INVESThub brings together social scientists interested in experimental research

INVESThub is a new platform for social scientists focused on experimental and quasi-experimental research. Currently INVESThub is organising a series of brown bags to discuss research ideas and build a scientific community.

INVESThub strengthens the research of interventions and social experiments within the INVEST Research Flagship. INVESThub researches inequality and well-being, but also produces evidence-based intervention programmes that improve welfare society support for children from the beginning of life.

Currently INVESThub is organising a series of talks called “INVESThub Brown Bags” throughout the year. The term “brown bag” comes from brown-coloured lunch bags and refers to a professional meeting where people gather for lunch and talk about research.

– The idea of the series is that once a month we gather around informal yet committed presentations and strengthen the research community interested in experimental work by sharing ideas, experimental designs, comments and questions. My intention was to contribute to build this community and make it vibrant, says Héctor Bahamonde, the research director of the INVESThub.

The “INVESThub Brown Bags” series is targeted to researchers from both inside and outside of the University of Turku. Also, scholars at any level are all welcome to participate in the talks, either by giving a presentation or just by coming to the venue.

– The idea is to involve researchers who may not know what experiments are for, but still are curious about experimental and quasi-experimental research. We also welcome researchers who have a lot of experience with these things or who just published a paper with an experiment or a quasi-experiment involved. So, from both extremes, to also researchers who might want to brainstorm a design or have preliminary results or need to discuss a pre-test. The idea is to bring together everyone from all levels of interest and experience. Everyone is welcome, underlines Bahamonde.

An important aspect of the “INVESThub Brown Bags” is its cross-disciplinarity. The series has researchers coming from Economics, Psychology, Sociology and Political Science.

– This is something really important at the INVESThub. We want to calibrate the “INVESThub Brown Bags” to make it substantively interesting to everyone. It’s really interesting and fun to have researchers with different backgrounds, with their own disciplinary ways to do things, in the same room, concludes Bahamonde.

See the INVESThub Brown Bags programme here.