As part of its mission as an interdisciplinary institute and its implication on policy to address educational inequities in youth-serving initiatives, the Institute will have full-time staff personnel devoted to handling research coordination and data infrastructure management to help facilitate collaboration across UT Austin & System pertaining to behavioral science research.
The Institute will coordinate intervention development, data collection, contracts oversight, budget planning, and resource allocation for researchers and collaborators. As part of handling research data infrastructure, staff will assist in implementing architecture for local servers that maintain highest levels of security that facilitate optimal user experiences. The Institute will assist researchers by cleaning, merging, documenting, and creating analytic study datasets as well as implement procedures for documenting and archiving programming syntax. The Institute staff will respond to researcher queries and work with them in the capacity of analytic support.
By adhering to best practices, the Institute staff will create database structures suitable for large-scale studies and external datasets from National Student Clearinghouse, etc. The staff will help enumerate standards for archiving and documentation of research data in preparation for public dissemination for public use at repositories like ICPSR, DAIRL, etc.
In terms of coordination and handling of large-scale research studies, the Institute staff will assist in determining data collection standards according to study outcomes, maintain and monitor standards for data collection, develop templates to ensure consistency with specified standards. Institute staff will act as a liaison between research sites including K-12 schools and other sub-contracted organizations to understand, interpret, and validate administrative data request transfers from customized school data systems, and coordinate custom reports on the results of the studies to incentivize participation.