UW Tacoma Statistics Consulting Group

The UW Tacoma Statistics Consulting Group is a service administered jointly by the UW Tacoma Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) and Office of Research that provides free statistical consultations to UW Tacoma faculty and (in some cases) staff. The UW Tacoma Statistics Consulting Group is comprised of UW Tacoma faculty and staff who either specialize in or have strong experience and training in statistics and statistics software. The group offers guidance and statistics support at any stage of a project: Research design; data collection, analysis, interpretation, and visualization; and drawing accurate inferences. Statistical consultants also are able to provide help with many common statistics software programs such as R, SPSS, Stata and Excel.

The group operated as a pilot program during the 2018-2019 academic year and after experiencing success will continue on in earnest in 2019 onwards.

If you are conducting research or working on a project for which you will need statistical support, we strongly recommend contacting the statistical consulting group at the earliest possible stage. Involving a statistician at the outset of a project - including prior to starting data collection - often helps a researcher avoid difficulties in garnering valid information from results.

Services that consultants are likely to be able to provide include: 

• Assistance with study planning and design, as related to quantitative data collection and methods.
• Assistance with the choice and application of statistical methods for research studies and proposals.
• Review of analysis section of proposals and publications/reports, as related to quantitative/statistical methods.
• Clarification of basic statistical terms and statistics.
• Advice on data visualization and presentation.
• Assistance with statistical software tools.

Please note that this service is meant to support UW Tacoma faculty and staff, not students. Quantitative support for student research is provided through the Teaching and Learning Center (more here).

If you are in need of a review of basic statistical terminology, please consider reviewing slides from the "Statistics Refresher Course for Faculty," here.

Submitting a request for assistance 

All requests for consultations must be submitted through our Consulting Request Form.

We ask that you complete this form as clearly and precisely as possible so that we are able to determine what type of assistance, if any, we are able to provide and so that we can identify which statistician(s) are best able to help. Clearly defining and articulating the problem is necessary to valid research, and is thus required prior to our consultants being able to assist.

After the UW Tacoma Statistics Consulting Group receives your form, potential consultants will review the request to determine whether we are able to provide support. If a consultant is able to assist, they will reach out directly to begin the consulting process. If consultants are not able to assist with your project, an administrator will let you know. Please allow 5-6 business days for a response.

Only requests submitted through a Consulting Request Form will be considered.

Disclaimer and Liability Statement

The UW Tacoma Statistics Consulting Group wishes potential clients to be aware of the following:

• Right to refuse. All consultants offer assistance without compensation in addition to their regular teaching, research and staff responsibilities. As a result, due to time constraints and/or lack of expertise in a particular field, consultants may not be able to take on every request for help.
• Consulting Request Form requirement. In order for your request to be assigned to the most appropriate group member we require that you complete the Consulting Request Form as fully as possible. Furthermore, because we are not a center and consultants operate as individuals, there is no drop-in location.  All queries and requests for support must be submitted via our Consulting Request Form.
• Consultation, not results. The UW Tacoma Statistics Consulting group provides advice and instruction to the best ability and experience of individual consultants.  The individual(s) seeking statistics support - not the statistical consultants or the UW Tacoma Statistics Consulting Group - are responsible for ensuring the quality and validity of findings or results.
• Co-authorship. In the event your consultation requires more than 10 hours of a consultant’s time, we ask that you discuss with your consultant(s) the appropriateness of including them as a co-author on your publication, or otherwise formerly recognizing the consultant’s effort.
• Data cleaning advice. As a part of our effort to help you analyze your data accurately, we are glad to advise you on methods for “cleaning” data.  We do not, however, offer “data-cleaning” as a service.

Contacting us 

In order to request more information or ask questions about our services, please complete a Consulting Request Form. You can use this form to ask simple questions about our services, to request a meeting to discuss a research proposal, or to describe a current statistics problem you have encounter in your current study.  Please allow 5-6 business days for a response*.

Acknowledgements 

If you have received useful assistance and guidance from the UW Tacoma Statistics Consulting Group, we ask that you please consider including some form of acknowledgement of your consultant(s) and the UW Tacoma Statistics Consulting Group in your publication.  For example, an acknowledgement could read: “This study was supported by the work of [Name of Consultant X] and [Name of Consultant Y] through the UW Tacoma Statistics Consulting Group.” As noted above, in the event your consultation requires more than 10 hours of statistics consultation, we ask that you discuss listing your statistics consultant(s) as co-author on your publication.

Please also make sure to let your consultant(s) and the Teaching and Learning Centre (dwaynech@uw.edu) know when any manuscript that includes an acknowledgement or co-authorship has been submitted for publication so that we are able to track the contributions of the UW Tacoma Statistic Consultant Group.

Other Resources for Statistical and Analytical Consulting

Statistical and statistical software consulting services provided through the UW Seattle campus are available to UW Tacoma faculty . Three primary sources are available:

• UW Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences (CSSS)

CSSS provides free statistical consulting for faculty engaged in social science research. Consultants offer assistance at all stages of a project, including the study design process. Appointments are available during specified office hours.

Visit the CSSS website here to schedule an appointment and learn more about their services.

• UW Center for Social Science Computation and Research (CSSCR)

CSSCR offers free consulting assistance with statistical and qualitative software packages including R, STATA, SPSS, and Atlas.ti. Consulting is offered on a drop-in basis on the UW Seattle campus and may also be arranged over the phone. CSSCR recommends that faculty call ahead before dropping in. Note that the service consultants only on use of analytical software, not on research design.

More information is available here.

The CSSCR also offers free quarterly courses introducing statistical software - for example, Introduction to R using R Studio,  Introduction to Atlas.ti, and Introduction to GIS. Courses are listed here.

• UW Departments of Biostatistics and Statistics

​These departments offer free statistical consulting associated with designing analytical approaches for proposed research, choosing statistical methods, and visualizing and presenting data visualization. Free 50-minute consulting sessions are available when classes are in session. Additional session may incur a fee.

More information about these services and instructions for scheduling an appointment is available here.

• UW Institute of Translation Health Sciences (ITHS)

The ITHS provides fee-based biostatistical consulting for non-ITHS researchers, offering more in-depth collaborative consultation than is possible through other free consulting services. 

More information about these services can be found here.

Contact Dwayne Chambers in the UW Tacoma Teaching and Learning Centre for assistance in determining how to best use these resources – and identifying other possible resources – to meet your analytical needs.

Graphics support

A number of graphics support resources on the UW Seattle campus are available to UW Tacoma faculty, including the following:

• UW Creative Communications - In addition to fee-based poster and powerpoint presentation design services, this UW office provides a "Creative Consultants Network" of writers, photographers, and designers who are available to work on a project-by-project basis.
• UW Health Sciences offers some useful layout guides for creating poster and powerpoint presentations in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, as well as Adobe Illustrator and InDesign.