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Job Description

Research Associate/ Research Fellow (quantitative/mixed-methods)

Type: 1-year contract (renewable), full-time, Singapore-based

About the Role
Join an interdisciplinary research team examining how co-located community hubs-such as Our Tampines Hub, Heartbeat @ Bedok, One Punggol, and Wisma Geylang Serai-shape social capital, intergenerational connection, and community capacity in Singapore. Designed to optimise land use and bring together health, social, cultural, and daily-life services within a single space, these hubs are emerging as vital platforms for community engagement and wellbeing in dense urban settings. They offer rich testbeds for community-based research, participatory innovation, and real-world evaluation.

This role provides a unique opportunity to work across public health, behavioural science, urban design, and community arts, advancing actionable knowledge on how the built environment and community programming can foster inclusion, belonging, and social resilience in cities.

What You'll Do
1) Measurement Research
• Design and lead the development of measurement frameworks and tools to assess constructs such as social capital, community capacity, trust, and place-based engagement.
• Conduct literature reviews, qualitative research (e.g., interviews, focus groups), and secondary data analysis, as well as review and adapt existing survey instruments, to create measurement scales/indexes
• Facilitate Delphi panels and expert consultations to validate item relevance, wording, and weighting.
• Pilot, revise, and finalize tools for use in both academic research and practitioner settings.
• Perform psychometric testing to establish reliability and validity of the developed instruments.
2) Socio-Spatial Analysis and User Profiling
• Design and integrate survey and observational data across multiple research streams to generate spatially informed insight for co-located community hubs
• Collaborate with urban design and built-environment experts to conduct socio-spatial analyses and develop digital tools for mapping and studying public life in community spaces.
• Integrate GIS, accessibility, and land-use data with user and programming outcomes to analyse how the design and spatial layout of community hubs influence engagement and inclusion, and to develop a typology of community hubs.
3) Stakeholder Engagement and Translation
• Coordinate a multi-agency advisory group involving academics, government, and industry partners.
• Translate findings into toolkits, templates, referral workflows, and training modules for practitioners.
• Prepare and present policy briefs, reports, and visual summaries for government and community audiences.
4) Project Management and Ethics
• Manage IRB submissions, ethics documentation, and data governance processes.
• Ensure data integrity, documentation, and reproducibility across research partners.
• Track project milestones, reporting, and deliverables under the Cities of Tomorrow (CoT) R&D Programme.

Requirements
• At least 3 years of research experience in community, health, or built-environment project. Interdisciplinary backgrounds and applied research experience in real-world settings are highly valued.
• Proficiency in R, Stata, SPSS, or Python with skills in quantitative and measurement skills (survey design, psychometrics, regression, multilevel modelling, factor analysis).
• Excellent writing, facilitation, and stakeholder engagement skills; comfortable presenting to practice audiences.
• Fluency in English as the candidate will need to coordinate a multi-agency advisory group involving academics, government, and industry partners.

Qualifications

• Master's/PhD in Public Health, Urban Planning, Human Geography, Psychology, Data Science, or related disciplines.