GIST Fall 2013

The social science magazine of Duke University Fall 2013, VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1

gist

SSRI-WEST: connect. collaborate. create.

Nechyba’s Niche

After a year of planning and construction, Tom Nechyba announces the opening of SSRI-West.

The renovations at Gross Hall took about a year and you were a big part of getting the SSRI-West space designed to be as collaborative as possible. Is the space what you envisioned?

Nechyba: It is, absolutely. The architects did an incredible job, and our own Amy Barbee made sure the vision for the place would not be lost in any of the details. We were a bit delayed in opening and have been on a soft launch as the finishing touches were put on, but already we have lots of projects active in the space—and lots of faculty and students coming by to connect in one form or another. It’s amazing how much can happen in just one year.

What types of projects have found their home at SSRI-West? Are there other projects you envision using the space in the future?

Nechyba: A number of very different projects have made SSRI-West their home.

First, of course, there are the data and methods related groups within SSRI—our Data Information Services core, the Duke Network Analysis Center (DNAC), the Survey Methods Center, the Census Research Data Center and a new group on Ethnographic and Mixed Methods. Second, a number of Bass project teams have located in our space, including some that are facilitating our collaboration with the information initiative at Duke (iiD)—that is located right above us. Then there are projects like John de Figueiredo’s that’s featured in this issue of GIST, and other data intensive projects we are just beginning to incubate. Also, the Duke Population Research Institute (DuPRI), one of our affiliated centers, is partnering with us on a number of projects in SSRI-West.

Can you give us the scoop on the help desk, also known as the “Connection Bar”?

Nechyba: The Connection Bar, located in the middle of our open area in SSRI-West, is there to assist faculty and students with social science methods in real time.

It’s open 40 hours a week, and, while you can certainly just walk up to get help, we encourage people to go to our web site and make an appointment with a consultant that is best equipped to help with the problem at hand. The website also has a chat feature— so that, during hours when the help desk is open, you can open a chat with one of our consultants and get help from wherever you are. And, when your problem requires deeper expertise than what we can offer at the Connection Bar, the consultants can link you to others in SSRI-West.

Duke University Photography

How can faculty and students become a part of SSRI-West?

Nechyba: That’s easy—come to our open space, have some coffee with colleagues and find out what’s going on. That’s a first step, at least. Students and faculty who have research data needs or need advice on social science methods—SSRI-West is built to meet those needs. And of course we are here to provide resources particularly focused at cross-disciplinary collaborations on problems that are rooted in—or at least strongly intersect with—the social sciences.

The Data Information Services (DIS) core is a big part of the new space. What kind of help can students, researchers and faculty get from DIS? Nechyba: Our Data Information Services core has deep expertise in virtually all aspects of social science data management and is now especially emphasizing the housing and access of protected and sensitive data.

We are quickly growing our capacity in these areas and would encourage researchers to come see us at the beginning of a data project so that we can help to strategically plan for the evolution of the endeavor. Again, the John de Figueiredo project, described in this issue, is a good example. The data team also has real strength in developing web-based solutions to research needs. And, in collaborations with faculty from Sanford and Global Health, we are about to launch a mobile technology group that can assist researchers with growing needs that rely on such technologies.

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Although SSRI-West has only been open since the beginning of the semester, what feedback have you been hearing?

Nechyba: Given our “soft launch”, we are only beginning to advertise our presence. But even without that, we have had lots of traffic—and everyone seems to just love the space. It’s very different from most spaces on campus, and it’s been gratifying to see just how much people like it.

Rumor has it there is great coffee and snacks.

Is this too good to be true?

Nechyba: Indeed. What better way to get people to come and connect with each other than to slow everyone down long enough to sit down with some coffee, tea or hot chocolate and a mid-afternoon cookie. We have good self-serve coffee available all the time, and then bring out the really good stuff for an hour in the morning (starting at 9) and two hours in the afternoons (starting at 3). And yes, for now at least, it’s all free. But we ask you to stick around a bit rather than just dash and go.

Tom Nechyba Director, SSRI

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Housing Disparities: Are Minorities Paying More for Housing?

Bass Connections: Education and Human Development

MOOCs Gaining in Popularity

Boot Camp Reaches Out to Undergraduates

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Managing Editor: Courtney P. Orning courtney.orning@duke.edu

Scan this QR code to read GIST online.

SSRI-West: Now Open!

