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We provide a wide variety of offerings to support you through the entire lifecycle of your research project, from defining your research question to creating and distributing broader impact materials.

Proposal Support
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Proposal Support

Writing proposals can be stressful, but it doesn’t have to be. Our staff is equipped and available to assist in proposal writing and project planning. Use the tabs below to explore the different support options available at each stage of the research lifecycle, and our facilities.

Planning Your Research

Before deciding how to tackle your research project, you first have to define the question/questions you want to answer. Often in research we are looking for the gaps in existing research, or previous research to replicate. In both cases, it is a good idea to explore the existing literature on your subject, to get an idea of what has been done and how you might build upon that foundation.

If your topic involves social science, we recommend you check out our data collections, Odum Institute Archive Dataverse, which houses one of the largest collections of social science research data in the world.

What type of data do you want to collect?

These consultants are available for short consultations free of charge to UNC students, faculty and staff and can help if you are struggling with this step:

  • Quantitative data (numerical data collected most often through surveys and questionnaires): Contact Chris Wiesen
  • Qualitative data (non-numerical data collected most often through interviews, focus groups and ethnography): Contact Paul Mihas

Once you have defined your question, the next step is to decide the best way to answer it. What methods will you use? Will you be collecting data? If so, how will you do it and for what purpose?

You may already have a strategy in mind. If not, we can help with that, too. Visit the pages below for more resources about each category of methodology, and to contact our consultants:

“Research instruments” refers to the tools you will use during data collection. This can include surveys, questionnaires, scripts for interviews, codebooks and more. If you are new to this process, our consultants can provide guidance and resources to get your products in shape. Familiar with developing materials but want a fresh pair of eyes to review them? They can do that, too.

Survey Design:

Our survey unit offers consultations for survey design on dissertations, theses, other research papers and funding proposals. It also houses walk-in hours for Qualtrics support, for technical questions about this powerful web-based survey software.

Qualitative Research:

Our qualitative and mixed methods units offer consultations on creating questions and codebooks for in-depth interviews, focus groups and more. Our consultant can also advise on best practices before, during and after interacting with participants.

Active Research

Once you have defined your research question and created a research strategy, you should know what type of data you will be collecting. At Odum we can provide consultations and guidance on the data collection process — we can also do it for you, as part of a paid service.

Consultations:

Time permitting, these consultants are available for short consultations free of charge to UNC students, faculty and staff and can help you develop your data collection instruments (such as surveys and questionnaires), decide an appropriate recruitment/dissemination methods and establish a workflow for dealing with the collected data afterwards. Choose the consultant best-suited to your preferred collection method:

Data Collection Services:

Our survey and qualitative units both provide paid services for data collection. These services are primarily provided for grant-funded projects led by faculty, though we are also open to partnerships with non-UNC organizations as time permits.

If you are interested in enlisting an Odum consultant for your project, please contact them directly.

Quantitative:

If your data is numerical or textual, you can stop by our statistics help desk or schedule an appointment with one of our full-time statistical consultants. Short consultations are available free of charge to UNC students, faculty and staff.

We also offer a number of short courses on quantitative data software and analysis each semester.

Qualitative:

If your data is non-numerical, check out our qualitative research page to set up a consultation with our consultant and/or explore some of the resources listed at the bottom of the page.

We also offer a number of short courses on qualitative data software and analysis each semester.

 

After Research

Once your project is finished, it may feel like the “real work” is done, but as researchers we know that’s not the case. Our staff can assist with the preparation and formatting of your reports and articles, creating a strategy for how and where to get published and production of data visualizations, graphics and videos.

These consultants are available for short consultations free of charge to UNC students, faculty and staff and can assist with the following topics:

  • Publication strategy (choosing where and how to publish): Contact Jessica Grant
  • Data visualization (making effective and appropriate charts and graphs for your materials): Contact Chris Wiesen

Odum Facilities (for grants)

A printable version of the Odum Institute’s facilities document is also available.

In addition to the facilities available at the Odum Institute, UNC also provides us with access to several high performance computing arrays. These include 1) the Kure cluster, which includes more than 1,800 computing cores across 230 blade servers; 2) the KillDevil cluster, which includes more than 8,000 computing cores across 706 servers; and, 3) a Virtual Computing Lab that provides access to these tools for UNC researchers anytime, anywhere. These resources help support any development and testing of prototype solutions, particularly those dealing with large events data sets.

The Odum Institute has extensive resources in quantitative, qualitative research and survey research. The institute’s Consulting Group (3 FTE + several part time staff) delivers hands-on assistance and instruction to faculty, graduate students, and others on advanced quantitative and qualitative methods, research design, and other research issues. Odum has two PhD statisticians on staff, offering a multitude of services concerning statistical analysis and software, including SAS, Stata, and R.

Additionally, 5-6 part-time statistical consultants are available throughout the year to help faculty and students (on a walk-in basis) with specific research issues or questions

The institute also offers consulting services in qualitative research design, analysis, and strategies for using software, such as ATLAS.ti and MAXQDA. Consulting services include methodological approaches for analyzing documents, focus groups, in-depth interviews, and graphical and video data.

The Odum Institute’s Survey Research Group (1.5 FTE) supports UNC’s primary education program in survey research, the Certificate in Survey Science. In addition, the Survey Research Group offers consultation and services on questionnaire design and pre-testing, data collection (web and mail surveys), sample design and weighting, and data analysis and visualization. Finally, the Survey Group manages UNC’s site license for the Qualtrics web survey platform, a highly sophisticated software system for delivering and managing web surveys for research purposes.

The UNC Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research (OVCR) Service Center is committed to supporting the research mission of the Odum Institute. The CSC’s goal is to provide the highest level of customer service and research administration expertise, supporting researchers with contract and grant applications, financial management, and payroll. The Service Center consists of six permanent employees that provide guidance and instruction with research administration activities: pre- and post-award; generating data for completing agency forms and reports; proposal packaging and submission; establishing and managing financial accounts; and payroll.

The Service Center works in close collaboration with The University’s Office of Sponsored Research (OSR) with regard to all facets of pre-award and post-award administration, and is a liaison between a number of university departments and other campus offices for research administration, financial management, and human resources processes.

Contract and grant administrators are assigned to specific Center investigators, and do not rotate. In this way, there is clear and consistent delegation of responsibilities, which allows investigators to focus on their research rather than on administrative concerns.

The Director for Finance and Research Administration Manager each have over 15 years’ experience in research administration, financial management and human resources at UNC-CH. In addition, the Service Center recruits 5-8 students funded primarily by the Federal Government’s Federal Work-Study Programs. This allows students to obtain hands-on experience in the areas of accounting, finance, and research administration.

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