Research Support
Proposal development, study design, and statistical consulting for every stage of the research process — before and after data collection.
Research fails most often not at the writing stage but at the design stage — a question that can’t actually be answered with available data, a methodology that doesn’t match the question, a sampling approach that undermines generalizability. Once those problems are baked into a study, they’re rarely fixable after the fact.
We provide consulting across every stage of the research process: from sharpening a proposal, through choosing and executing a defensible methodology, to communicating findings to the audience that needs them. Our consultants include statisticians and qualitative methodologists with experience across social science, health, and applied research.
What we don’t do is conduct your research or write your findings for you. Every service below is scoped to consulting and feedback on research you are designing, executing, and authoring yourself.
Getting the design right before you start
Research Proposal Development
A strong proposal has to do two things at once: convince a committee or funder that your question matters, and prove you have a workable plan to answer it. We help you develop a proposal that does both — sharpening a vague research interest into a specific, answerable question, building the argument for why it matters now, and laying out a methodology detailed enough to be defensible at review. This is the stage where the most consequential mistakes happen, because a flawed proposal usually can't be fixed later without redoing months of work — it has to be caught before you start.
Literature Review Support
A literature review that just summarizes what's been published isn't doing its job — it needs to show where the gaps are and how your research fills one of them. We give feedback on scope, on synthesis (are you connecting sources or just listing them), and on argument (does the gap you've identified actually justify your study). This is developmental feedback on a review you're writing, not a review we write for you.
Research Design Consultation
The design decisions you make early — experimental vs. observational, cross-sectional vs. longitudinal, qualitative vs. quantitative vs. mixed methods — constrain everything that comes after, including what conclusions you're even allowed to draw from your data. We consult on choosing a design that fits your research question and the practical constraints you're working under: timeline, access to participants, resources. Getting this right before you collect a single data point saves you from a design that can't support the claims you want to make.
Methodology Consultation
Once your broad design is set, methodology is where the details live: sample size and power calculations, instrument selection, recruitment strategy, data collection protocol. We pressure-test these details against your research questions and against what a committee or reviewer is going to ask. The goal is to surface problems — an underpowered sample, a validity issue, a confound in your protocol — while they're still cheap to fix.
Making sense of what you find
Data Analysis Support
Once your data is collected, the analysis plan you chose at the design stage has to actually get executed correctly — and this is where errors in statistical software, misapplied tests, or misread output commonly creep in. We provide guidance on running your planned analysis correctly and interpreting the output. We work with your data and your analysis plan; we don't run an analysis you haven't designed or take over interpretation of results you should be authoring.
Statistical Consulting
Some analysis problems need more than execution support — they need a statistician's judgment on which test or model actually answers your question, given your data's structure and its violations of standard assumptions. We provide one-on-one consulting on your specific dataset: choosing between parametric and non-parametric approaches, handling missing data, and building models appropriately complex for your sample size.
Qualitative Analysis Support
Qualitative analysis carries its own rigor requirements — a coding scheme has to be systematic and defensible, themes have to emerge from the data rather than be imposed on it, and your process has to be transparent enough that another researcher could follow your logic. We support thematic analysis, coding scheme development, and the interpretive work of turning codes into findings.
Research Interpretation
Getting statistically or thematically significant results is not the same as knowing what they mean for your research question — or for the field. We help you work through what your results actually support, where they're limited, and how they relate to existing literature, so your discussion section makes claims your data can actually back up.
Getting your findings to the right audience
Executive Summaries
A stakeholder who won't read your full report still needs an accurate picture of what you found and why it matters. We help you condense a full research report into an executive summary that a non-specialist reader can act on — leading with the finding that matters most, without oversimplifying to the point of misrepresenting your work.
Technical Reports
Formal technical reporting — for a funder, a regulatory body, or an institutional review — has its own conventions around methodology documentation and results presentation. We help you structure a technical report that meets those conventions and gives a reviewer everything they need to evaluate your methodology.
Policy Briefs
Translating research findings into policy recommendations means making a case for action, not just reporting results — a different structure and tone than an academic paper. We help you build a brief that leads with the problem and recommendation, backs it with your evidence concisely, and anticipates likely counterarguments.
Research Summaries
Not every audience for your research is academic or technical. We help you write plain-language summaries — for a general public audience, a professional newsletter, or an institutional communications team — that accurately represent your findings without the jargon your original audience needed.