Subcommittees in Large-scale Studies Posted on December 4, 2007 Jay Belsky (bio) describes 'pods' that served different functions in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care.

We actually had a strategy. We had lots of data and lots of questions, and we still do. We ended up doing was creating two sets of groups. One was a pod which were basically data reduction groups. So let’s say we had interview data that we wanted to refine down to create some measures of whatever it was.

Well there’s no one way to do that, so a sub-committee basically was charged with doing that. Or let’s say we had a semi-standardized instrument, but we had to do psychometric analyses and generate measures in our case of child care quality or of parenting or of instruction at school and instructional style. Well these weren’t off the shelf measures. If they were off the shelf measures, it was just a matter of checking their psychometric reliability and validity, et cetera. If they weren’t, then we had to create constructs out of them.

So we had different pods who would work on the child care quality data, the child behavior data in the child care center, the teacher behavior data, the parent/child video tape interaction data, and basically they were kind of like a supplier who took the raw material and now supplied to the whole group the variables that were going to be in the analytic data set. So they had manufactured the raw material for the rest of us.

So that’s how the pods worked. Then there was another group of people and these are overlapping in terms of memberships were a paper writing group. So we would say, “We’re going to have a paper on this. We’re going to have a paper on that. We’re going to have a paper on this.” Those three or four people were charged with preparing that paper.

So they would take the leadership, laying out the analytic plan and they’d actually have to write an analytic plan up with a sketch of a paper and distribute to the whole steering committee who would then approve it, make comments on it, suggest, “you need to consider this,” or, “What about that,” or that kind of thing. So that was the first round of feedback. They’d go off and do the paper then bring back the data, make a presentation, some more questions would be asked, answered. Maybe things would change. Maybe they wouldn’t. Then they’d go back and do some more, then they’d write up the paper.

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