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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 the
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):
- 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),
- Abstract of the proposal,
- Project description (full
proposal), and
- 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. |