A Big Roof for Big Data

Contributors: Whitney Howell Nancy Oates Mary-Russell Roberson Taylor Sisk Designer: Regina Barnhill-Bordo regina@bdesign-studio.com This publication is printed with vegetable-based inks on chlorine-free paper containing 10% postconsumer fiber. Please recycle this magazine.

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The Social Science Research Institute at Duke University is a part of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University

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Housing Disparities

Are Minorities Paying More For Housing?

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n a neighborhood on the outskirts of a large metropolitan area, there are two virtually identical houses for sale.

A white couple and a Hispanic couple make offers on the houses, respectively, and both are accepted. Reviewing the records, however, reveals the Hispanic couple paid thousands more for a comparably sized home with similar features. Why? Laws exist in the United States to prohibit and prevent racial, gender or religious discrimination in housing practices. However, research out of the Duke University economics department shows that not enough has changed in the 45 years since the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Christopher Timmins and Patrick Bayer conduct their research to see who pays more when houses are re-sold to buyers of different races or ethnicities.

than 1 percent more in California. Hispanic buyers also paid between 2.5 and 3 percent more in Chicago; Baltimore/Washington, D.C.; and San Francisco, but only 1.2 percent more in Los Angeles.

Although the percentages sound small, it can amount to much more than it seems, says study co-author Patrick Bayer, professor and economics department chair.

“Three to 4 percent doesn’t sound like a lot, but it could be as much as $10,000 to $20,000. If blacks and Hispanics are paying BWPW Photography

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The study, published on the National Bureau of Economic Research website, analyzes more than 2 million sale prices from 1990 to 2008 for equivalent homes in the same neighborhoods purchased by white, black and Hispanic buyers. Researchers concentrate on neighborhoods in Chicago; Baltimore/Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; and Los Angeles. The data reveal, on average, that black and Hispanic buyers have spent 3 to 4 percent more on equivalent homes than their white counterparts.

The price differences did vary, with black buyers paying nearly 5.5 percent more than whites in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, but only slightly more

black buyers paying nearly

5.5%

more than whites in Cook County, Illinois

Hispanic buyers also paid between

2.5% 3% and

more in Chicago, Baltimore/Washington, D.C., and San Francisco

that much more, that adds up to a lot over a lifetime,” he says. “In our work, we’re documenting that there really is a pretty large difference.”

The research, he says, goes beyond earlier efforts because it takes into account previous sale prices and neighborhood appreciation rates. In doing so, they are able to compare houses that are as similar as possible.

“Basically, we compare two houses in the same neighborhood that sold for the same amount several years prior,” Bayer says.

“We’re looking to see who pays more when the houses are re-sold to buyers of different races or ethnicities.”

Although price differences are present in all four metropolitan housing markets, researchers are not able to decipher the reasons behind the apparent highs and lows, notes Bayer. He attributes the prevalence to a greater number of segregated neighborhoods in those cities, as compared to California. The reasons why, however, remain unclear.

The research does uncover and confirm several other aspects of this housing phenomenon. Some revelations are contrary to previous beliefs, Bayer says.

“Our study points to the unlikelihood that the race of sellers is important in driving this differential. No one has shown this before,” he says. “We’ve also shown that a home seller taking a lower-price bid because a buyer has a greater chance that the mortgage will go through is inconsistent with public records.”

What the data does support is the suggestion that real estate agents show blacks and Hispanics fewer houses, potentially prompting them to pay more for an attractive house, and they sometimes steer these

buyers to neighborhoods that have historically been associated with their respective racial and ethnic groups. Unfortunately, says Bayer, those areas tend to offer lowerquality housing. In addition, blacks and Hispanics are also more likely to be firsttime homebuyers, and may end up paying more because they have less experience with house-buying negotiations.

Housing disparities extend beyond purchase prices to include environmental factors, as well. Economics professor Christopher Timmins uses the data to study the environmental justice of housing practices. Overall, he says, blacks and Hispanics are pushed more frequently to make tradeoffs in their housing decisions. To find

crime or better schools,” Timmins says, “we must attack at a deeper level to fully understand their willingness to make these trade-offs.”

A lack of financial liquidity could be a significant hindrance for minorities looking to escape neighborhoods with high pollution levels, he says. Overall, these groups have less accumulated wealth and resources, effectively prohibiting any moving opportunities.

The data applied in these studies can also be useful to others throughout campus.

