Statistical Consulting Center

Type I: Limited Free Consulting

We provide FREE statistical consulting services on topics such as experimental design, project management, data management and mining and statistical analysis, to students and faculty of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley who are engaged in unfunded research, and also to researchers in the community. Please be aware that due to faculty's workload and schedule, the free consulting service availability might vary.

Type II: Unlimited Free Consulting for Collaborations

If a researcher needs more specific statistical analysis and a large number of computations are necessary, we are willing to provide detailed analysis FREE in the collaboration framework. Collaboration may be targeting at journal papers or funding proposals.

Type III: Fee-based Consulting

If people seek more statistical help and willing to pay for the consultation, we will offer a fee-based consulting service. This type of service can be divided into two subcategories. One is for consultation only, which means that the service is not for training or collaboration and we will NOT perform detailed analyses. The other is for data analysis only, which requires the client to have a good knowledge of statistical analysis and we will provide intensive statistical analysis for their research projects. The guideline for the hourly rate is approximately $60~80. The first meeting will be free of charge. The client and related consultants will sign an agreement or contract. The Center will not handle on-site cash/check for the fee-based consulting services. An invoice will be issued by the Center to client’s organization, after both client(s) and consultant(s) agree with and sign on the contract.

What Consulting Topics

We provide statistical consultations including the following areas:

• Planning the study so that only the data needed for the purpose of the inquiry are collected (includes design of experiments and surveys)
• Helping the researcher specify the model and related hypotheses
• Determining sample size for desired power and effect size
• Randomizing experimental units when appropriate
• Data management
• Analyzing the data, checking for validity of assumptions required by certain statistical methods
• Interpreting the results
• Assisting in the writing of the final report or manuscript
• Assisting in the use of statistical software, such as SAS or SPSS
• Modifying or creating statistical methodology when basic assumptions required for validity of the existing statistical methodology are violated

Some Claims

• Hereby, we have a special note about consulting needs that are related to commercial purposes. We are not solely aiming the fee-based consulting service at those projects or programs with commercial purposes. For clients coming to us with commercial purpose projects, the Center requires that special attention to be paid on items related to consulting service for commercial purpose projects in the agreement or contract.
• Under guidance of the appropriate committee, the Center will provide advice to students who are currently working on an undergraduate honors research project, master’s thesis, or doctoral dissertation.
• The consulting service is NOT for assistance on homework assignments or class projects in any course.
• In order for the Statistical Consulting Center to be most effective in its consultations, it is advisable that we are involved at the design stage of the research. In particular, the service would include: assistance in the design of the experiment or survey; assistance in determining the appropriate modeling and analyses of the data; assistance in the interpretation and the conclusions to be drawn from the analysis of the data.

Make Appointment

To make an appointment for consultation, please check the contact information that is available at Associated Faculty. Name, office, phone number, email address, and detailed consulting interests for each associated faculty are listed there. Consulting sessions are scheduled in one hour segments with a 24 hour waiting period (no walk-in, please). For example, a Monday consulting appointment should be scheduled on (or earlier than) prior Friday.

Prepare First Meeting

To ensure the fruitful appointment, you should prepare the following for the first consulting meeting:

At the Design Stage of a Project, bring the following information with you to the meeting:

• A well written short description of your project
• Supporting literature review of the project
• Any data collected during a pilot study or previous studies

At the Analysis State of a Project, bring the following information with you to the meeting:

• Well defined research hypotheses
• Description of how the study was conducted
• Copy of any questionnaires that were used
• Output and code of any preliminary analyses of the data
• Any graphs or plots of the data

he Interdisciplinary Statistics Club is a free-membership club that brings researchers together via the linkage of statistics. The ISC is under the umbrella of Statistics Consulting Center and holds its annual meeting starting from 2010. Both statisticians and researchers who need statistics should find this club very helpful to getting connected with statistics related network at UTRGV.

How to Join

Membership of ISC is free and should be renewed every other year. Note that joining the Club does not automatically register you for the following activities. If you like, please register for activities sponsored by SCC/ISC, see below.