SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH CENTER California State University, Fullerton Phone (714)278-2600 278-3185 Fax (714)278-2549

Mission of the SSRC:

The Social Science Research Center was established in 1987 to provide research services to community organizations and research support to CSUF faculty.  Our primary goal is to assist non-profit and tax-supported agencies and organizations to answer research questions that will lead to improved service delivery and public policy. We offer the expertise of full-time research scientists as well as faculty who are highly knowledgeable and active in their fields.  As a university-based center, we are fundamentally concerned with providing high-quality research services utilizing state-of-the-art hardware, software and methodology.

SSRC Services and Facilities:

The SSRC conducts mailed, telephone, and web-based surveys, evaluation research, needs assessments and image studies.  We specialize in telephone survey research, however we also administer face-to-face interviews in urban settings.  We advocate the use of qualitative methods in applied research, and conduct focused group discussions and semi-structured interviews in addition to employing quantitative techniques.  We can assist in proposal preparation and in all phases of social research including the development of survey and evaluation instrumentation, research design, data collection, statistical analysis, and technical report writing.

We find the literal translation of English instrumentation to be insufficient, and we emphasize the development of linguistically and culturally appropriate research instruments and methods.  We regularly conduct research in the Latino and Vietnamese communities, and have conducted surveys in Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Khmer and other languages.  Our university setting allows us to access the linguistic and cultural expertise of members of many racial/ethnic and national groups.

Our 24-station Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) facility supports telephone surveys of general and special populations.  CATI software helps assure accuracy in call management and data collection and facilitates the rapid analysis of results. Telephone monitoring of interviews further ensures the quality of data, and we encourage our clients to use our remote monitoring capability.