DataHaven Yale Policy Lab Fellow

February 17, 2017. The Policy Lab is excited to announce a collaboration with DataHaven, a non-profit organization with a 25-year history of public service to Connecticut and formal partner of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership of the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. DataHaven’s mission is to “improve quality of life by collecting, sharing, and interpreting public data for effective decision making.”

Together, The Policy Lab and DataHaven will conduct research to inform policymaking in areas of community well-being, criminal justice, and policing.

We invite applications from undergraduates for the position of DataHaven Yale Policy Lab Fellow (YPF). YPFs will work with Mark Abraham (Executive Director of DataHaven), Andrew Papachristos (Director of The Policy Lab and Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale), and the DataHaven team to analyze surveys, visualize social and economic data, and develop tools to understand policy issues facing the state and local community.

The Policy Lab is seeking volunteer YPFs for three projects:

• Community Wellbeing. Develop Interactive Community Wellbeing Index for CT 
• Justice Mapping. Create neighborhood maps of the amount of money spent on residents who interface with the criminal justice system.
• Trust in CT Police. Understand CT residents’ perceptions of police using data from 2015 DataHaven Community Wellbeing Survey (N = 16,219 residents). Survey included questions on victimization experience as well as attitudes about local government, perceived safety, and responsiveness.

The positions will involve hands-on work with data on Connecticut and the Greater New Haven community. To make this collaboration successful, we are particularly seeking undergraduates with:

• A background in statistics, survey methods, social science, urban planning, and/or related fields
• Experience analyzing data with Microsoft Excel, Access, R, SPSS and/or similar programs
• Experience with GIS preferred for mapping projects
• Experience with Python, database development (SQL), and web application development a plus

If you are interested in the position, please send a CV and one-page letter describing your interest and qualifications to katherine.mccabe@yale.edu. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.