Emily Cochran Bech, Senior Consultant

This time around we meet Emily Cochran Bech, the American who came to Denmark with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She joined our Social & Economic Impacts team in Aarhus.

What do you work with?

My work has a special focus on immigrant-integration policy and practice in Denmark and the Nordic countries, but I’m also working on projects across sectors like education, vulnerable children, healthcare practices and sustainability. Methods-wise, I work primarily with surveys and survey experiments, but do other kinds of social and policy analysis as well.

What made you want to join Ramboll Management Consulting?

Three things really; Firstly, I wanted to work with more applied projects where I can see how my work can be directly used to improve society and secondly I was excited to work in a more team-oriented approach.

Finally, and not least, Ramboll’s company values and ambitions to make society sustainable in a broad sense really resonate with me.

What is the most significant professional experience you have had so far?

I have this ‘aha’ experience that got stuck with me. It was one of the first times I conducted cognitive interviews to test a survey – where you run through a survey using a personal interview to learn how people are actually understanding and interacting with the questions.

I interviewed a young Muslim woman and asked a question about ‘how religious’ she was. She answered ‘low’ on the scale which surprised me. But hearing her response made me ask more questions, and in our conversation, I realised that the fact that she took her religion seriously made her apply a higher standard for what ‘being religious’ means and by this she answered ‘low’ on the scale! So, the question clearly wasn’t working. Sometimes in-depth interviewing makes our quantitative measures better (and vice versa).

What is the most exciting development within your field of work?

I would say the huge potential to gather reactions and opinions from more people, more easily – with online connectivity becoming more universal, and collection platforms simpler. We can get better, broader data, over time. We can also tailor conditions, languages and more to individual respondents. The major challenge is, though, that people’s attention is in high demand, so it’s also more challenging to get people to participate.