Research Support Assistant

About the Organization

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. Anchored by a network of 194 affiliated professors at universities around the world, J-PAL conducts randomized impact evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty. J-PAL South Asia, based at the Institute for Financial Management and Research in India, leads J-PAL’s work in the South Asia region. J-PAL South Asia conducts randomized evaluations, builds partnerships for evidence-informed policymaking, and helps partners scale up effective programs. Over more than ten years of existence, J-PAL South Asia has conducted 193 ongoing and completed randomized evaluations.

About the position

You will be working for Kailash Rajah, an Economics PhD student at MIT, on a field experiments identifying barriers to women’s employment in India. The project presents an excellent learning opportunity to work very closely with a PI on designing, implementing, and analysing data from a series of field experiments in India. The role also involves a large field component allowing you to gain experience designing surveys, collecting data, and monitoring teams. The position is based in JPAL’s Patna office.

J-PAL South Asia is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to age, disability, family status, gender identity, race, religion, sexual orientation and other attributes protected by law. We strongly encourage people from marginalized communities to apply for this role.

Project Specific Details-

In many conservative countries, including India, social norms limit the interaction of married women with men outside of their family. Such constraints on women’s mobility may make it difficult to participate in the labour market, particularly given most workplaces are mixed-gender. In this project, we test whether the presence of men in the workplace limits female labour force participation. We then conduct a series of follow-up experiments to understand the mechanisms that may be driving this. We hope the findings of this project will help to inform the design of future interventions and policies aimed at increasing women’s employment in India.

Important: Please complete this Google Form (here) in addition to filing an application through the JPAL portal. We will only be reviewing applicants who have completed the Google Form. Please apply before 15^th July 2024.

Key Responsibilities

Research Support Assistants work closely with Research Associates, Research managers and Academic researchers and other field staff to perform a variety tasks including, but not limited to:

Research Design and Data Management
Designing survey questionnaires, conducting qualitative research, running pilot/backchecking exercises, refining study design and survey instruments
Ensuring that the project complies with research protocols related to data collection and security
Supervising data collection and data entry to ensure good data quality
Work with data sets, prepare and run codes regularly for daily data cleaning and analysis in STATA
Ability to analyze and interpret data using statistical packages like STATA and produce output, including graphs and tables
Managerial / Operational
Maintaining relationship with partner organizations
Managing teams: Recruit, train, and supervise both field-based and data operations teams consisting of project assistants, field managers, field-based surveyors, data entry operators and other field and office staff
Overseeing the on-ground implementation of the implemention in accordance with the research design in association with our partner organization. Further, making sure the project is on track in terms of timelines.
Liaising with field staff and collaborating with them including regular travel to research field sites; focus of work is to advise on quality control of data collection practices.
Supporting the project in design the survey instruments and coding it in Qualtrics
Any other task as assigned by the PIs