CONSIRT – Cross-National Studies: Interdisciplinary Research and Training program expresses the long and productive collaboration of faculty and graduate students at The Ohio State University (OSU) and at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN).
CONSIRT is the organization that bridges OSU and PAN and whose mandate was renewed in the latest OSU-PAN agreement (2018–2023) signed by President Drake of The Ohio State University and President Duszyński of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Our mission is threefold: First, CONSIRT stimulates cross-national and longitudinal social science research that overcomes the shortcomings of fragmented methodology of comparative studies. Second, we build this research into training programs for graduate and undergraduate students. Our goal is to form a new generation of specialists who meaningfully integrate different methodology strands to produce rigorous, empirically-driven comparative research. Third, CONSIRT promotes and manages an active network of institutions and scholars from across disciplines, fields and countries.
CONSIRT is unique. Currently, there is no other organization within either OSU or PAN that explicitly bridges the U.S. and Europe with as deep and worldwide a scholarly network, and whose sole focus is the creation of high quality academic products on interdisciplinary comparative research and methods. CONSIRT organizes numerous international conferences and workshops, as well as sessions at major international sociology and political science conferences; over seventy OSU faculty, students and alumni participated in our events. We hosted over 90 OSU students in our annual OSU Study Abroad Summer School in Poland. Through the years, CONSIRT helped undergraduate students in our OSU Study Abroad Program to collectively win tens of thousands of USD in grants and fellowships.
CONSIRT has a long history of international and interdisciplinary collaboration. It began with the Across Nations Project of the early 1990s. In 2008, we engaged more disciplines, included undergraduate students in research and training, and strengthened our international network of scholars. Former presidents of OSU (E. Gordon Gee) and PAN (Michał Kleiber) saw CONSIRT’s value and formalized the OSU-PAN cooperation. The Departments of Sociology and Political Science at OSU, and the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology and the Graduate School for Social Research at PAN, established CONSIRT within the framework of this Agreement.
Intellectual Focus
CONSIRT is a comprehensive program that integrates diverse methodological approaches in comparative studies to produce innovative, empirically-driven social science research.
Academics and businesses involved in cross-national and longitudinal research encounter four major problems: (i) limited data coverage across space and time, (ii) inadequate integration of survey data with administrative and other types of non-survey data, including qualitative data, (iii) weak data comparability, and (iv) insufficient implementation of best practices in data collection and documentation, and in comparative analyses.
To address these problems, CONSIRT prioritizes the following research agenda:
- Integration and Harmonization of Cross-National Survey and Contextual Data
- Methodology for Analyzing Multi-Dimensional Data Structures Stemming from Ex-post Survey Harmonization
- Measurement and Analyses of Intersecting Inequalities within and between Nations
- Strategies for Collection and Analysis of Longitudinal Data – Panel and Repeated Cross-sectional Surveys
CONSIRT’s strategic focus on methodology in social science research fosters high-quality scientific products with clear theoretical and practical contributions.
CONSIRT serves scholars at all steps of the research process, from research design to data collection, through data analysis, to the dissemination of results.