Hye Won Kwon joins INVEST as a FIRE Visiting Fellow
Assistant Professor Hye Won Kwon from Ewha Womans University will visit the University of Turku in August through the FIRE infrastructure visitor programme. During her visit, Kwon aims to deepen collaboration with researchers at FIRE and INVEST and explore the opportunities that Finnish register data offer for research on meritocratic beliefs and social inequality.
The Finnish Infrastructure for Register-Based Research (FIRE) is a national research infrastructure being developed during 2025–2028 to support high-quality register-based research in Finland. It provides remote access services, application support, training, and guidance on research ethics, while facilitating the creation of new research datasets and research projects based on administrative and register data.
Through its visitor programme, FIRE promotes collaboration between researchers and research organisations in Finland and internationally. n 2026, a total of six researchers will undertake research visits at different host organisations within the FIRE network, fostering knowledge exchange and strengthening collaboration in register-based research.
INVEST has the pleasure of welcoming back a familiar researcher: Assistant professor Hye Won Kwon from the Ewha Womans University will arrive Turku in August. Kwon is a sociological social psychologist who studies how psychological resources are unequally developed and what unequal social consequences they produce.
“I have explored various psychological resources, including grit, personal goal striving, self-efficacy, and agency, to show how these seemingly idiosyncratic psychological traits can play an important role in social stratification across countries and how culture moderates this mechanism”, Kwon says.
As the PI of the research project titled “The Limit of Hard Work”, funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea (2024-2027), she is currently examining the antecedents and consequences of meritocratic beliefs in Korea using survey experiment designs.
This is not the first time she is working in Finland. Between 2019 and 2023, she worked as a senior researcher and a Research Council of Finland postdoctoral researcher at the INVEST Research Flagship Centre at the University of Turku.
“Looking back, my years at INVEST were among the most academically productive, and I think one reason was the academic environment researchers helped create. Although my position ended in 2023 due to my appointment as an assistant professor at the university, director of INVEST, professor Jani Erola has been one of my key collaborators for my research that intersects social stratification, social psychology, and cross-cultural research”, Kwon says and expresses her hope to continue and expand her collaboration with researchers at FIRE and INVEST.
As a FIRE Visiting Fellow, she hopes to expand her collaboration with researchers at Turku using the INVEST Research Flagship Centre Longitudinal study on wellbeing in register-based research projects.
“Given that existing literature on meritocratic beliefs relies heavily on cross-sectional survey data, linking longitudinal survey data to register data would open up new avenues of inquiry.”
She has not used Finnish register data previously, but hopes that her visit to FIRE will help her navigate to the new world.
“Although I am new to this area, I believe that register-based research would play a crucial role in advancing scientific understanding of social issues and expanding our knowledge of human society. I hope that register-based data becomes more widely accessible to researchers around the world. “