Both Bayer and Timmins are looking forward to a close partnership with SSRI-West because it will give researchers in all disciplines access to the records of more than

Both Bayer and Timmins are looking forward to a close partnership with SSRI-West because it will give researchers in all disciplines access to the records of more than 120 million housing purchases over the past 25 years. more affordable homes, they often have to choose locations where pollution or crime levels are high or school quality is low.

Identifying the relationship between race and lower-quality housing is easy, he says. The broader question is: Why does this pattern exist? To find the answer, Timmins has several ongoing projects that are supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the largest of which focuses on the factors creating a link between housing, race and pollution.

“Why is it this way? Whether it’s polluting firms locating in those neighborhoods or poor minorities moving into places where pollution is bad largely because, by being there, they can get bigger houses, lower

120 million housing purchases over the past 25 years. SSRI will house the data in a communally convenient place, eliminating the red tape that currently makes accessing this information difficult.

“We’re trying to build the infrastructure so undergraduates, graduates and faculty can use this rich housing data that we have for their own research purposes,” Bayer says. “Questions that touch on the environment, neighborhood evolution, housing markets—there are a lot of details in this data that can be accessible to researchers around campus.”

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Bass Connections: Education and Human Development

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Zelder, who came to Duke last summer from Northwestern University, to work on the project. “I saw this as a thrilling challenge,” says Zelder who was a highly recognized undergraduate teacher at Northwestern and has kept an active research agenda. “This was an exciting way to combine my teaching and research interests.”

The EHD theme has 12 project teams, with titles including: • Difficult Early Childhoods and Educational Paths Toward Adulthood • Interventions to Increase Healthy Eating on College Campuses

• Diversity in Schools • Education, Poverty, and Economic Inequality in Rural Appalachia • Coursera and the Future of Free Massive Open Online Courses Most teams consist of two or three faculty members, a half-dozen undergraduates, and sometimes a graduate student or two.

Each team might produce a policy paper, a website, a peer-reviewed article, an online course, or other products.

“My goal is for the students to have a meaningful intellectual experience to understand what it’s like to work on a

BWPW Photography

his fall, you can find undergraduates from all over campus working on interdisciplinary projects with faculty and graduate students at SSRI-West. These projects aim to tackle a wide variety of real-world problems, and the space and resources on the second floor of Gross Hall are a perfect fit for such collaborations.

These projects are made possible by Bass Connections, which is divided into five themes, each chosen to capitalize on existing faculty strengths. The undergraduate portion of Education and Human Development (EHD) is headed by Martin

We’ve seen synergy and connection with all of the students coming to these team meetings and my class at SSRI-West.

People are bumping into each other as one meeting is ending and another beginning.

Martin Zelder teaches his class for EHD scholars at SSRI-West.

serious high-level research project and use that to shape their future going forward,” Zelder says. “I want to train and nurture scholarly temperament. That doesn’t mean they are going to go on and get Ph.D.’s—it’s the same temperament that will make them valuable in corporations or the non-profits, or as physicians or lawyers. The pertinent skills that are called on these days are being able to work in teams on multidisciplinary projects where everybody’s contributing at a highly responsible level.”

On a campus where students routinely complete a major, a minor, and a certificate,

Zelder is heading a program that provides opportunities for students to participate at varying levels. The most involved students, dubbed “scholars,” must complete significant work related to their team, meet with their project team weekly, and be enrolled in a two-semester class taught by Zelder.

This year, there are 65 scholars in the EHD theme, including sophomores, juniors, and seniors from a wide variety of majors.

Other students, called “associates,” attend a not-for-credit weekly evening event that includes talks related to education and human development given by experts on campus and from the wider community.

“There are hundreds of students who tutor in local schools, and we are hoping that weekly discussions will help to connect these students to each other, and to current researchers tackling questions about how we learn and how our brain develops,” says Jim Speckart who has been instrumental in supporting the EHD Bass theme and is co-leading one of the project teams.

Eventually, Zelder and his team hope to build a self-sustaining community on campus with strengthened links to internal programs, external programs, and to new research ventures.

Associates may choose to enjoy the experience for what it is, or they may be inspired to apply to become scholars the following year. While the Tuesday night events are aimed at associates, they are open to anyone on campus and the general public as well. “We have a vibrant community where there’s a lot of interest in thinking about what works and how to solve problems,” Zelder says. “We want to be relevant to Durham.”

