Summer program shows students ins and outs of community-engaged research

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Ten graduate students from universities across the country came to Penn State this summer to learn how to make their research a vehicle for social change.

Led by Ray Block Jr., Brown-McCourtney Career Development Professor in the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and professor of political science and of African American studies, the inaugural Mixed Methods Summer Intensive for Practice-Based Researchers program trained participants how to study civic engagement, organizing and democratic participation as a means of practicing community-engaged research, which brings academics and community groups together to solve problems and influence public policy.

“At a high level, the program is about training scholars who can bridge academic research and civic practice — research that speaks both to scholarly debates and to the needs of communities,” Block said. “Community-engaged research that extends beyond the trappings of academia is very important. We want people who value that to have some kind of home and see examples of how it can be done.”

The two-week residential program included workshops led by faculty from Penn State and other universities. Funding came from the Democracy and Power Innovation Fund and the College of the Liberal Arts.

Block, who also serves as the RAND Corp.’s Michael D. Rich Chair for Countering Truth Decay, said the program came out of the Forum for the Study of Organizing and Collective Action, an organization he formed four years ago with fellow scholars Deva Woodly, Hahrie Han and Daniel J. Galvin to help academics connect with community groups. He and his colleagues recently collaborated on an article about the group’s work that was recently published in the journal The Forum.

“We were doing this work because we honestly cared about it and we think it’s important to be involved in civic engagement,” Block said. “But it’s not obvious how a college professor goes about doing it, so we decided it was something we wanted to share with others who want to do this but don’t have those obvious recommendations on how it works and how to go about doing it.”

The program’s first week focused on methods training, specifically qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods design, as well as ethics and challenges such as selection bias when studying real-world organizations. In the second week, the students applied what they had learned to their own research projects while working alongside one another, exchanging ideas and feedback, meeting with program instructors, and preparing their final presentations.

Block said he was thoroughly impressed with the students’ rigor.

“I see with this cohort a bunch of people who are very motivated and very intentional in how they’re moving,” he said. “When you have a good class like this, it makes you as their teacher work harder.”

Fariha Ahmed was among the students who traveled to University Park for the program. Currently pursuing her master’s degree in social policy at the University of Missouri, she said her research addresses how organizational processes can impact youth belonging and agency.

“One of my goals for the degree is to learn how to make a bridge from policy mechanisms to the people I’m working with, but I started to see in my research that there was a lack of community-centered research in my field,” Ahmed said. “I didn’t know about the prospects and the opportunities in this field, but after coming here I have been connecting with like-minded people who know the focus of their community research. It’s been very positive and motivating.”

Virginia Commonwealth University developmental psychology doctoral student Hailley Moore is researching food-related health disparities, with a particular emphasis on how food and nutrition security impacts long-term chronic illness. She was attracted to the program’s mixed-methods approach.

“To be able to capture stories in a way that can not only show the data and the rigor of quantitative methods, but also just as much rigor in qualitative research, has been really cool to learn about,” she said. “Seeing all the interesting, smart things that everyone is doing, I feel a real sense of belonging here.”

Celine Tsoi, a social psychology graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has focused her scholarship on the processes that make different minority groups want to work together toward a common goal.

“I’ve conducted my first study, and feel like, ‘Now what?’” Tsoi said. “I feel like my work lives in the lab and doesn’t really go anywhere else. I’m just doing a survey and then sending it to a journal, and there’s no real impact aside from a citation.”

The program, she said, has opened her up to a whole new way of approaching her work.

“Doing community research can be scary to do by yourself, but seeing other people engaged in it gives me comfort and encouragement,” she said.

Jaden N. Smith, a second-year doctoral student in sociology at Howard University, is examining increasing college enrollment dropoff rates among Black males. He hopes to use his research to create better, more inclusive systems that can help reverse the trend.

Smith said Block’s research on African American civic engagement has inspired his own work.

“That’s a catalyst that I’m going to try to tap into when trying to understand how we can involve Black males more in the college enrollment process,” Smith said. “What’s great is this is a place where I can bounce ideas off people and be inspired at the same time. The resources I’m building here I plan to bring back to my university. I’m looking forward to what happens after we leave here — I feel like I’d like to work with a lot of people in this group.”