About
About
We build infrastructure and community so social scientists can work at unprecedented speed, scale, and levels of collaboration.
Gary King
Director, Institute for Quantitative Social Science
Albert J Weatherhead III University Professor
The mission of IQSS is to contribute to solving society's greatest challenges by creating, preserving, and disseminating social science knowledge. We do this by building infrastructure and community so social scientists can work at unprecedented speed, scale, and levels of collaboration.
Our History
We founded IQSS on March 1st, 2005, replacing the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences. Fourteen months later, IQSS was formally designated as a Harvard University-wide institute.
Over the next two years, IQSS incorporated within it the Harvard-MIT Data Center, the Henry A. Murray Research Archive, the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA), the RWJ Scholars in Health Policy Program, and others.
Since then, IQSS has helped create numerous programs, centers, and initiatives that are now part of the Institute; elements of other Harvard units; ongoing collaborative efforts between IQSS and other Harvard groups; separate organizations within Harvard; and independent nonprofits and commercial firms outside of Harvard.
IQSS is now the University's largest social science research center and an integral part of the Harvard administration.
We continue to welcome numerous centers and institutes at universities around the world to replicate what we have built at IQSS. Administrators and faculty from other institutions have visited IQSS so regularly that we have standard protocols of meetings and tours for these events, and have even written an article summarizing our suggestions for others (see "Restructuring the Social Sciences: Reflections from Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science").
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Programs & Products
IQSS houses and develops many faculty-led scientific programs, as well as software and systems tools designed to facilitate research and the use of large datasets.
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Research Resources
IQSS offers access for social scientists to technological resources, and we’re ready to help you learn how to use them so you can focus on your research.
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Our Impact
IQSS has encouraged and allowed researchers to think more expansively and take on projects that would have been impossible otherwise.
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Become an Affiliate
IQSS welcomes requests from scholars to become affiliated with our institution. Affiliation allows graduate students and faculty to apply for funding or access IQSS-based services, such as Sponsored Research Services.