The UCLA Statistical Consulting Group offers many services to UCLA researchers. Most of our services are provided free of charge. Our services are listed below, along with details regarding the service. Please note that we do not offer telephone consulting (that is to say, we do not answer statistical consulting questions over the phone).
The goal of the UCLA Statistical Consulting Group is to help UCLA faculty, staff, and graduate students perform top-notch research, with the greatest emphasis on data analysis related to grants and publications, but also including dissertation research. We provide advice and resources to enable you to develop and/or extend your statistical computing skills, helping you to independently use common statistical packages for the analysis of research data.
Please visit our services FAQ page for more information and examples of the services that we offer.
Walk-in consulting
- Walk-in consulting will be closed indefinitely. Please see our page on remote consulting for details about this service.
- Appointments: We do not make appointments, except for UCLA faculty. UCLA researchers are welcome to use our remote consulting services.
Email consulting
- Affiliation: Email consulting is available only to members of the UCLA research community: Faculty, staff researchers, post-docs, visiting scholars and graduate students. If you are a member of the UCLA research community, but are sending your question from a non-UCLA email account (e.g., hotmail, gmail, etc.), please be sure to indicate your affiliation with UCLA in your email. We regret that we are not able to assist researchers who are not currently affiliated with UCLA.
- UCLA Alumni: We are unable to provide consulting services to former UCLA students. This includes UCLA alumni who are working with a UCLA faculty member on a publication. Requests for assistance must come directly from the UCLA faculty member, and assistance will be provided directly to the UCLA researcher.
- Email address: You may send your email question to idrestat@ucla.edu . We request that questions not be sent to individual consultants.
- Response time: Emails questions are usually answered within 2-3 business days. We will make our best effort to respond within 2-3 business days; however, due to the high volume of email questions it may take us longer to reply.
- Stat package: Please indicate which statistical package you are using (e.g., SAS, Stata, SPSS, etc.). It is also often helpful if you include the version of the software and the platform on which you are running the software (e.g., Windows, Mac, etc.).
- Information to include:
If you are having difficulty with a certain task, especially a data
management task, please be sure to include in your email:
- a clear description of the task that you are trying to accomplish
- the code that you used to accomplish this task
- the error message issued or the reason you believe the task was not successfully accomplished.
- Files to include: If it helps explain your question
or questions, you can include your data file, program file and/or output file. We cannot accept attachments larger than 10 mb.
- If you send an output file, please also include the syntax that generated the output (you can include that in the body of the email or as a separate attachment).
- If you send a data file, please include only the relevant variables.
- Sample email questions:
- In my model, the interaction of a categorical variable and a continuous variable is statistically significant. I would like to graph this two-way interaction in SPSS. Could you tell me how to graph it in SPSS?
- I am using proc gplot in SAS. If I want to label my points, how do I go about it?
- I am running the mixed command in Stata. How do I calculate the intraclass correlation based on the output of the model?
- When to come to walk-in consulting: If you find yourself spending a long time writing an email question or if you think it will take a long time to explain your situation/question, it usually means that your question is too complicated for email consulting, and it might be time to make a visit to our walk-in consulting. Please note that we cannot provide assistance to undergraduate students or graduate students who are working on homework, papers or projects for a class.
Mailing list
- You can send a message to ATSSTAT-L+subscribe@lists.ucla.edu to join the ATSstat-L mailing list. A verification e-mail will be sent to your e-mail address. To confirm your request, reply to that message. You will receive to 2-4 emails per month announcing updates to the consulting schedule, upcoming classes and workshops, etc.
Workshops and classes
- We have more than 60 online seminars that you can access 24/7 by visiting our Workshops and classes page. This page also lists any live workshops and/or classes that will be presented during the current quarter.
Stat books for loan
- When and where: Books may be borrowed and returned visiting Statistical Consulting in Math Sciences 4919 during walk-in consulting hours. For a list of books available and our lending policy, please see our Stat Books for Loan page.
- How long: Books are due two weeks from the time you borrow them, and you may have a total of two books on loan at any given time. Although you can have a book for two weeks, we kindly request that you return the book early if you are finished with it early, as this helps to keep books in stock for other researchers.
- Renewals: Books cannot be renewed.
- Policy on late returns: It is important to return your book on time, and if you do not return your book on time it will be counted as late. If you have three late returns, you will no longer be permitted to borrow books.
- Returning books: Please return books during regular consulting hours. If you cannot stop by during regular consulting hours, you may return your book(s) to the IDRE main office, MS 5308 (on the fifth floor). This office is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- Please do NOT:
- leave books on the floor outside of the consulting office.
- mail books back to us, as they tend to get lost in the mail. If you know that you will be going out of town, it is your responsibility to return your book(s) before you leave.
List of statistical consultants and tutors for hire
- We maintain a list of statistical consultants and tutors for hire. You can email us at idrestat@ucla.edu to request that list.
FAQ
- Please visit our services FAQ page for more information and examples of the services that we offer.
Fee-for-service
- The UCLA Statistical Consulting Group can be hired to do data analysis for UCLA researchers on a fee-for-service basis.
The researcher must be a faculty or staff member currently affiliated with UCLA and must have a grant or other funding
source with a full accounting unit (FAU). The process begins with an initial meeting (for which the client is not
charged) to discuss the research project, the proposed statistical methods, and the scope of the work.
If the members of the UCLA Statistical Consulting Group and the researcher decide that a fee-for-service
arrangement will be mutually beneficial, then a Consulting Agreement is drawn up, including a
Scope of Work (which lists all of the tasks that the UCLA Statistical Consulting Group will do) and a
timeline. The minimum amount of time that can be allotted to a project is 10 hours. A good-faith effort
is made by the members of the UCLA Statistical Consulting Group to complete the work within the
allotted time. Addendums and extensions are considered on an as-needed basis. The type of work that
can be done by the UCLA Statistical Consulting Group includes:
- power analyses for grants
- research design and data collection
- data management
- descriptive data analysis and graphing
- statistical modeling and hypothesis testing
- creating publication-quality graphs
- editing methods and results sections describing the research and
- assisting with reviewer comments.
The UCLA Statistical Consulting Group can also provide training in the use of statistical software packages and statistical methods for research labs.