you know, I was in the community and they're Oh, you're actually here to help us. And, then being able to do interviews and drive policy and actually applying to college, to the things that mattered to people as opposed to just doing well, here's my best guess is what's gonna matter. That was, that was a really cool experience to do. And then again, working with the doctors who wanted to work with me, because I had community trust, and they wanted to do interventions, like setting up working groups and things that it's, if you understand, again, that kind of sociological piece of stuff,you can, you can open some doors and whatever level of stuff you want to work with. Yeah, it's been really fun. And yeah, looking where I am, now, it's gone from I can help the city of Nashville or the state of Tennessee to well, we work in 50 cities around the country, and we're starting to work internationally. So I'm just trying to be, mindful of scale and location and other things. And I work with a network of 140 universities now. So I'm all in research
Angela: Oh my god, that's wonderful. Exciting.
Michael: Yeah. So it's, it's great. I can rely on local expertise while providing data. And, I write letters of support for grant studies and stuff all the time. So I help I help people do research that matters. So that's the nice thing for me.
Angela: Dr. Rickles, thank you so much. It is very exciting to to hear this about. I mean, I think we all went to grad school together and so we all know where we stand in terms of, you know, wanting to affect positive change on the the world you know, you go in with this, wanting to do that. And so having a model for how to do that, especially outside of academia is, is super exciting. And it's I think it's heartwarming that you use sociology threaded throughout everything that you do. And I think it speaks really loudly to how useful it is for anyone anywhere. And thank you so much. I really appreciate this. And and I know our students will as well.
Daniela: Thank you, Dr. Rickles.
Michael: Thank you both for reaching out to me.
Daniela: Thank you for tuning in to why sociology, the first episode. Stay tuned for more interviews with applied and clinical sociology. Special credits go to Gary David, professor of sociology at Bentley University for his support and mentoring. And see you next time!