Most of the EHD meetings—Zelder’s class, the project team meetings, the Tuesday evening events—are held at SSRI-West, in Gross Hall. “We’ve seen synergy and connection with all of the students coming to these team meetings and my class at SSRI-West,” Zelder says. “People are bumping into each other as one meeting is ending and another beginning.” Indeed, Zelder’s class dismisses just before the Tuesday evening event begins.

While the scholars are immersed in what Zelder calls a “high-level research type experience” and associates are exploring and learning about the possibilities without committing a lot of time, a third group of students, called “specialists,” partici-

pate on the project teams on an ad hoc basis.

Meanwhile, members of the larger Duke and Durham community may attend just one Tuesday night event and come away inspired.

“It’s something you can dip into and get real benefit from, we hope,” Zelder says.

“We’re trying to create a flexible product or service that more people can use. We want this to be a big community.”

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Connect.

Collaborate.

Create.

SSRI brings together researchers with interests in problems that cross the various social and behavioral sciences including problems that connect with the humanities and natural sciences. We promote interdisciplinary collaboration among such scholars as they work on important social issues that are difficult to address fully from within any given discipline.

Since opening its doors in the summer of 2003 and becoming one of Duke’s seven signature University Institutes, SSRI has continued to grow and now has two locations: SSRI-West and SSRI-East.

SSRI-WEST

provides research space and support for social science faculty and students in Gross Hall near the heart of West Campus.

Enter the new space and you are surrounded by team rooms devoted to research and projects. A welcoming large space known as The Connection features informal areas to cross paths on the way to coffee and refreshments as well as extensive whiteboards and writable glass to facilitate the instant exchange of ideas. Seminars, classes and teams operating in the space are able to draw on an extensive social science data infrastructure backed up by a 21st century help desk (Connection Bar), providing assistance with data access, data management and social science methods.

This combination of space and research infrastructure serves as an incubator for social science research by faculty and students at Duke.

SSRI-EAST

is located at Erwin Mill near East Campus. It is home to the Interdisciplinary Behavioral Research Center (IBRC), supports a broad range of research centers and houses one of our two grants administration teams. These teams assist our affiliated centers, as well as other faculty at Duke, with grant proposals and management.

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BWPW Photography

SSRI-East (Erwin Mill) houses affiliates as well as the east grants office.

SSRI-West | Renovations Complete

SSRI-East | Renovations In Progress: New B140 collision area and reception space

Stop by The Connection or use one of our team rooms to discuss your project or idea and connect with other researchers.

> The Connection Connection Corner Connection Cafe

Connection Bar (help desk)

We bring together the right people and resources to inspire collaboration, support active dialogue, and encourage strategic action.

Data

Consulting

Education

Research Development

We help with data resources, online data interfaces, databases and other issues relevant to your research project.

We offer a help desk staffed by advanced graduate students and post-doctoral Fellows: live chat, online tutorials, one-onone consults and more.

We ensure that Duke scholars have access to the tools and training they need to conceive, undertake and complete their research.

We support faculty and students with pre/post-award services, research development assistance, and training.

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MOOCs are gaining in

popularity across the world Students like getting the best content from universities for free

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n the night of November 27 of last year, Jupiter and the moon drew near one another—an impressive celestial conjunction easy to spy under most any viewing conditions—and Ronen Plesser asked his students to describe it.

Several hundred among them did, from every reach of the globe.

It was the first day of Plesser’s online Introduction to Astronomy class, offered

by Duke in partnership with a Californiabased company called Coursera, which provides a platform for universities and

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organizations to offer free online curricula to anyone, anywhere.

“It’s fun to illustrate with such an event the fact that all of us, anywhere in the world, see essentially the same night sky,” Plesser says.

The exercise, he observed, helped create, on that first day of class, a “sense of a global community of students.” Which is very much what Coursera is about.

Since fall semester 2012, when Duke launched its partnership with Coursera, hundreds of thousands of students, some two-thirds from outside the United States,

have availed themselves of the opportunity to sit in on a variety of Duke classes.

They’re what are called massive open online courses. These MOOCs are gaining in popularity across the world—The New York Times dubbed 2012 “the year of the MOOC”—and Coursera is a pioneer in the field, now contracting with 70 universities. The curriculum includes video lectures, collaborative forums, peer-reviewed writing assignments and interactive exercises.

Data from the classes will be warehoused and analyzed at SSRI-West. That analysis is a critical link in the Coursera loop.

