Since 2013, Lee Smithey’s students in a Swarthmore College sociology elective called Gun Violence Prevention have been working with activists and local groups to research gun homicides in Delaware County, PA. Along with CeaseFire PA, a nonprofit working to end the epidemic of gun violence across Pennsylvania and the U.S., Smithey and his collaborators recently launched an interactive homicide database that pairs information from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports with news accounts, census data, and geospatial information. With its searchable dashboard and data visualizations, antiviolence activists can use the database to educate the community and seek funding to prevent gun violence.
Quoted in an WHYY/NPR story, Swarthmore student researcher Oliver Hicks explained that the researchers were trying to “find any information that we could about each of these individual cases of gun violence,” as they tried to present “a full picture of gun violence in our communities using statistics and data points, but also not losing the kind of grounding, humanizing elements of all of these incidents of gun homicides.” More than 40 undergraduates have been involved with the project, as well as Swarthmore IT staff, librarians, and others associated with the Lang Center for Civic & Social Responsibility.
Multifaceted Benefits
Smithey’s project is a great example of the kind of collaborative community-engaged research that can yield many benefits, not only to community partners but to undergraduates, too. Our students learn best when they can engage in hands-on learning and practical activities that apply sociological methods and knowledge to the real world. Alongside benefits to community partners, applied projects help students hone the skills they are learning as sociology majors.
Part of the Sociological Literacy Framework, these skills include “using the sociological imagination to analyze social problems in context and to generate and evaluate solutions.” Research published by the American Sociological Association (Senter and Spalter-Roth’s 2016 Individual Salary is Not Enough) has shown that such skill-building is important for majors and can impact employment outcomes including job satisfaction, especially when students are able to articulate these skills in resumes and interviews. Employers seek new hires with real-world experience, and community-engaged research can help students gain skills and knowledge that will improve their labor market outcomes (Ciabattari et al. 2018).
Fostering undergraduate involvement in community-engaged research also has an array of benefits for institutions, departments, and faculty. Community-engaged experiences can help foster an inclination for civic participation, a key part of the missions of many colleges and universities. Undergraduate research is often welcomed by administrators, and community-based research can help deans, provosts, and presidents make the case to stakeholders about the relevance of our work.
If you already do community-engaged research with your students, make sure people know about it. You can document projects on department websites (or your own, such as this blog written by sociology professor Carol Glasser at Minnesota State University-Mankato). Departments can feature community-engaged research on social media, and keep it on the radar with the help of an institution’s publicity staff—ASA has tools and advice on public engagement that can help you get started.
Sociologist Melissa Fry, director of the Applied Research & Education Center (AREC) at Indiana University Southeast, said that after more than two decades of work, AREC is the “face of the university in the region”—important at a time when public higher education is underfunded and often under attack. “When we can be on the ground helping solve problems,” Fry says, “we can make the case that what we do is important, and we are raising the profile of sociology in the community.”
Of course, most of us who do community-engaged work with undergraduates are motivated by the desire to put sociological skills to good use for community partners, initiated or otherwise driven by the needs of community groups. Community-engaged research can expand the capacity of local organizations that may not have the tools, knowledge, time, or energy to tackle questions or concerns that can be addressed with sociology. As with Smithey’s project at Swarthmore, community-engaged research teams can access campus resources (e.g., libraries, statistical or other analysis software), and faculty can guide undergraduates to do research to address many types of questions or problems.
Such projects can help inform existing and future programs and employ a wide array of sociological skills and methods. Community-engaged research can help partners make the case for funding or research best practices, a great task for undergraduates who have developed or are developing literature review skills. For instance, a team of undergraduates in my Applied Sociology class did a literature review on best practices for serving the d/Deaf and hard of hearing community for the New Jersey Coalition Against Sexual Assault. Their work resulted in a newsletter piece that went out to all groups that work with survivors in the state.
My students have also worked with local nonprofits to help them analyze existing data. For instance, they have processed and assessed data from a dusty box of paper surveys collected over several years by staff at Habitat for Humanity, and they have also helped the Trenton Circus Squad analyze data from its online survey about the social and emotional learning benefits of the circus squad for young people. We can also work with our students to design and carry out rigorous data collection and analysis efforts, including needs assessments and evaluation research projects like the ones featured on AREC’s Past Projects list.
