Enriching Academics
SSEL offers students across the UAE an opportunity to enrich their academic and research experience and inform their career paths by engaging them in the research process. This experience is critical in helping students select graduate programs and informing their career paths. By having the community participate in SSEL studies, researchers at NYUAD are able to conduct effective and regionally relevant experiments. Participation in SSEL experiments is also open to the entire NYUAD community as well as employees of organizations and the public.
Lab Resources
Zurich Toolbox for Readymade Economic Experiments (z-Tree) is a widely used software for experiments in economics and political science. It is free but requires a license. The Social Science Experimental Laboratory received such license in 2012. Researchers conducting their experiments in SSEL can use different versions of the available software. As z-Tree web site advises, "The sample treatments are probably the easiest way to learn about the new features of z-Tree." The z-Tree tutorial explains through examples some of the most common experiments while still more codes and samples can be found on the internet. The Center of Experimental Social Science at NYU (CESS) created web pages that offer additional examples.
Participatory Experiments
The basic research tool used at SSEL is laboratory experimentation, in which participants engage in decision-making tasks in order to test theoretical predictions and/or the properties of proposed or existing models of human behavior. Anonymous interaction takes place over a computer network, and participants’ identities are not revealed to others in the lab. Researchers at SSEL do not use deceptive identities or materials; participants are given full information concerning the tasks requested of them and all studies must satisfy the SSEL protocol. Participants may withdraw from an experiment at any point in time.
SSEL also supports lab-in-the-field experimentation, with a portable laboratory, as well as traditional survey and field experimentation. SSEL is open to experimentalists from all social sciences and encourages collaborators from economics, political science, sociology, and public policy.
Participant Pool
SSEL currently has a participant pool with approximately 500 members which continues to expand. Apart from the NYUAD community, our members so far have included students from the following universities:
- Canadian University Dubai (CUD)
- Emirates Institute for Banking and Financial Studies (EIBFS) Abu Dhabi
- Emirates Institute for Banking and Financial Studies (EIBFS) Sharjah
- Heriot Watt University, Dubai
- Manipal University, Dubai
- SZABIST Dubai