About the Social Science Data Library

Staff SSDL Services Advisory Committee Contact Information

Staff

David Elesh, Director

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, www.temple.edu/mpip. A past chair of the American Sociological Association’s section on Communications and Information Technologies, he also has published articles on the replication of structures of inequality on the internet with Shanyang Zhao.

David Ford, Assistant Director

David Ford became the Assistant Director of the Social Science Data Library in 2003. Mr. Ford has lead 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.

Scott Deacle, Data Specialist

Scott Scott Deacle is a doctoral student in economics at Temple University. In his dissertation research he uses stock and bond market data to study the riskiness of financial institutions. He is co-author with four others of A Toolbox for Economic Design (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), a textbook on mechanism design theory and applications. Scott has worked extensively with SAS and Stata and analyzed a variety of time series and panel data models. Before starting graduate studies at Temple, Scott worked for six years as a newspaper reporter, with stints at four newspapers including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Scranton Times-Tribune. He holds a bachelor's degree in history from the College of William and Mary and a master's degree in economics from Temple.

Ricky Moye, Data Specialist

Ricky Ricky Moye is a doctoral student in the Sociology Department. He is currently working on his dissertation proposal which focuses on racial transition in neighborhoods and the impact on property values. Ricky has performed qualitative data analysis as a research consultant at Public/Private Ventures. He has served as a teaching assistant for various sociology courses. Ricky can provide assistance with both SPSS and Stata statistical programs, as well as with the ArcView GIS software program. He can provide assistance to both qualitative and quantitative researchers in the formulation of projects, acquisition of data, and use of software for data analysis.