It’s Show Time!Are your data ready to be the “next big thing”?

Stephen Childs, Institutional AnalystCIRPA/PNAIRP 2016, Kelowna, BCNovember 7, 2016

Office of Institutional Analysis

Who am I?

Program promised:— Kaveh Afshar, Education Policy Research Initiative— Wayne Poirier, Mohawk College

Instead, I am covering for both of them I had Kaveh’s role at EPRI until June 2015 Working at OIA at University of Calgary

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Old Vines & New Shoots

IR searching for new roles – program evaluation New sources of data – e.g. tax linkage

Somebody hears about the “next big thing…”

Researchers looking for data to support a publication Can we work out a deal? IR office brought in to support the project

How to make it work

More communication Agreements, contracts, written expectations Buy in across the institution A project champion at the institution Centralized data and capacity

The Research Assistant

This was my job - all the data work to support research Very necessary, but often unsung Often they have not been doing this long Have a critical role to play in project success

Institution Perspective

Centralized data & available data Horizontal and vertical commitment Create agreements

— Data sharing agreement— Project plan – milestones and deliverables

In-kind resources— Will you have the personnel to clean the data

Need a champion

Research Group Perspective

The institutional stuff is largely invisible to them Will not have enough resources, competing priorities Do not have institutional knowledge

— Give them the calendar Want consistency of data Well documented data

Strategies

Meet in person with researchers and their team Need to sort out the technical challenges High quality data leads to more effective research No matter what you do, researchers will have to “clean” the

data Changing data formats are hard on researchers

Technical issues

Keep all the files you send researchers Keep track of the queries used – maybe give to researchers Never send data files by e-mail Excel encryption is not good enough Secure web dropbox – firewall, VPN Automatic data validation

Research Assistant

Will never know everything you do to help the project Have great research skills and can apply them Opportunity to mentor them and learn from them They can make great institutional researchers

Conclusions

More evaluation, more research projects Need champions, need communication Opportunity to grow capacity of IR office