With DataCenter’s help, you’ll learn how to collect and analyze data and effectively tell you own stories in your own voices, in ways that are relevant to communities and cannot be ignored by social and political institutions. Through a combination of trainings, curriculum and tools, we teach you how to develop skills in research methodologies and participatory research methods.

Our training services include:

• Interactive and participatory trainings in

research design

research strategy

research methods

data analysis

• Training toolkits and curriculum development
• Interactive tools to transfer research skills to communities
• Research internships Read More!
• Annual intensive research training academies

Stories of Success: Khmer Girls in Action

Our interactive work to help organizations develop their voices demystifies the process of research. The excitement and sense of ownership this can inspire resonates through all of our work, especially our work with Khmer Girls in Action (KGA).

The 60,000 Khmer girls attending high schools in Long Beach, CA are usually lumped into programs targeting Asian and Southeast Asian students. But this prevented Khmer girls from receiving support that responded to their particular cultural needs regarding language barriers, genocide in their home county, and racism. We helped KGA learn how to ask for customized education and community programs by developing its own voice.

A three-part training process provided KGA the tools to tap into its knowledge and expertise, tailored to their needs, interactive and accessible. With DataCenter, KGA learned:

• social science research methods, such as focus groups and surveys, so they could understand the criteria that institutional reviewers and others would apply to their findings.
• a process to guide its research by defining roles, developing a timeline, and demonstrating how each step of the process strengthened their research.
• investigative research methods that helped KGA uncover studies that informed its research and prevented it from duplicating the work of others.

Because the training broke down research methodology into concepts the girls understood, research seemed fun and accessible. They didn’t need a lab coat or a Ph.D. to engage in it. This motivated them to train other members and to recruit even more Khmer girls to the group. The KGA has now begun to conduct the first ever studies of racism and other issues facing girls in the American Khmer community.