Collaborative Research at Skidmore (continued)

Collaborative Research (continued)

Skidmore students and their professors have worked together on numerous research projects. This kind of high-level scholarship does more than enhances a student's understanding in a given disipline; the practical, hands-on experience and "real-world" accomplishment also instill a sense of confidence that will benefit a graduate in any career. Projects from recent years appear below, arranged by academic area.

Sociology

Project: Trends in the Gender and Racial Composition of Government Work Forces
Participants: Professor Catherine White Berheide and Melissa Arentshorst '01
Plan: Previous research (e.g., Deitch, 1994; Needleman, 1994) has documented the negative economic consequences for women and minorities of declines in public sector employment. We propose to conduct a longitudinal study of changes in the gender, race, and ethnic composition of non-federal government work forces in the 1990s, a time of significant government downsizing. Using data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity commission EEO-4 surveys in 1990 and 1997, we plan to examine changes over time in the gender, race, and ethnicity of employees in all eight EEO-4 job categories within state and local governments.

Project: Community Justice in Vermont
Participants: Assistant Professor David Karp and Ryan Fairley, '01
Plan: This study will examine a new correctional program in Vermont (1998 recipient of the Ford Foundation's Innovations in Government Award). In this "restorative justice" program, citizen boards sentence criminal offenders so that they can make amends to victims and communities harmed by their offenses. The collaborative research project has two components: (1) videotaping board hearings to examine the offender-board member relationship; (2) creating a dataset and analyzing a large sample of board cases to determine the effectiveness of this correctional program.

Project: An Analysis of Men's Roles in Neglectful Families
Participants: Professor Catherine White Berheideand Lani Radack '99
Plan: The goal of this experience is to extend the feminist critique of family violence research to the study of child neglect to explore whether the role men play in the family affects the likelihood of child neglect occurring within it.

Creative Thought Matters.