SSRI
Helping projects grow
WORKING WITH SSRI THROUGHOUT YOUR PROJECT SSRI provides research support for social science projects in Gross Hall near the heart of West Campus. Our combination of space and research infrastructure serves as an incubator for social science research by faculty and students across the various schools at Duke. We want to help your projects grow. Think of us as the soil that helps your project reach maturity. We have a full range of services including grants, project management, data, workshops, consulting, web services and more. We are here to assist at all stages of the research process.
“The SSRI space allows more conversations, not only about substantive issues, but also about the methodological challenges in interpreting both qualitative and quantitative data and the mix of those types of data.” — Lind Burton, Dean of Social Sciences
BEGINNING AT THE PLANNING STAGE Institutional Review Board (IRB)
Grants
When working with human subjects in your research, it’s important to work within IRB guidelines. Our experts can assist with administering, supporting, and guiding the work of the Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and all related activities. Any research involving human subjects proposed by faculty, staff, or students must be reviewed and approved by an IRB before research may begin, and before related grants may be funded.
SSRI is dedicated to supporting faculty and students as they pursue funding for their research. We are particularly interested in supporting the development of larger, cross-disciplinary initiatives that hold substantial promise of external funding.
RESEARCH LIFE CYCLE data discovery
We support research activity at Duke by providing preaward and post-award services, research development assistance, and training and networking opportunities relevant to research administration.
“The SSRI staff helped me at every step in the development of my grant; from looking up my RFA number getting the
RE-USE
Data archive
DEPOSIT
DATA LIFE CYCLE
proposal PLANNING WRITING
PROJECT Start up
data collection
data analysis
specifics about that announcement, to developing an RE-PURPOSE
appropriate budget, to helping create deadlines for the ultimate submission of the proposal. All I needed was to ask and I got the support I needed, even for coordinating investigator information from outside Duke.” — Keith E. Whitfield, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
getting started
Come and chat with us once you decide to begin a project. We will work with you through each step of the research life cycle.
data sharing
Disseminate Findings
MEETING AND WORKING IN THE CONNECTION 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, and whiteboards and writable glass to facilitate 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, the Connection Bar. Our facilities are equipped to conduct and communicate social science research, as well as attract, train and support scholars engaged in research and interested in collaboration. Rooms are available for teams, seminars, or small classes. Research originates with a great question or idea, yet requires much more–such as testable hypotheses, useful data, coded interviews, statistical or spatial software, and the ability to interpret and disseminate findings. Getting from great idea to feasible project can require dodging pitfalls, particularly for the novice researcher or for collaborative teams that apply new methods and integrate multiple disciplines.
connection bar Our Connection Bar offers a consulting service staffed by advanced graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, who are on call from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday during the academic year, and available to consult on all stages of the research process. Connection Bar staffers can offer quick advice on such topics as: • Model development and hypothesis specification • Duke data resources • Crafting and conducting surveys and interviews • Qualtrics survey software • Common statistical software, including R, SPSS, Stata, SAS and NVivo
Research Connect The Research Connect website provides a place where Duke students, looking to join research projects, can find Duke investigators who have projects needing motivated student researchers and vice versa. By listing available projects and the skills each requires, this site allows students to identify commonly needed skills and to prepare themselves to be productive members of a research team. It also enables research teams to find and contact potential team members.
“The Connection Bar is a great resource. I don’t know of any other place where students can regularly call on such skilled and seasoned consultants. As a consultant, it’s so rewarding to help students cut through the messy stuff and get back on track with their research.” — Steven Snell, Postdoctoral Fellow, Duke Initiative on Survey Methodology
Connection Bar
• Chat Online • Find a Consultant • Make an Appointment • Request a Class Visit • Browse Research & Help Topics
WORKING WITH DATA Data Management Whether your project is big or small or uses new or existing data, SSRI’s data management services can help increase your productivity and organization.
Duke Initiative on Survey Methodology (DISM) We think of surveys as any setting in which research participants are asked questions about their attitudes or behaviors, whether in the traditional survey format, experiments, interviews, or focus groups. DISM offers a number of resources including advising on individual projects, funding opportunities, and training in survey research methods.
communities within Duke, and supporting real-world engagement and innovation. Dedicated to improving the lives of children and youth, EHDi is in a unique position to protect, manage, and provide access to data for a new generation of education research.
