DISSC Staff with Handsome Dan XIX- 2026 Summer Retreat
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It is hard to overstate the rapid diffusion of LLMs and other AI tools in the social science research enterprise. However, a just released survey by Anthropic provides evidence of wide heterogeneity in adoption across multiple dimensions. While the survey focuses on differences in the stages of adoption, comparing researchers' use of chatbots vs their use of coding agents, it also sheds light on interesting differences across demographic groups and disciplines.
At DISSC, we seek to help the Yale social science community along this diffusion path. Most recently, as part of our AI program, we helped sponsor a major conference with FDS and ISPS focused on AI in social science research. Two sessions focused on the use of these AI tools in replication and reproducibility, the focus of our ORR program. More details on both programs are below.
As always, we are here to support all phases of the research lifecycle. Please reach out with any questions, or any ideas you wish to share to dissc@yale.edu.
Wishes for a great summer,
The DISSC Team
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New Team Member
Please join us in welcoming Philip Waggoner to DISSC. He joins our Data Engineering and Solutions team and, in this role, will help our efforts to make research data more readily available at Yale.
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AI for Social Science Research Methods
DISSC recently co-sponsored the poster session at the AI for Social Science Research Methods conference, hosted by Foundations for Data Science and faculty organizers Emma Zang and Danny Karell. The workshop gathered scholars working on methodological innovation across sociology, economics, political science, public health, statistics, computer science, and related fields.
Papers focused on using AI to generate data and features from text and video, comparing those to traditional techniques and across tools. Others focused on LLMs in estimation, in assessing the quality of data, and in orchestrating parts of the research process.
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Clarity for Research Data
A reminder to researchers that Clarity is certified for all research data except ePHI, NIST 800-171, and DUA restricted data. For more information see the Clarity Platform Security page.
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DISSC AI Workshops
The DISSC AI Workshops seek to equip Yale researchers with practical skills for integrating AI into their workflows. Based in Claude Desktop, "AI Workflow for Empirical Research" focuses on the use of Claude Code through the various stages of an empirical research project. "Research Operations with Reusable AI Skills" focuses on the use of Claude Cowork for research operations tasks, critical to the research enterprise. The audience for these are faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and staff.
An AI Workflow for Empirical Research
AI can write your analysis code quickly; the problem is trusting it. In this workshop, participants will run a published difference-in-differences analysis end to end with an AI pair programmer, and then verify the work: one agent drafts the analysis, a second agent with fresh context critiques its identification, inference, robustness, and code, and the researcher arbitrates. Attendees leave with the demo materials, every prompt, and a saved reviewer skill they can run against their own scripts.
Format: Hybrid - Zoom link will be sent after registration.
Audience: Researchers comfortable in a language like R, Stata, or Python.
Date: 7/08/2026
Time: 10 - 11 AM
Location: 37 Hillhouse Ave, Conference Room 102
RSVP here.
Research Operations with Reusable AI Skills
Most people use AI chat one answer at a time, and then move on to something else. This hands-on workshop shows a better pattern: point Claude at the folder where your documents live, do a recurring task once (our live example: pulling every deliverable and due date from a stack of grant PDFs into one sorted table), then save that procedure as a reusable "skill" you re-run each month with a single command. Along the way:
when to use agentic AI vs. plain chat, how to keep sensitive data out of reach, and how to verify everything before your name goes on it.
Format: Hybrid - Zoom link will be sent after registration.
Audience: Research staff with no programming experience.
Date: 7/08/2026
Time: 2 - 3 PM
Location: 37 Hillhouse Ave, Conference Room 102
RSVP here.
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DISSC ORR Program Updates
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DISSC Website Updates
Our Open and Reproducible Research (ORR) Program section on the DISSC website has been refreshed to include more information regarding our services, terms and definitions, tips and guides, and information by social science discipline. Be sure to check back this fall to view upcoming ORR events and workshops.
Dataverse Community Meeting Notes
The DISSC-Yale Library ORR team of Bethany Seeger and Limor Peer recently presented on YARD, the University’s data repository service for faculty, staff, students, and affiliates during the Dataverse Community Meeting, May 12-15, 2026, Barcelona, Spain. View their presentation here.
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Dewey Updates
The team at Dewey have published an interesting Academic Research Data Market Map, which offers a picture of the commercial data providers that are directly or indirectly working with academic researchers and librarians.
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Election Surveys
AmeriSpeak® Voter Surveys are a new survey series designed for academic and nonprofit researchers studying civic engagement, voter behavior, and democratic attitudes. The key feature is that researchers can field their own questions both cost-effectively and using high quality scientific samples while also receiving respondent‑level data from the NORC Civic Health & Elections Project for those same individuals. An overview of the study design and options is available here.
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Stata
Stata MP2 will be renewed at no cost to faculty, staff, or students. Larger jobs that may need to run on more core can be run via YCRC which has MP16 installed. Users should visit the ITS software library to renew their licenses after 7/1/26.
Stat/Transfer
Stat/Transfer was recently renewed, which provides data transfer between statistical packages, databases, and spreadsheets, handling missing data, value and variable labels, and many of the details necessary to moving information from one file format to another.
Nvivo
DISSC is assisting current Nvivo users interested in using the collaboration add-ons (Collaboration Cloud and Collaboration Server) to be set up. Please reach out to us at dissc@yale.edu if this is something your lab or work group would be interested in. A per-user cost may be incurred for this purchase. If you're acquiring a license to these or any of the other software titles that DISSC supports through a P-Card or Purchasing Order, make sure to reach out to take full advantage of the university licenses already at Yale.
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