Quantitative Methods for Policy Research: Institute for Policy Research

Under its research program on Quantitative Methods, the Statistics for Evidence-Based Policy and Practice, or STEPP, Center seeks to serve the practitioners and policymakers by developing and promoting state-of-the-art methods for researchers, especially in education and the applied social sciences. It seeks to generate strong evidence on research designs, synthesize and interpret results of multiple studies, and translate findings to inform policy and practice. The STEPP Center was founded in 2019 and evolved from IPR’s Q-Center.

A Message From Larry Hedges, Program Chair and STEPP Co-Director

We launched the Q-Center at IPR in 2006 to take advantage of a critical mass of scholars at the forefront of evidence-based research on social policy issues. Today, we seek to build on our foundational work by launching the STEPP Center to further develop and assess methods to generate, synthesize, and translate evidence to improve policy and practice.

Working Papers

Recently published articles and working papers in this program area include:

Jonathan Green, Matthew Baum, James Druckman, David Lazer, Katherine Ognyanova, Matthew Simonson, Roy Perlis, and Mauricio Santillana . 2020. Identifying and Measuring Conditional Policy Preferences: The Case of Opening Schools During a Pandemic (WP-20-55).

Larry Hedges and Elizabeth Tipton. 2020. Addressing the Challenges to Educational Research Posed by Covid-19 (WP-20-47).

Lincoln Quillian and Arnfinn Midtbøen. 2020. Comparative Perspectives on Racial Discrimination in Hiring: The Rise of Field Experiments (WP-20-46).

All Papers

Faculty Experts

This collaborative group of interdisciplinary scholars stems from statistics, economics, education, political science, and other social science fields.