Proposal Information

Overview
Anyone wishing to conduct research within the CCRDC must develop and submit a proposal to the Center for Economic Studies (CES). Proposal guidelines can be found at the CES website. It is important to contact either the CCRDC-Berkeley Administrator or the CCRDC-UCLA Administrator early on about your prospective project to help you navigate the process and answer your questions. The CES research proposal process outlines the steps to get started. Final proposals may be submitted on a rolling basis through the CES web page in PDF form, and are subsequently reviewed by both members of the academic community and government researchers before a final decision by the Census Bureau.

RDC Research Proposal
All proposals for conducting research using Census confidential data inside CCRDC must provide some benefit to the Census Bureau as defined under the criteria outlined in the IRS Criterion document. These benefit criteria include improving the quality of Census data, improving the methodology for collecting and disseminating data, and improving Census sampling frames and imputations. All projects will be reviewed for benefit to the Census Bureau, disclosure risk, feasibility, need for non-public data, and scientific merit. Funding of a project by a granting agency such as NSF or the National Institutes of Health will be taken as evidence of scientific merit, though outside funding is not necessary to establish scientific merit.

Researchers interested in submitting a proposal to use confidential data at the CCRDC must first have a user account in the CES management system. If you do not already have an account, you can create one here. All researchers to be listed on the project should have their own accounts. Researchers may then submit a one-page prelimary proposal on the CES web site through their CES account. In the preliminary proposal, researchers will briefly describe the proposed research project, list the requested dataset(s), and upload a document containing a two-page curriculum vitae for each of the researchers on the project. Researchers then work closely with the appropriate RDC Administrator (CCRDC-Berkeley Administrator or CCRDC-UCLA Administrator).to develop a full (approximately 15-page, single-spaced) research proposal and statement of the benefits that the project will provide to the Census Bureau.

To assist you in your proposal development, the Michigan CRDC has a helpful document listing tips for writing a proposal to use a Census Research Data Center. Also, the New York CRDC website lists some sample RDC research proposals.

When invited by the RDC Administrator, your final proposal may be submitted into the CES system. The final proposal consists of four separate documents in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF):

1. Curriculum vitae of all investigators on the proposed project (this was already uploaded in step 4, but if you wish to submit a revised version at this point, you may e-mail it to the RDC Administrator),
2. Abstract of the proposal,
3. Project description (full proposal), and
4. Statement of benefits to the Census Bureau.

Once a final proposal has been submitted, the CES review process will begin. CES approval takes approximately four months. Contact the RDC administrator for an update on your proposal status. If the proposal requires IRS or other outside agency approval, this will take a second step and will require an additional review process after CES approval has been granted.

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