Survey Research Center names Miranda Kaye as new director

Miranda Kaye has been appointed as the new director at the Survey Research Center (SRC) at Penn State. She will begin on Sept. 1, succeeding Diana Crom, who is retiring from Penn State after many years of service.

Kaye completed her bachelor of science in human development and family studies at Cornell University, her master of science in kinesiology from Arizona State University, and her doctorate in kinesiology from Penn State.

Kaye’s research focuses on scale measurement, including the dissemination and implementation of health and well-being interventions, positive parent-child interactions, and youth development.

“I have a lot of experience with different types of research in the social science field so I’m excited to be able to bring that to the center,” Kaye said.

Before working at the SRC, Kaye was a research and evaluation scientist for the Clearinghouse for Military Family Readiness at Penn State and taught research methods and statistics at Ithaca College. Both the SRC and the Clearinghouse are units of Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute.

“I had the opportunity to do such amazing work with military families at the Clearinghouse,” Kaye said. “We were doing program implementation, dissemination, evaluation, and applied research with military family programs. We worked with practitioners and looked at the impact [these programs] had on families.”

The mission of the SRC is to provide high quality survey research services to researchers, faculty, graduate students, and administrative units at Penn State. Kaye said that while much of her work in the past year has involved phone-based data collection, the SRC also collects data in schools, homes, focus groups, interviews and through mail and online surveys.

Kaye has worked on a variety of projects at the SRC. She managed data collection for the PEAK Project, led by Jim Diperna, professor and director of Penn State’s school psychology program. According to Kaye, data collection for the PEAK Project involved implementation and evaluation of a social emotional curriculum among school children.

Kaye also worked closely with Glenn Sterner, assistant professor of criminal justice at Penn State Abington, in a large-scale random digit dialing project across Pennsylvania concerning interactive online gaming habits.

Looking to the future, Kaye said she hopes to get more Penn State students involved in the research done at the SRC through promoting the center’s work.

“This is an area I’m passionate about,” Kaye said. “I’ve had the opportunity to try out and be involved in so many different types of research, so I’m excited to be able to expand that even more.”