IQSS is a university-wide institute located physically within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. We are an unusual hybrid organization, both a research center and also an integral part of the Harvard administration. We direct large, interdisciplinary research projects ourselves; build infrastructure that facilitates the research of students, faculty and others; house research groups and technology centers; and administer professional staff and IT tools that increase the productivity of many others around the university. We also combine the roles, most obviously when we take routine activities of the administration, turn them into research projects, automate their tasks, and greatly extend the reach, efficiency, creativity, and productivity of the effort. We specialize in infrastructure that scales.

Our Mission

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 be accomplished readily 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 problems within their own discipline, but also to seek out problems in unrelated or applied areas amenable to the same approach.

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 analysis using data observed at the level of the person or groups of persons, such as countries or areas. The term most commonly is 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 also is 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 the law school faculty calls 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 Initiative for Global Health, and the Broad Institute (along with many more substantively oriented centers), including joint grant proposals and collaborative research.