Research Data Centers: Kentucky Research Data Center

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SES - 1562503James P ZiliakChristopher R BollingerGlen MaysEugenia F TomaDerek YoungUniversity of KentuckyThis project establishes the Kentucky Research Data Center (KRDC) in Lexington, Ky. as a partnership between the Bureau of the Census and the University of Kentucky, and will join an existing network of over two dozen such RDCs throughout the nation. In addition to faculty and students at the University of Kentucky, inaugural consortium partners are Indiana University, The Ohio State University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Louisville. The establishment of KRDC will have a broad impact on the infrastructure available to scholars and students in the East-Central consortium region, whose translational research will impact economic, social, and health policy both regionally and nationally. Moreover, because many researchers at KRDC's consortium schools currently collaborate with colleagues at universities across the country with an RDC, the establishment of KRDC will significantly ease those collaborations, improve research productivity, advance the dissemination of published data products, and foster new research networks. Research that informs evidence-based policy is in heightened need in this era of fiscal austerity and economic and demographic change. For purposes of preserving respondent confidentiality, many major social, health, and business surveys suppress identifying information such as state or county of residence from publicly released data. This inhibits certain forms of research, including tracking the health and economic status of individuals across states and over time, characterizing urban growth and decline using address-level unit status records of living quarters and nonresidential units, and the more formal statistical evaluation of the effectiveness of public policies. However, restricted-access research data centers (RDCs) permit the study of issues having scientific and social import within a secure environment that ensures respondent confidentiality. The investigators affiliated with KRDC reflect the cross-disciplinary expertise of the consortium schools with the areas of economics, sociology, public health, public policy, statistics, nutrition, education, social work, and medicine represented. They will conduct research on topics spanning income inequality, poverty measurement and anti-poverty policies, education, health disparities across geographic regions, race and gender, domestic violence and substance use, food insecurity, immigration, and firm dynamics and government procurement processes. In the secure data environment, the projects will utilize nearly twenty different Federal statistical datasets supported by the Bureau of the Census, the National Center for Health Statistics, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and other federal agencies that contribute data to the RDC network such as the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Housing and Urban Development, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Department of Agriculture.