Institute For Quantitative Social Science - Programs at IQSS

Programs At IQSS

IQSS is home to a number of faculty-led research programs. Connecting investigators from across Harvard and beyond, these programs build collaborative research teams working toward the advancement of knowledge and the solution of human problems. IQSS is proud to offer administrative support, technical tools, and general infrastructure to help make these endeavors possible.

• Program on Quantitative Methods - This program encompasses a wide variety of projects that actively develop innovative methods and software as a way of building and unifying the methodological subfields now existing separately within most social science disciplines.

• Program on Positive Political Economy - This program currently supports research exploring politics and demography; consumption and spending; behavioral economics; international political economy; game theory in negotiations; auctions and herding behavior; and college admissions mechanisms.

• Program on Survey Research - PSR serves as a resource for those interested in scientific survey methods and offers a university-wide clearing house for information and expertise in survey design, administration, and analysis.

• Bibliographic Knowledge Network - The Bibliographic Knowledge Network aims to address three fundamental problems of knowledge management: compartmentalization, navigation, and maintenance.

• Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research - The RWJ Scholars in Health Policy Research Program is a two-year, post-doctoral fellowship program for eight recent Ph.D.s in political science, sociology, and economics.

• Undergraduate Research Scholars - Working side-by-side with faculty, students contribute to the discovery and development of new tools, methods and knowledge.

• ideas42 - Recent research in psychology and economics has uncovered important, and sometimes surprising, drivers of human behavior. ideas42 attempts to apply these insights to an understanding of the economic lives of people.

• Education Innovation Laboratory (EdLabs) - This innovative program led by Professor Roland Fryer applies an R&D model to education as a way to unearth root causes of performance gaps, effectively vet reform options, and replicate solutions that will improve public schools.

• Patent Collaboration Network - The Patent Collaboration Network database is a dataset generated by pulling together data on all patents granted by US Patent and Trademark Office since 1975 in order to represent and analyze social networks among inventors.

• Program on Text Research - This program works to foster interdisciplinary research and teaching as it relates to the utilization of textual data within social science research.

• A New Architecture for the U.S. National Accounts - Professor Dale Jorgenson’s research project implements a new conceptual framework for the U.S. national accounts by integrating the national income and product accounts, productivity statistics, and financial accounts.

• Boston Data Portal - The Center for Geographic Analysis with the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and the IQSS, is building a proof-of-concept system called the Boston Data Portal aimed at providing both government and academic datasets.

• Program on Qualitative Methods - A new initiative at IQSS, this program focuses on teaching resources in qualitative methods at Harvard. It will catalog relevant faculty and courses available at Harvard and at neighboring universities, host software tools for content analysis, and provide contact information for transcribers. Topics addressed will include content analysis, discourse analysis, the use of transcription software, in-depth interviewing, and more.