About Us
Director’s Welcome
Welcome to the Web site for the Center for Improving Methods for
Quantitative Social Policy Research (the Q-Center). We launched
the Q-Center to improve quantitative social policy research by supporting
the development of new methods that are more appropriate for social
research and fostering novel application of existing methods to
research on social policy problems.
The center will bring together distinguished scholars who focus
on methodological problems from a variety of disciplines along with
individuals who focus on important substantive policy questions.
We believe that the interactions between such individuals promise
to yield better strategies for quantitative research—and specifically
for social research problems.
In creating this Web site, we hope to make the Q-Center’s
work more accessible to the broader community. The site will include
research and publications of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and
graduate students and information about our collaborative efforts
with other centers. It will also provide information about our upcoming
speaker series, conferences, and workshops. We invite you to join
our community.
Background
Social policy research has increasingly become more dependent on
quantitative research methods drawn from social sciences such as
economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. However
major social policy problems often require research approaches that
draw on multiple research traditions and pose methodological problems
and conflicts that do not arise within a single discipline. Even
within a discipline, advances in conceptualization often make existing
methodological approaches increasingly less relevant to research
at the frontiers of knowledge.
Northwestern University is remarkable in the number of scholars
from several disciplines that focused their work on problems of
developing and improving methods of quantitative policy research
and on the theory of such methods. This includes work on the design
of social experiments and quasi-experiments, inference in situations
where models are only partially identified, understanding data quality
requirements and their implications for data collection methods,
and synthesis of evidence from multiple sources.
Location
Northwestern University is known for its collaborative culture,
and one premier example of multidisciplinary collaboration is the
Institute for Policy Research (IPR), comprised of scholars across
campus with policy-related research programs. Housed within IPR,
the Center for Improving Methods for Quantitative Social Policy
Research will build upon and expand IPR's interdisciplinary experience
by bridging the gap between methodologists across different disciplines.
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