Young Scholars Debut Fresh Findings at Research Conference

Doing good research is hard. Doing research that meets methodological muster, slays the dragon of dissertation defense and impresses translucent criteria for successful journal submission – that’s a gauntlet survived by only the mightiest Knights of the Academic Roundtable. Ideally, the finished product means something to the student, their school and their wider community. Evading the myopia of a single research specialty and venturing beyond the department’s walls is imperative to nurture groundbreaking research. An academic can break those barriers with feedback from a wider audience. The secret is sharing and revising from beginning to end: framing of the research questions to the placement of commas on final drafts.

The College of Public Service and Community Solutions hosted its second Doctoral Student Research Conference to cultivate interdisciplinary dialogue among its Ph.D. students. Presenting preliminary findings, 30 scholars from the College’s four schools covered wide-ranging topics: the privacy implications of commercial drone technology, the value of differing social enterprise models on public health challenges, and effects of more widely available video from police interactions with the public.

Broken into eight thematic panels moderated by faculty members, the conference showed the value of getting up from behind a desk and talking with fellow students whose expertise lie in seemingly unrelated topics. As School of Social Work Ph.D. candidate Husain Lateef presented research on black youth perceptions of police, a School of Criminology and Criminal Justice doctoral student listened. The criminologist later asked a question relating Lateef’s research to his own. As the panel broke up, the two men shook hands, exchanged information, and promised to share data and collaborate.

Conferences are an important part of scholarly life. Like swallows to Capistrano, researchers from every sub-specialty imaginable flock together at these events. The bookish folk offer line graph data visualization of their own projects and attend presentations that pique their interest. Often, as with the movie business and film festivals, the real action happens outside the meeting rooms, where colleagues break down specifics and exchange offers of assistance. Frequently high stakes affairs, conferences can make for obsessive slide deck preparation and insomnia for the greenhorn graduate student.

The College of Public Service provides a supportive, low-stakes atmosphere at the Doctoral Research Conference. The time will come for these students to offer plenaries in Paris, lead breakout sessions in Berlin, and seal the deal with university presses in Singapore. For now, the Sun Devil tenderfoots can brush up on PowerPoint skills and check how standard error candlesticks look projected onto a big screen.

Before panels begun, College of Public Service Dean Jonathan Koppell encouraged the gathered researchers to engage each other. Though many conferences group presentations together, few events seem to connect each project to each other along some common thread.

Throughout the presentations following Koppell's remarks, ASU faculty members led discussions earnestly tying different research projects together. Cynthia Lietz, senior associate dean of the College, pushed presenters and the audience to discuss connections between research from all four College schools. Lietz’s session on youth development and choices raised important issues of research approach. For Adrienne Baldwin-White, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Social Work, use of “rape” and “sexual assault” meant large differences in survey responses, for example.

Keynote speakers during the lunch session included two recent Ph.D.s from the College of Public Service. Erica McFadden, Ph.D. public administration and policy, and David Pyrooz, Ph.D. criminology and criminal justice, offered their research stories and set the stage for attendees’ future in academia. The nights may be long, the pay may be low, but the experienced scholars wished that luck, and the 95% confidence interval, be always in their favor.