Title: Data Associate

Division/Department: Steinhardt/ IHDSC – Global TIES for Children

Reports to: Larry Aber, Principal Investigator

Work Location: New York University, Washington Square

Work Schedule: Full-time

Salary (Pay Range): $56,000 per year

Benefits Eligible: Yes

Start/End Date: Immediately – August 31, 2019

About 3EA

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Global TIES for Children at New York University have launched an ambitious initiative aimed at improving the quality of education and children’s learning in crisis-affected countries, “Education in Emergencies: Evidence for Action and Measurement” (3EA).

The 3EA partnership is designed to marry research with practice in order to rapidly generate rigorous evidence that stakeholders – NGOs, governments, communities, researchers, and funders – can use for program and policy decision making. The 3EA partnership includes two primary initiatives:

1. Impact: In Lebanon and Niger, we will conduct rapid-cycle randomized trials of low-intensity interventions targeted at improving children’s stress, executive functioning, and basic literacy/numeracy skills in emergency contexts.
2. Measurement and Metrics: In the Middle East/North Africa and Turkey (MENAT) region, we will lead a consortium of research-practice partnerships to define a regional measurement research agenda and collaboratively develop the tools needed to assess children’s holistic learning and development (CHILD) and program implementation quality (PIQ). In the context of our 3EA partnership, we will focus on how technology can be applied to address challenges to high-quality data collection with children in crisis contexts.

Position Summary

The Data Associate will support NYU Global TIES for Children by identifying problems with collected data for on-going projects, engineering context-specific functions for data verification and for data cleaning, as well as managing data tasks for temporary personnel. The Data Associate will be primarily charged with data organization, management, and documentation for 3EA, and will also support similar data management/cleaning activities on other Center projects as needed.

Responsibilities

• Build on existing data verification, cleaning and organization protocols, and create new ones.
• Use mathematical logic and programming skills to identify, verify, quantify, and correct problems in the data collected.
• Successfully apply existing 3EA functions and develop new flexible and user-friendly functions that can be applied to other databases, and that can be circulated for wide use across the Center.
• Make recommendations, identify data resources, and provide support for data collection.
• Organize data cleaning procedures and tasks, help create longitudinal item-mapping documents, codebooks and data directories.
• Create, coordinate and manage tasks for the data verification team.
• Resolve issues and problems by conferring with team members.
• Provide support and occasional data workshops for other members of the organization.
• Mentor interns and new hires.

About Global TIES for Children

At New York University’s Global TIES for Children we design, evaluate and advise on programs and policies to improve the lives of children and youth in the most vulnerable regions across the globe. Led by University Professors Larry Aber and Hiro Yoshikawa, we work with some of the world’s leading non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and with governments in low-income (LI) and conflict-affected (CA) countries on developing and evaluating innovative approaches to promoting the health, education, and social development of children and their communities. Together with our key strategic partner organizations, our work leverages cutting-edge scientific methods and interdisciplinary collaboration to:

• Generate actionable evidence to promote child and youth development by conducting and evaluating powerful strategies to transform relevant “social settings” (i.e., classrooms, schools, families, communities, etc.) that are key drivers of children’s learning and well-being;
• Communicate actionable evidence by engaging diverse stakeholders across sectors and regions and disseminating a rigorous evidence base to inform program and policy decisions for children and youth in LI and CA countries; and
• Build human, administrative, and institutional capacity for a robust global science and practice through the provision of professional development and training activities.

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/global-ties/

• BA or BS degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, Applied Statistics, Data Science, or a related field where mathematical logic and programming are central. Candidates from social fields like Economics, Applied Psychology, Political Science, Sociology, and other social science fields may apply as long as they have obtained extensive knowledge in Mathematics and Programming from their coursework and experience.
• Understanding of data confidentiality principles and having impeccable research ethics are compulsory.
• Strong knowledge of R is required, Python is desirable.
• Relevant data management and analytic skills, including experience cleaning, organizing, and describing data in R.
• Strong logic, quantitative and analytical skills; deductive reasoning and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills, organizational, and team-management skills.
• Ability to work well independently and in a multidisciplinary, multi-country team.
• Genuine interest to contribute to social research.
• Experience with SBATCH, SLURM, and UNIX language, as well as previous experience working on an HPC cluster are a plus.