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:

Charles F. Manski. 2020. Econometrics for Decision Making: Building Foundations Sketched by Haavelmo and Wald (WP-20-01).

Elizabeth Tipton, Jessaca Spybrook, Katie Fitzgerald, Qian Wang, and Caryn Davidson. 2019. The Convenience of Large Urban School Districts: A Study of Recruitment Practices in 37 Randomized Trials (WP-19-27).

Pamela Giustinelli, Charles F. Manski, and Francesca Molinari. 2019. Precise or Imprecise Probabilities? Evidence From Survey Response on Late-Onset Dementia (WP-19-21).

All Papers

Faculty Experts

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