What We Do
What happens at the ERC?
We are a service that helps students and faculty with all kinds of “empirical reasoning,” or the use of data to describe people and things and apply critical reasoning to make inferences about those people and things. We offer a variety of services to faculty, students, alumnae, and staff:
The ERC supports a variety of programs including Excel, R, QGIS, ArcGIS, STATA, Python, and Social Explorer.
TRAINING AND TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
The ERC offers training for statistical analysis, data manipulation and visualization, and geographical information systems software. The ERC hosts Open Workshops for students, faculty, staff, and alums to learn introductory and intermediate software skills. We support both Macs and PCs.
INDIVIDUAL GUIDANCE
The ERC can help individuals through each step of the research process from basic research design and formulating a hypothesis to data analysis and visualization to interpreting and presenting results.
CLASSROOM SUPPORT
The ERC supports courses with supplementary training sessions focusing on using analysis softwares, finding appropriate datasets, and interpreting and understanding the narrative of quantitative and qualitative data. The ERC also offers assigned fellows dedicated to specific courses (see the faculty section for more information).
What can you do at the ERC?
Below are some examples of what students, faculty, staff, and alums are able to do here. But they are not limited to these examples, there are many other possibilities at the ERC!
- Learn the Excel basics to enter, manage and visually display your data.
- Attend a workshop or series of workshops on how to make statistical maps
- Get assistance with statistical analysis in programs such as R, GIS, and Stata
- Learn how to create and administer a basic survey
- Create a data visualization based on a classroom assignment to explain the incremental effects of raising the minimum wage on employment in the fast-food industry
- Refine research questions, track down the relevant data to address them, select the appropriate methods of analysis, and writing up and displaying results
- Consultations on empirical projects/survey methodology
- Assistance in devising curricular content/assignments that develop and strengthen empirical reasoning skill
- Workshops for your class on data analysis in programs (Excel, Stata, R, Python, ArcGIS, QGIS), research design, or survey methodology
- An assigned fellow for your class:
- Assigned fellow could hold dedicated office hours for your class
- Assigned fellow could attend your class occasionally to help during sessions where students are actively working with data/programs that we support
- Attend open workshops during the academic year
- Attend workshop on data management designed specifically for Barnard staff in partnership with HR
- Consultations for support with data and/or Excel, R, Python, etc
- Attend dedicated workshops in Excel (basic, introductory, and intermediate) for Alums (in partnership with Beyond Barnard)
- Join any open workshops throughout the academic year
- Consultations on data and/or Excel, R, Python, etc
Other FAQs
Yes! While we primarily focus on quantitative data and analysis, we can offer some guidance with qualitatively focused projects. In particular, we have worked with students conducting and analyzing interview and focus group transcripts in addition to providing training on content analysis of open-ended survey responses. We can offer assistance on a case-by-case basis for text analysis in R or Python, but we do not support specific text-analysis software such as Nvivo or Atlas.ti
Yes! We have resources to do that in the lab, so please come in and let us help you. Librarians are also a great resource for help with finding data.
Yes! We’ll help guide you from your interests to a research question that you can answer. Please contact fkoli@barnard.edu for help with research design.
While the ERC does provide some services that are similar to a statistical consulting service - primarily our one-on-one support for students - we’re not exactly a consulting service. Our role is not to perform your analyses for you, but to help you learn how to do it yourself and build your skills. Our staff are instructed not to provide interpretations of statistical analyses. There is also a math help room in the collaborative space on the 5th floor of the Milstein Center that does provide support for help with statistics.