Stephen Ostertag, Ph.D.
Putting Sociology to Use
Services
Research and Consulting on Client Engagement, Customer Opinion, and Usability/Human Factors
Specializing in Start Ups and Small Businesses
Options Include: Formative, Summative, Heuristic, and Walk-Through Methodologies
Consultant on Disaster Preparedness and Recovery
Be Prepared for what Follows the Next Disaster
Anticipate and Account for Problems that Arise Weeks and Months After
Expert on Culture and Human Behavior
Understand the Conditions, Causes, and Consequences of Human Behavior
Remote or In-Person Options
Stephen Ostertag, Ph.D.
Stephen Ostertag, Ph.D., is a professional sociologist with over 20 years of experience conducting research on trends and patters in human behavior. His research spans a variety of areas, including trust and healthcare behavior, the relationship between news and public opinion, the emergence and impact of cultures, and how people restore their lives after natural disasters.
Dr. Ostertag currently serves as an associate professor of sociology at Tulane University, a Faculty Fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology, and the Executive Director of the user research firm TIMBS Consulting. He previously worked as a Senior Lead in User Research at Ipsos, managing research teams for companies like Google and Meta. He’s served as expert reviewer with the National Science Foundation and Fulbright U.S. Student Program. He is an editorial board member for Cultural Sociology and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, and is the author of Connecting After Chaos: Social Media and the Extended Aftermath of Disaster (NYU Press), which explores how culture motivates and directs behavior following a disaster (see here for review).
Dr. Ostertag uses a variety of qualitative methodologies to precisely measure and assess the key mechanisms that cause, condition, and make possible human behavior across a variety of social conditions and situations. He draws from frameworks rooted in social psychology, cognition and the neurosciences, and cultural sociology to uncover the mental and emotional processes that underlie and structure human behavior. He is the creator of the MORR approach to human behavior, which directs attention on the Motives, Opportunities, Resources, Rationalizations to thoroughly explain collective action.
Customer and Client Engagement Research and Consulting
Do you want to know what your customers or clients think about your services and products? Do you want to design and create better experiences for your customers and clients so they return? Concerned all your hard work and investment will be for nothing because of poor user design or inaccurate assumptions about your intended customer base? Let me help you reduce this uncertainty with quality research and actionable findings.
SPECIALIZING IN STARTUP COMPANIES and SMALL BUSINESSES
I work with all types of organizations, but am especially suited for startup companies and small businesses. I provide low cost, flexible research and consulting services that can accommodate everyone’s needs.
Custom Research Design
Dr. Ostertag uses his experience in qualitative research, social psychology and cultural sociology to create custom designed research projects based on your unique needs.
Cost-Effective Solutions
Little overhead and sole proprietorship help keep costs down, making services particularly attractive to small business and start-up companies with tenuous income streams. Upfront costs are minimal to none.
Comprehensive Services
From conducting full research projects to consulting on research design and analysis, Dr. Ostertag can help on all aspects of your needs.
Sample Services Include:
✔ User research and empathy studies
✔ Heuristic analyses and cognitive walk-throughs of web-services
✔ Customer opinion and feedback analysis
✔ Product and service optimization strategies
Increase the chances of success with custom designed research and informed consulting regarding your product and targeted customer base.
Culture and Human Behavior: The MORR Approach
Want to know the Why and How of human behavior? Curious why people are or are not using your product and/or service? Want to know how they’re using it so you can better provide their needs? Several factors intersect to explain human behavior. It's essential to understand all of them to make sure your innovations, interventions or adjustments properly target the problem.
Let me present to your team and/or design a research project to address your goals.
The MORR Framework
Motives - What drives people to act
Opportunities - What circumstances enable action
Resources - What tools and capabilities people have
Rationalizations - How people justify their behavior
Healthcare Applications
Do you work in healthcare and want to know how to better serve your communities? Understand patient behavior and improve service delivery.
Business Applications
Do you work in business and want to know why people use and don't use your services? Optimize customer engagement and retention.
Disaster Preparedness and Long-Term Post-Disaster Recovery
Most disaster relief organizations and efforts focus on the weeks after a devastating event, getting water, food, and temporary shelter in place. However, the consequences of disasters extend for years, with different problems arising and shifting over time. Be prepared to address these problems so that they don't fester and grow into crises. Make sure the work you do to ease people's pain and suffering is not wasted. Know what problems to anticipate so they don't become problems in the first place.
Preventive Strategies
Develop strategies to prevent secondary disasters and address emerging problems before they become crises.
Community Resilience
Learn how communities rebuild not just infrastructure, but social bonds and cultural systems that support long-term recovery.
Long-term Planning
Understand the extended timeline of disaster recovery and plan for challenges that emerge months and years after the initial event.
Research & Publications
“A riveting portrait of how one community used the power of culture to restore their lives and social connections in the years after a devastating natural disaster” (New York University Press)
Stephen F. Ostertag draws on almost a decade of research to create a vivid portrait of life in “settling times,” a term he defines as a distinct social condition of prolonged insecurity and uncertainty after disasters. He portrays this precarious state through the story of how a group of strangers began blogging in the wake of Katrina, and how they used those blogs to put their lives and their city back together. In the face of institutional failure, weak authority figures, and an abundance of chaos, the people of New Orleans used social media to gain information, foster camaraderie, build support networks, advocate for and against proposed policies, and cope with trauma. In the efforts of these bloggers, Ostertag finds evidence of the capacity of this and other forms of cultural work to motivate, guide, and energize collective action aimed at weathering the constant instability of extended recovery periods. Connecting After Chaos is both a compelling story of a community in crisis and a broader argument for the power of social media and cultural cooperation to create order when chaos abounds.
Remote or In-Person Services
Let’s Work Together!
Phone : 860-798-1072
Email : stephen.ostertag@gmail.com
Address : New Orleans, USA