Aline Grüneisen, Lab Manager, Center for Advanced Hindsight, has taken numerous MOOC courses as well as TA’d for some of the classes.

Data from the classes will be warehoused and analyzed at SSRI-West. That analysis is a critical link in the Coursera loop.

BWPW Photography

Among the questions to be addressed are: “What can this approach to education teach us about learning?” And: “What does the future of higher education hold?”

Coursera was founded in 2012 by Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, computer science professors at Stanford University, to broaden educational opportunities, encourage lifelong learning and promote collaborative innovation.

Students of all ages responded by the hundreds of thousands. “It turns out,” Koller said in a June 2012 TED Talk, “Students like getting the best content from the best universities for free.”

The Duke classes have been a resounding success. Some 200,000 students signed up for Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s Think Again: How to Reason and Argue course last fall.

Dan Ariely’s A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior had similar numbers.

“We’ve had people from every country you can imagine, at every stage of life,” says Lynne O’Brien, director of Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology.

Some are just passing through, sampling a lecture or two. But many stick around until the end, at which time those who pass receive a certificate. (Coursera also now has five courses available for college credit.)

“They talk about how they feel like they’ve gotten to know the professor and gotten to know other people in the course through the interaction and the discussion sections,” O’Brien says.

The aim is to provide an experience that’s similar in many respects to a traditional class—courses begin on a set day and proceed with deadlines for assignments—then to explore what technology affords.

A global classroom offers some unique opportunities. If a student in, say, Pago Pago poses a question at 5:04 in the morning and posts it on a discussion board, it’s just past noon in Boston, where another student offers an answer. The average Coursera peer-to-peer response time is 22 minutes.

Roger Barr signed up to teach at the get-go, offering his Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach course. “It was my chance, you might say, to address the world,” he says. His students have come from more than 100 countries.

In describing his interaction with students, Barr uses the advent of television as an analogy. Initially, newscasters and talk-show hosts addressed the camera as if they were delivering a speech to millions.

“But they learned pretty quickly that television is an intimate medium,” Barr says.

People were watching in their robes and slippers. “It was better to speak as if you were speaking to one person.”

Barr does the same, addressing just the one student.

That said, the sheer volume of students offers teachable moments: A thousand students gave the same wrong answer.

Why? An examination of the lecture might well provide the answer.

Coursera has provided faculty an opportunity to experiment. Sinnott-Armstrong, for example, has added a personal touch to his classes by including comedic video clips shot around the Duke campus—a glimpse into his world.

“It’s transformational for many of them,” says Keith Whitfield, vice provost for academic affairs. “They really get very, very excited about it.”

Meanwhile, the university will be amassing data from the courses at SSRI-West— including how much time students spend watching the video lectures and how often they return to them. It’s an opportunity, Whitfield says, to gain insight into motivations and behaviors in a nontraditional learning environment that might inspire fundamentally different approaches to pedagogy.

“This is a platform for us to think about innovative ways that we might deliver a 21st-century education to our students here on campus,” he says.

Whitfield says there are already signs that Coursera is helping drive innovation on campus: More professors are offering “flipped” courses, in which students view lectures online, with class time then used for discussion.

“There’s a sense that some kind of disruption to the status quo has been in the works for a long time,” O’Brien says. Coursera, she believes, is an “agent of experimentation and change.”

So, too, will SSRI-West act as an agent of exploration on the Duke campus, an invaluable resource for a project such as Coursera.

“SSRI-West is a rich environmental context for collaboration and interdisciplinary research in the social sciences,” Whitfield says. “There is infrastructure support, computing resources and pilot resources that facilitate investigators.”

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Boot camp Reaches Out to

undergraduates Giving the uninitiated the methodological tools needed to participate in discussions with senior researchers, and to learn which approaches to apply when answering a research question.

Netflix knows which movies to recommend to you by using data on what you’ve watched in the past to predict what you’d like to watch in the future. To solve such problems, machine-learning experts developed the concept of “supervised learning”. But some statisticians have suggested that this boils down to just using a common tool in their tool-kit—regression analysis— that correlates, say, how likely people who watch Ironman 2 are to watch Ironman 3.

The extent to which such statements are and are not correct could become clearer through better cross-disciplinary conversation. Had the statisticians talked to the computer scientists as machine learning was being developed, and if those two groups had understood each other’s language, research might have progressed faster, says Matt Masten, an econometrician new to Duke.

