About IQSS

The Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University

IQSS is a university-wide institute located physically within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. We facilitate the creation, dissemination, and preservation of scientific knowledge about human society, its problems, and their solutions. We support these aims through our highly collaborative enviroment and the scalable infrastructure we are continually building. IQSS also offers many related services to support faculty, students, staff, and programs across a wide variety of disciplines in all of Harvard's schools.

Our scientific mission is: (1) to create, and make widely accessible, statistical and analytical tools for the social and health sciences; and (2) to use these tools for understanding and solving major problems that affect society and the well-being of human populations.

The organizational mission is: (1) to foster interdisciplinary, often large-scale, and highly collaborative projects that cannot readily be accomplished within the traditional setting of individual departments; and (2) to build a scientific culture where faculty, students, and staff work side by side, not only to solve their own disciplinary problems, but also to seek out problems in unrelated or applied areas amenable to the same approach.

Organization

The Institute is organized into scientific programs, technology platforms, and educational opportunities.

  • Scientific programs are intellectual communities that draw together investigators pursuing a common problem, or different problems using a common approach, (1) to share ideas about advancing knowledge in their area and (2) to identify and organize collaborative research projects.
  • Technology platforms are organizations able to implement or develop cutting-edge technologies and manage complex projects. They are organized into major Centers, run by senior non-faculty scientists or professionals, and closely linked with the scientific programs and driven by their missions. Each platform (1) provides services and (2) performs innovative research and development.
  • The Institute includes a full range of educational opportunities, including research opportunities for undergraduates and graduate students, a Ph.D. program, several post-doctoral programs, and a series of weekly seminars and major international conferences.

What do we mean by "Social Science"?

We use the term "social science" to refer to areas of scholarship dedicated to understanding, or improving the well-being of, human populations. Social scientists typically conduct quantitative analyses using data observed at the level of the person or groups of persons, such as countries or areas. The term is most commonly applied to empirical and quantitative areas within academic disciplines in the Faculty of Arts and Science, such as Sociology, Political Science (called "Government" at Harvard), Economics, Psychology, and Anthropology. The term is also used for quantitative analyses of public policy at the Kennedy School and educational research within the Graduate School of Education. What we call social science is called other things in other areas but the category is much wider than the term. It includes what law school faculty call "empirical research," and many aspects of research at the Medical and Business schools. What we call social science includes a large fraction of faculty from the School of Public Health, although they have different names for these activities, such as epidemiology, demography, and outcomes research. IQSS also has increasingly rich connections with the Initiative for Innovative Computing, the Harvard Intiative for Global Health, and the Broad Institute (along with many more substantively oriented centers), including joint grant proposals and collaborative research.