New Center to Improve Quantitative Methods
“Q-Center” to contribute methodological approaches, train graduate students, build community

Spring 2007, Volume 29, Number 1

Larry Hedges talks with Steve Berlin of Education Daily on Capitol Hill

This past year more than 7,000 newly minted education PhDs were graduated across the nation. Some of them will go on to conduct much needed quantitative research in the field of education that will help shape local, state, and national policies affecting preschools to universities.

“Yet most researchers and academics, not just in education but in the social sciences generally, tend to stick with the research methods they know well, which are those they learned in graduate school—even though those methods might not represent current best practices or be the most appropriate method,” said IPR Faculty Fellow Larry V. Hedges, Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and Social Policy. This is one of the reasons why Hedges recently launched the Center for Improving Methods for Quantitative Policy Research, or Q-Center, at the Institute for Policy Research. He is the center’s director.

The Next Generation of Research and Researchers
Hedges’ impetus stems from his vision of bringing together an interdisciplinary group of distinguished scholars who focus on methodological problems with individuals who focus on substantive policy questions. He also saw a need to infuse the field with a new generation of researchers trained in interdisciplinary methods.

“We need a better understanding of what data analysis is,” Hedges explained. “For example, how should we take evidence from multiple studies and decide what it means? How can we better design studies to be more informative? In which cases should we use smaller, more nuanced, and more cost-effective social experiments over large-scale ones?”

Q-Center faculty conduct research relevant to the center’s mission of improving designs, data collection, analysis, and synthesis in social policy research—particularly in large-scale surveys. The center is also responding to a large shift in the field of educational research and analysis, as witnessed by a greater emphasis on random assignment studies and a call for more educational researchers trained in these methods by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which is part of the U.S. Department of Education.

For example, Hedges is working on new methods to conduct better and larger multisite and group randomized experiments in education; social psychologist Thomas D. Cook is studying cluster-based experiments and the extent to which specific forms of non-experiments empirically reproduce the same results as experiments; and economist Charles F. Manski is tackling partial identification problems.

The center is preparing to launch a postdoctoral research training fellowship with funding from IES. Over the next four years, it will accept one to two postdoctoral students each year, with each student receiving two years of funding.

“We hope that the Q-Center’s training function will help to end this huge shortage of people with skills in state-of-the-art methods,” Hedges said.

Critical Mass and Cross-Fertilization

Q-Center faculty listen to a presentation on fractional treatment rules.

Having recently joined Northwestern, Hedges found an opportunity to build on a critical mass of innovative IPR researchers who have made major contributions to the design, analysis, and interpretation of policy research. These methodological pioneers include: Cook in quasi-experimentation, Manski in identification problems, statistician Bruce D. Spencer in large-scale statistical program design, economist Greg J. Duncan in the study of neighborhood effects, and of course, Hedges himself in meta-analysis. (See "IPR Innovators in Social Science Methodology" for brief explanations of their methodological contributions.)

“We are fortunate at IPR and Northwestern to have an environment that encourages cross-fertilization of methodological approaches, which is not usually the case at other academic institutions,” Hedges said. “Those who work on methodology often do so in isolation.”

Yet this translation of techniques from one discipline to another, he continued, has contributed to many of the most important advances in social science methods over the last four decades.

He cites the well-known example of sociologist Otis Dudley Duncan, who introduced path analysis to sociology in the 1960s, having borrowed the idea from genetics where it had been used for 40 years.

“He changed how a whole generation did—and thought about—research,” Hedges said.

By bringing methodologists from different disciplines together, Hedges hopes to build a wider community and spread best practices to those already in the field. “Social science methodologists are often separated from specialists, particularly in mathematics and statistics, who are working on related problems,” he said. This is why the Q-Center inaugurated its interdisciplinary colloquium series last year.

Hedges is also active in fostering the methodological community at a national level as one of the founders of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, which held its first meeting in December. The organization seeks to advance and disseminate research on the causal effects of education interventions, practices, programs, and policies.

Hedges, with Barbara Foorman of Florida State University, will also serve as inaugural editor of the organization’s new Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness.

Building internal and external communities of distinguished scholars, producing innovative strategies for quantitative research, and forming new scholars in quantitative research methods will serve as the guideposts of the new venture.

“The Q-Center is the realization of IPR’s dream to bring together a critical mass of scholars who can produce better research methods for studying social policy,” said IPR’s Director and Faculty Fellow Fay Lomax Cook, professor of human development and social policy. “With Larry Hedges’ expertise and vision, in addition to a terrific group of IPR scholars, the Q-Center is poised to make valuable contributions in this endeavor.”

For more information on the Q-Center and its activities, please visit its Web site at www.northwestern.edu/ipr/qcenter.