Building Capacity and Coherence: Integration of Socio-Economic Data Collection

Participating Institutions:
University of Maine, University of Southern Maine

Team Leaders:

• Mario Teisl, Economics
• Caroline Noblet, Economics

Team Members:

• Shannon McCoy, Psychology
• Mark Anderson, Economics
• Linda Silka, Economics
• Laura Lindenfeld, Communications
• Charlie Colgan, Muskie School of Public Service
• Teresa Johnson, Anthropology/Marine Sciences
• James Acheson, Anthropology/Marine Sciences
• Kathleen Bell, Economics
• Jack Kartez, Muskie School of Public Service

This project will assist the current SSI research projects by institutionalizing the collection of socio-economic data across SSI funded research. The data collection and coordination (DCC) team will coordinate the data collection efforts of the social science faculty and/or graduate students currently on SSI teams. We will also provide data collection expertise to active projects to assist with conceptualization, research design and instrument design. Although technical editing will be offered, the primary goal is to help teams ask the right questions so the resulting data supports the testing of relationships between desired constructs.  Identifying and understanding the constructs and hypotheses requires us to be involved early in the research process to help ensure models are appropriate to the task and data (measures) are reliable and valid representations of the desired constructs. These activities will support and accelerate the process of integration both across projects and between natural science and social science faculty. The hope is to create and support synergies across the entire scope of the SSI project, leading to the identification of new hypotheses and the development of a more integrative research framework. We propose to use this integrated network to actively build an SSI social science database that would allow for consistent data collection across separate projects, indexed to allow for time, space, topic and population links so that ultimately we could perform a 'meta-analysis' of Maine’s sustainability domain. Simultaneous to this effort we propose to provide capacity building knowledge workshops on 'best practices' in socio-economic data collection including (but not limited to) survey design and analysis, sampling strategies and administrative components.