Research Assistant – Research Program on Children and Global Adversity

in Jobs
February 23rd, 2017

The Research Program on Children and Global Adversity (RPCGA) at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health is currently looking for a

Research Assistant

 

Led by Dr. Theresa Betancourt, the RPCGA focuses on understanding trajectories of risk and resilience in children facing multiple forms of adversity, including poverty, conflict, and infectious disease. You can learn more about our exciting work at https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/rpcga/. We currently have projects in Sierra Leone, Rwanda and with the Refugee community in the Boston area.

 

Desired skills/experience all of which we be responsibilities for this position:

  • Proficient in Stata (required) for data management tasks, e.g., creating labels, created scale score using a variety of algorithms, fixing incorrect values, formatting dates, etc.
    • Familiarity with common coding and labeling standards and/or willingness to use guidelines provided.
  • Can merge datasets in Stata for long/univariate and wide/multivariate formats
  • Can troubleshoot inconsistencies in IDs and static demographics over time
  • “Electronic” cleaning of data (required), e.g., run freqs to look for out of range values, run logic checks
    • Create flags for cases that might have issues/inconsistencies on various indicators
    • Present issues and some supporting analysis to team for discussion and decision making
  • Researching and determining/confirming final scoring procedures for known scales and new indices (e.g., of risk behavior),
  • Familiarity with psychometric testing, e.g., Chronbach’s alpha and factor analysis, preferred
  • Data management documentation – codebook & supporting docs
    • Update codebook to include all variables from all waves of data in addition to all new variables
    • Develop a “Decisions” document noting all decisions made including the problem, the decision, and any supporting documentation used to make the decision (e.g., descriptive statistics, lit search, etc)
    • Create a document describing the “trail” from raw data to final cleaned dataset noting syntax files and data sets used at each step

 

Salary commensurate with experience and in line with the standard University rates.

 

Please contact Emily Coles (ecoles@hsph.harvard.edu) for more information.