About the Social Science Data Library
Staff SSDL Services Advisory Committee Contact Information
Staff
David Elesh, Director
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David Ford, Assistant Director
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Data Specialist(position currently unfilled) |
Data Specialist(position currently unfilled) |
David Elesh is a faculty member in sociology and Director of the Social Science Data Library. An urban sociologist, he has co-authored two books about the Greater Philadelphia metropolitan area's increasing diversity and inequality, the most recent of which, Restructuring the Region: Metropolitan Divisions and Inequality, was published by Temple University Press in 2008. He also is co-principal investigatorwith Carolyn Adams, David Bartelt, and Mark Mattson of the Department of Geography and Urban Studies, of the Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project. Reports from the project’s research and its interactive mapping application, MetroPhilaMapper, are available through the project’s website, 
David Ford became the Assistant Director of the Social Science Data Library in 2003. Mr. Ford has led the data library’s transition from a secondary data provider service to a comprehensive research consulting service supporting a wide variety of methods related to data collection, data analysis, results presentation and data archival. In addition to training graduate student data specialists and managing Temple’s research consulting service, he has initiated a variety of programs to support research methods at Temple, including seminars focusing on specific methods (qualitative data analysis software, data collection methods, and statistical software packages such as SAS), seminars about specialized data sets (Hospital admissions data, Philadelphia geographic and administrative data, and financial data from WRDS), as well as organizing advanced research methods discussion groups for both quantitative and qualitative researchers. Mr. Ford, who plays jazz trumpet in his spare time, spent twelve years as a public policy consultant before coming to the SSDL.