Sydney Okland
she/her
SID-nee OAK-lund
Stephanie is a social psychologist and applied researcher specializing in quantitative methods, program evaluation, and data storytelling, with deep expertise in human-centered research design across academic, nonprofit, and applied settings.
PhD (Social Psychology)
BA (Psychology, English)
About
As Quantitative Analyst, Sydney is responsible for quantitative data cleaning, data management, and data analysis. She works with large and complex datasets while ensuring she is upholding best practices for data cleaning and analysis. Sydney's work covers a variety of focus areas, including community health and justice systems.
Prior to her work with Omni, Sydney served as a program evaluation analyst in STEM education. She worked on evaluation plan development, survey development, data analysis, and report writing. In Sydney's graduate work, she led several research programs examining how we communicate rejection, while teaching and mentoring both undergraduate and graduate students.
Sydney love to read, tending to gravitate towards general fiction and historical fiction, but she'll read just about anything! She also loves to spend time outside, whether that's walking, hiking, swimming, or paddleboarding.
- Okland,S., Freedman, G., Hales, A.H.,& Beer, J.S. (in revision). Soften the blow, feel the burden: The emotionalcosts of using recommended language in social rejection.
- Okland,S., Freedman, G., & Beer, J.S.(in press). Knowing versus doing: How much can training help people soften theblow of social rejection? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
- Freedman,G., Lutz, S., Sonnenberg, A.F., Okland, S., & Beer, J.S.(conditional acceptance). It’s not personal: The use of deflections in socialrejection. The Journal of Social Psychology.
- Okland, S. & Beer, J.S. (2025). Choose your own adventure: A tutorialfor using narrative games to study social cognitive processes. Social Cognition.43(5), 519-533. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2025.43.5.519
- Munin, S., Ong, D.C., Okland, S., Freedman, G., &Beer, J.S. (2025). Language measures correlate with other measures used tostudy emotion. Commun Psychol, 3, 29.https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00212-x
- Dao, A., Pegg, S., Okland, S., Green, H., & Kujawa,A. (2024). Longitudinal associations between sense of belonging, impostersyndrome, and first-year college students’ mental health. Journal ofAmerican College Health, 1-10.https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2024.2355162
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