“It’s inefficient to reinvent the wheel,” Masten says. “I want to prevent that from happening.”

Clear communication among researchers across disciplines at Duke becomes all the more important with the advent of Bass Connections, the initiative that assembles undergraduates, graduate students and faculty of all levels and from various fields into research teams, who bring a variety of perspectives to solving a problem. Because undergraduates, in particular, may lack the training in quantitative methods used by more senior researchers, Masten has developed a “boot camp” in an effort to bring

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participants up to speed on tools used in analyzing and establishing causality. He wants the qualitative people and the quantitative people to talk more easily.

His workshop, the “Causal Inference Boot Camp,” held the weekend before classes began for the fall semester, examined what is behind such phrases as “research has shown…” and “if… then” statements, such as, “If we implement a specific policy or treatment, then a particular outcome will occur.” The workshop was nontechnical and used minimal math, while still giving the uninitiated the methodological tools needed to participate in discussions with senior researchers, and to learn which approaches to apply when answering a research question. This sort of course is rarely available to undergraduates.

Masten aimed for about 20 participants to enable hands-on learning. The free, noncredit program was over-enrolled, even before undergraduates returned to campus.

The program was among the first offered at SSRI-West, the new offices and collaboration areas where social scientists, engineers and computer scientists can work side-byside and collaborate informally. The renovated second floor of Gross Hall on West Campus opened just days before Masten’s boot camp.

The boot camp serves as a warm-up act to the classes Masten teaches at Duke, beginning with a course for doctoral students on various flexible estimation techniques, called “sieve estimation.”

Masten concentrates his research on social interactions and econometrics— applying mathematics, statistical methods, and computer science to economic data to flesh out relationships. Think of the point where supply and demand meets, and what you can learn about where that intersection hits by analyzing data on price and quantity.

Masten adds the element of social interactions and explores the importance of individual differences in such analysis of real world data sets.

The human experience and our attributes are so diverse, and there are only so many study designs researchers can use with human subjects. Thus, social scientists often rely on datasets that document measurable behaviors.

“The point of my research,” Masten says, “is how do you do this analysis when you acknowledge that people are very different from each other?”

Much of Masten’s research looks at how your friends, family and the people around you affect your behavior. He focuses on model building to set up his analysis. Masten recently completed his doctorate in economics from Northwestern University, and his dissertation applies the results of a model for network weights to analyze the social determinants of obesity.

The program is among the first offered at SSRI-West, the new offices and collaboration areas where social scientists, engineers and computer scientists can work side-by-side and collaborate informally.

“Econometrics gives me the opportunity to do the statistical manipulations I enjoy,” he says, “but also lets me study social science, which is the reason I went into economics in the first place.”

Let’s say a university administrator wants to know whether offering free tutoring would pay off. Masten would begin by examining whether college roommates influence each other’s study habits. If you study hard, that could motivate your roommate to study hard, which might make you study even harder, and the dynamic spirals upward. It could just as easily spiral downward, though, if you’re discouraged by a hard-working roommate.

The complexity in coming up with a value to plug into an equation to figure out the effect comes from what’s called the “simultaneity problem”—you are influencing your roommate at the same time your roommate is influencing you. Factor in that no two sets of roommates have the same dynamic: Your roommate may have very little influence on you, but my roommate has a great deal of influence on me. Masten’s research allows this difference to matter, a point that sets it apart from previous research.

The influence difference becomes all the more important when social multipliers come into play: Your roommate gets tutoring, and that helps you. So the benefit of a free

tutoring policy is multiplied by the effects of these interactions. But the extent of the multiplier effect depends on the strength of the interaction, Masten says.

“If you assume everyone has the same effect, you’re going to get a certain number for this multiplier,” he says. “But that could be a very big overestimate of the multiplier effect if, because people are different, each person has different social effects.”

“This kind of topic is what makes econometrics a separate field from statistics,” he continues. “When doing the data analysis, you have to think about how people are interacting and what matters for their decisions.”

Meet Matt

Masten grew up in Orlando, Florida. An animal lover, at one point he had five cats, two dogs, a lizard and a turtle. He married his high-school sweetheart. He had never seen snow until his first winter in Chicago and was shocked to see, after a blizzard, people sledding and skiing in the streets.

He and his wife, Amanda, are looking forward to the milder winters of Durham.

