Contract Consulting Services

Location: 3.04 Painter Hall

Schedule an appointment

We are pleased to offer professional data-analysis services to UT faculty and staff researchers with complex statistical or data management projects. Our consulting services can be tailored to meet your needs. Our consultants can guide you through the process of taking a raw dataset to a polished publication, or directly assist you you’re your analyses by performing programming, data management, or analysis in a variety of applications. We support SAS, SPSS, Stata, AMOS, HLM, Mplus, Matlab, Maple, Mathematica, and others. If you desire, our consultants can also assist you in writing up the results for publication.

Hourly Rates

Contracts are charged at a rate of $65 per hour, with a minimum charge of $650. Charges must be paid through an IDT from a University account.

To Request an Appointment

We invite UT faculty and staff with statistical or data management projects to contact the consulting coordinator at contracts@ssc.utexas.edu to learn more about our contract services. We would like to know the basic aims and goals of the project along with a brief description of your data analysis needs. Based on this information, the consulting coordinator will assign a primary consultant or consultant(s) to your project. Within two business days (48 hours), we will get back to you to schedule a meeting to discuss the potential contract.

Establishing A Contract

Prior to beginning actual work on any project, an SSC representative will meet with you to discuss and complete a simple, one-page contract. At that time, you will be asked to provide a billing contact and address, as well as a UT Austin Account Number for Interdepartmental Transfer Voucher (IDTV). When the project is complete, a detailed invoice will be sent to you along with a copy of the completed contract.

Short Term Projects

For projects expected to be completed within one or two weeks, a single meeting is usually sufficient to outline the requirements for services to be performed. During this meeting, required services, deliverables, and a timeline is specified.

Longer-Term Projects

For projects expected to continue for several weeks, we hold an initial meeting to outline and prioritize the proposed work. For these longer-term projects, a written description of the proposed work will be sent to you for your approval before work commences. Subsequent meetings will be scheduled as needed to clarify project deliverables. For longer-term projects, the consultant will provide regular status reports that include descriptions of progress, obstacles, and anticipated completion dates for each phase of the project.

Contract Consulting Policies

We provide the following guidelines and information to facilitate the use of our services as well as to detail what researchers can expect, and what is expected of them, when using our contract statistical and mathematical consulting services.

Can students have a contract?

Using departmental, grant, or endowment funds managed through the UT-Austin Office of Accounting, a faculty member may contract for services related to a student’s research for and preparation of a report, thesis, or dissertation provided that the faculty member is the student’s supervisor of record and that the following conditions are met:

the contracted service is incidental to the nature of the underlying project and the student already has or does not need to acquire the related knowledge and skills necessary for such work as part of the degree program;
if any deliverable is directly incorporated into a report, thesis, or dissertation, the student must explicitly acknowledge that it was acquired through DSSC contract consulting services and does not represent his or her original work;
the student’s supervisor of record, who is also the contracting client of record, transmits to the DSSC consulting coordinator a signed and dated statement agreeing to these terms.

When will my consultant be available to work with me?

Contract work is performed during regular working days and hours (i.e., Monday-Friday 8-5, and not during University holidays). The consultant will work to set a timeline and schedule that is as convenient as possible for you, while balancing the needs of other clients and projects.

When is co-authorship considered appropriate?

If a research project calls for only standard statistical or mathematical designs and analyses, then co-authorship is not necessarily required. If, on the other hand, the problem demands nonstandard techniques or considerable effort (e.g., the consultant writes a portion of a report or article), then co-authorship may be required. It is important to discuss this issue early in the client-consultant relationship.

Please note that contract policies may be subject to change