The RDS Department offers support to GSU students, faculty, and staff in the areas of data analysis tools & methods, data visualization, finding data & statistics, data collection, and data cleaning & management.
Academic department faculty (e.g., course professors/instructors, thesis/dissertation advisors, etc.) are students’ primary resource for support in the areas of research methods, data analysis and visualization, and statistical/quantitative and qualitative analysis software assistance. The RDS Department is here to supplement that support. RDS members will refer students back to their academic department for assistance when the support being sought is the primary responsibility of academic department faculty or the home department.
When RDS members determine that their support for a research project or teaching curriculum has resulted in substantive intellectual contributions, they will negotiate the appropriate recognition for their intellectual contributions (e.g., co-authorships, acknowledgments, thesis/dissertation committee membership, copyright/creative commons privileges, etc.).
RDS class/course assistance is focused on secondary software support for analysis and does not include generalized statistics or methods tutoring, or help with statistical or research methods assignments that do not have a required software component. Also, we do not have the capacity to provide pre-scheduled frequent software tutoring that is divorced from a specific assignment or software troubleshooting task at hand -- in other words, we are also not generalized software tutors. Our one-on-one software assistance is available to help you troubleshoot specific tasks or assignments. If you are seeking generalized software help, we direct you to our live workshops and our recorded workshops to gain the foundational skills for using various analytical software. Then, when or if the time comes that you have targeted software questions or specific issues to tackle related to a course assignment or research project, please feel free to contact us for one-on-one support.
When RDS members determine that a student or faculty researcher's assistance expectations have gone beyond the scope of appropriate support services, they will communicate as such to the individual. If the individual has further questions or concerns, they may contact the RDS Department Head, Dr. Mandy Swygart-Hobaugh.
We currently welcome workshop attendees who are not affiliated with GSU, including attendees from other Metro-Atlanta colleges and universities, GSU alumni, and general community members (see our Workshops ~ Etiquette & Policies here).
RDS members do not offer one-on-one assistance (either face-to-face, via email or other virtual modes, or over the phone) to non-GSU researchers as a general practice because it is not sustainable for them to open their one-on-one services up that widely.