His favorite pastime? “Talking with friends about how the world works,” he says. “That’s really the point of academia, after all.”

Matt Masten leads lecture on “Causal Inference Boot Camp” at SSRI-West.

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Big Roof

J

ohn de Figueiredo is a man of many interests, which explains why he’s been looking forward to the arrival of SSRI-West.

It’s a mutual regard for interdisciplinary study that attracts him.

De Figueiredo is the Edward and Ellen Marie Schwarzman Professor of Law at the Duke School of Law and a professor of strategy and economics at the Fuqua School of Business. His areas of focus include the intersection of law, politics and economics; organizations’ competitive and political strategies; and the management of innovation.

In collaboration with Charles Cameron, a professor of politics and public affairs, and co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University; and David Lewis, a professor of politics and law at Vanderbilt University, de Figueiredo has recently launched an interdisciplinary research project.

Quite logically, they’ve collaborated with SSRI: Their data is being housed at the institute, and SSRI-West also serves as a place for a meeting of the minds for scholars from a variety of disciplines who are being consulted throughout the project.

In the first part of the study, the researchers will examine federal agencies and their employees to gain a better understanding of how personnel policies can influence an agency’s performance. In the second part, they’ll develop frameworks for exploring issues and opportunities in managing governmental workforces. And in the third, they’ll analyze employee data, looking at patterns in promotions, wages, turnover and expertise development.

Among the issues the researchers will tackle is one that is particularly intriguing to de Figueiredo: Success in the global

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What SSRI offers is a whole suite of services you need to run a project like this, including expertise in software and architecture, an understanding of the sensitivities of confidential data, and coordination of faculty and students from multiple disciplines across the campus community. workplace has clearly become less about managing physical assets and more about maximizing human capital—knowledge, expertise, innovation. And when your employees’ output is knowledge, it’s difficult to measure performance—much harder than if what they’re tasked to produce is, say, a thousand widgets, which can be counted.

“What’s also true about these knowledge workers,” de Figueiredo says, “is that frequently, not only is it hard to measure their level of expertise, [but] their output may come many years after their input.” With pharmaceuticals, for example, it can take 10 years or more before R&D renders a drug.

Establishing a means of wisely incentivizing employees is, thus, tricky business.

And showing cause for laying someone off is also more difficult. This issue is particularly vexing in government, where civil-service guidelines and protections make it even more difficult to incentivize for good performance and for firing people.

“Our primary objective is to help government,” de Figueiredo says of the study. “But

it’s broader than that; this research can help firms as well.”

SSRI director Tom Nechyba immediately recognized the project as falling squarely into SSRI’s sweet spot—an ambitious, big data, interdisciplinary social science undertaking.

“We received such an enthusiastic initial response from (SSRI Director) Tom (Nechya) and his staff,” de Figueiredo says.

SSRI then helped to shape the strategic approach to the project, providing expertise and resources.

One of the first issues to be resolved was where to store all that data—the work histories of nearly 10 million government employees over a span of 24 years.

“We’re going to have hundreds of millions of observations on a quarterly basis,” de Figueiredo says. “You can’t run that on a localized server; it needs to be on a more complex system.”

The SSRI data team found a solution, coordinating the migration of the data from SSRI servers onto the university’s Office of Information Technology system.

for

Big Data

“What SSRI offers is a whole suite of services you need to run a project like this,” de Figueiredo says, including expertise in software and architecture, an understanding of the sensitivities of confidential data, and coordination of faculty and students from multiple disciplines across the campus community.

Regarding SSRI-West, de Figueiredo said he’s been telling Nechyba, “Come now.”

The fact that SSRI is now within hollering distance of the Duke School of Law, the Fuqua School of Business and the Sanford School of Public Policy, he says, is a major asset: “In research, proximity is everything.”

“We see SSRI-West as being a very important, centralized meeting place where we bring a lot of people together across a number of disciplines on this project. We have economists working on this; we have political scientists working on it; we plan to bring in people from the business school and the public policy school.”

He’s also thrilled that the information initiative at Duke (iiD) group is in the

same building. This multidisciplinary team is developing a Big Data toolbox, formulating techniques to better analyze huge datasets.

“There’s a massive potential for learning from those guys,” de Figueiredo says. “I don’t think that can be underestimated.”

It’s going to take about a year just to structure the data for this project into a usable format, and it may take up to 10 years to analyze it. That’s some big data; fortunately, it’s found a good home.

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