Matthew Minsk (YC '26) reflects on his summer internship at the Institute for Family Studies.

What were the main tasks you undertook during your internship or fellowship? 

I was a research intern at the Institute for Family Studies. My main task was data—I ran cross tabs on a recent survey conducted about motherhood to break down responses about loneliness, concerns about raising children, and other similar questions based on marital, employment, education, and class status. As part of that study, I also created a word cloud from the responses to "one word about motherhood" and summarized a video recording of a focus group. Besides for my work on the motherhood survey, I conducted literature reviews on the success sequence and the effect of the quality of parent-child relationships on future "flourishing" (particularly future marital status), as well as re-creating charts in the IFS style for imminent blog posts and copy-editing blog posts. Although my internship is formally complete, I still hope to write a post for the Family Studies website.

What were your research areas or key work objectives? 

For much of the summer, my primary research area was the motherhood survey (which hasn't been published yet). I also did research on the "success sequence" and on the literature surrounding "human flourishing" (relating to the Global Flourishing Study). I also did some intern-related tasks like compiling all of my boss's published work.

Which skills did you improve or develop during this experience? 

The primary skill that I really developed this summer was my R skills. In particular, I learned how to use the "tidyverse" package for data analysis and how to use "ggplot" to create charts and word clouds.

Describe one or two significant discoveries or accomplishments. Were there tasks that surprised or particularly challenged you? 

There was a lot of trial and error to make the charts look aesthetically pleasing, especially those that were actually getting published (such as the word cloud and for some individual blog posts) rather than simply being an easy medium to visualize the cross tabs. In particular, the word cloud felt like an accomplishment: I had to correct typos, create a system to turn multi-word responses into key words and then re-weigh for multiple key words, use lemmatizing to combine words with the same "stem" and then reformat the suffixes. Without speaking to any specific results of the motherhood survey, which isn't published yet, I think that the report which I contributed to will have important discoveries that will help shape our understanding about modern motherhood, especially as it relates to working mothers and what does or does not stress them out.

How did your experience as a Straus Scholar influence or impact your research or work? I

I am very grateful to the Straus Center and the Impact Office for its support this summer, especially in enabling a demanding hybrid schedule (driving down to Charlottesville for two days a week—2.5 hours from DC—and staying one night a week in Richmond) which allowed me to work at IFS. I also gained a lot learning about what public-facing quantitative social science research looks in practice as well as the behind-the-scenes work that think tanks do to get their research into their public conversation.

Why do you believe this work is important, and why should other Straus Scholars consider pursuing similar research or internships? 

IFS does incredibly important work, doing serious social science on one of the biggest challenges facing the United States and the entire Western world: the decline in family formation, marriage, and children. Their research is cited and trusted by media and policymakers to drive the conversation on family policy and related issues (as well as tech policy that is amenable towards family values), and it comes from a general belief in the importance of the traditional family structure. Coming from the frum community that thankfully has mostly avoided these pitfalls, I believe that we have a responsibility and a strong perspective to preach these values and, to the extent that we can, prove their utility and discover why these trends have been occurring.