Interdisciplinary Behavioral Research Center (IBRC) The IBRC lab holds computing facilities for group and individual testing. The lab provides researchers with space, equipment, and services to facilitate the recruitment of research participants and the collection of data for laboratory-based social and behavioral research. For researchers wanting to go outside campus borders for research requiring a diversity of ages, ethnicities, and socioeconomic groups, check out the ResearchMobile.
Methods), its center on network methods (Duke Network Analysis Center), its collaboration on big data with the Initiative in Information at Duke (iiD) and SSRI’s data core.
MOBILE TECHNOLOGY Mobile devices are transforming the way that many of us live, learn and conduct research. The Mobile Technology Initiative is a collaborative effort between SSRI and partners around the university to work closely with faculty in the creation of new applications of mobile technologies; develop open source and modular programming tools; assist in the submission of funding proposals; and develop a training program that allows a team of programmers and researchers to keep pace with the rapid innovations in the use of mobile technology for research.
Triangle Research Data Center (TRDC) Duke Network Analysis Center (DNAC) DNAC is dedicated to building a world-class network science & analysis program at Duke. The program strives to help make visible the cutting-edge network scholarship currently ongoing on campus, promote new collaborations in network science, introduce new researchers to network analysis and train them in related methods and applications.
Education and Human Development Incubator (EHDi) EHDi strives to incubate communities by fostering research collaboration, connecting cross-disciplinary
Initiative on Ethnographic & Qualitative Methods (IEQM) In collaboration with leading experts at Duke, SSRI is soon launching a new initiative aimed at expanding support for social science research using ethnographic and mixed methods – and integrating such methods into cross-disciplinary research that also employs other methods. This initiative is a complement to SSRI’s already existing initiative on survey methods (Duke Initiative on Survey
The TRDC is a partnership between the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau and Duke University, in cooperation with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), North Carolina State University (NCSU), and RTI International (RTI). Under this partnership, the Census Bureau allows researchers with approved proposals to perform statistical analysis on non-public microdata from the Census Bureau’s economic and demographic censuses and surveys.
Web Development SSRI focuses on web projects that further the research goals of social and behavioral science researchers at Duke University. The team is well versed in creating custom, complex data collection and tracking tools for research projects needing specialized and secure data-entry web forms. Such websites also include backend tools to display information and create reports.
Protected Data SSRI specializes in helping social science researchers navigate a myriad of issues when dealing with acquiring, storing, securing and using such data. We have a number of specialists on staff to assist researchers with protected data.
data archive
data discovery data collection
data sharing
data analysis
“We have been using SSRI’s Protected Data Network for over a year because it has the capability to support complex statistical analysis of big datasets. The PRDN has been absolutely essential to the success of our research.” — John de Figueiredo, Edward and Ellen Marie Schwarzman Professor of Law
GETTING EDUCATED Workshops Want to learn how to use a statistical software program or improve your understanding of how to craft a survey and encourage your subjects to respond to it? SSRI offers workshops on a diverse array of topics throughout the year. They typically run for two to four hours and focus on a particular task, methodology or software. We are also prepared to offer customized workshops for research teams.
Help Topics Need help planning a project, collecting or analyzing data, or using a particular software package? Our web-based help topics will allow you to find support for a wide-range of research tasks; identifying Connection Bar consultants with the relevant expertise, listing upcoming workshops, and offering online resources available at your convenience.
18 Workshops Offered 16 Consultants 35 Help Topics (Over 145 links)
“The SSRI team has done a fine job in creating an
< 30 seconds Wait for Online Chat
on-line attendance information system for use in our experiment with truancy prevention. We are more than satisfied with the technical competence and helpful spirit of the team, and the result is everything that we had hoped.” — Philip J. Cook, ITT/Sanford Professor of Public Policy
< 5 minutes Wait at Connection Bar
Duke University Social Science Research Institute Campus Box 90989 Durham, NC 27708 Phone: 919.681.6019 Email: ssri@duke.edu www.ssri.duke.edu