Diverse Projects, Varied Audiences
Some of the most exciting applied projects are multidisciplinary and include ways to share results with the community—from presenting at a local library to developing fact sheets for public distribution, such as the ones Fry’s students helped produce as part of their needs assessment for the Community Foundation of Southern Indiana. My students’ work on a survey project with Sustainable Lawrence—a local environmental group in the Township of Lawrence, NJ—culminated in a presentation to municipal leaders. They have also contributed oral histories to the Trenton Free Public Library’s Trentoniana Room collection and worked with a photography class to stage a gallery show that addressed the question, “What was Trenton like in the 20 years following World War II, and how has it changed?” as part of a campaign by the East Trenton Collaborative. In Coastal Carolina University’s Rolling Forward Program, sociology professors Sara Brallier and Stephanie Southworth have worked since 2016 with community partner organizations that serve homeless individuals in their area, doing needs assessment surveys as well as regular resource fairs that provide everything from health care to bicycles to people in need.
Such efforts are a great way for students to practice communicating with different audiences, while garnering support for community partners and efforts. For instance, Glasser’s students invited members of the media to a presentation of their research about food insecurity on campus. According to Glasser, the “university has consistently cited this as the study that sparked the fire and provided the data to move them toward putting a food shelf on campus two years later. Of course, there were rock star student activists who kept the ball rolling between the time of the study and the food shelf implementation.” Projects like this one help undergraduates have a lasting impact on the communities where they live and learn.
Overcoming Challenges to Undergraduate Participation
Community-engaged research with undergraduates is not without its complications. A major challenge comes with timing. Course-embedded projects often last one semester, so being able to design and implement a research project quickly can be difficult, especially when human subjects’ approval from your campus Institutional Review Board (IRB) is necessary. I only teach my applied sociology course in the fall, so I have time over the summer to set up projects and work with community partners (and sometimes a few students who do related summer independent research). I also use this time to establish structures for student communication and leadership and add materials to my syllabus that will scaffold in the skills students will need for the particular projects that semester. It can also be a way to start the IRB process in time to complete the project in the fall semester. This allows us to hit the ground running in the fall.
To avoid the problems presented by a short-term community engagement, Rebecca Christensen, director of engaged learning/project community and lecturer III at the University of Michigan sociology department, teaches a two-semester course sequence as part of the department’s Project Community program, one of the longest running community-engaged learning programs in the country. Students take a Sociology in Action course in the first semester, during which they learn about community organizations, local inequalities, and social issues, and focus on knowledge-building and consciousness-raising before embarking on a second-semester project driven by the needs of community partners.
Christensen said the model addresses concerns of community partners that investing in a short-term project with students can take up a lot of time and training, so if students can contribute for a longer time and do more advanced work, they benefit. But students benefit, too, says Christensen, “I see a lot of growth in the students. They really blossom in their second semester. Having a full year cements the community-engaged principles.” The projects have varied from qualitative research on food quality in local jails, to the co-development—with an HIV/AIDS advocacy group—of a survey on the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP), a medicine taken to prevent getting HIV.
Another exciting model comes from the AREC at Indiana University Southeast, where six to eight undergraduate students work as paid staff members each year. According to AREC Director Melissa Fry, “we are able to do quite a bit with an undergraduate staff,” who learn as they work on projects over several years, with veteran students mentoring newer ones. She says that paying students is important because most AREC student staff members could not do the work if they were not getting paid; “they cannot afford to sacrifice income.” There is also potential for independent studies, student theses, small-group projects, and paid internships. Being nimble can help students gain different types of experience and continue projects over a longer period.
Faculty should be attentive to inclusivity, so that students from underrepresented groups have the opportunity to fully participate in community-engaged research. By embedding this work in the undergraduate curriculum, approaches like the Community-Initiated Student-Engaged Research, or CISER model, advocated by Miriam Greenberg, Rebecca A. London, and Steven C. McKay at the University of California-Santa Cruz, can contribute to learning outcomes, increase persistence to graduation, and foster inclusivity for students from historically underrepresented groups.
Community-engaged research with undergraduates provides avenues for professional development that can strengthen faculty pedagogy and sociological research skills. Departments can facilitate these goals by valuing community-engaged research and other forms of public sociology within promotion guidelines. There are also opportunities to recognize undergraduates who are interested in community-engaged research, including competitions and paper awards from the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology. If you are new to community-engaged research and want help getting your undergraduate students involved, seek out entities on your campus that support this work. Many colleges and universities participate in networks like Campus Compact, and even those that do not likely have relationships with community partners that may help you get started. If you want inspiration, or perhaps funding for projects that are underway, be sure to review ASA’s Community Action Research Initiative (CARI) grant program, its Sociology Action Network’s “Profile” page, and the Sociological Initiatives Foundation. Even small projects can make a big difference!
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
