Faculty Fellows for Research
You probably started graduate school with excitement and lots of questions about your discipline. Now you have the opportunity to work on answering your questions and contribute to building the body of knowledge that you found so fascinating. The Faculty Fellows for Research can help you make the most of your opportunity. Specifically, we can meet with you individually or work with faculty in groups to help you:
- Think about research and get started. Research is not easy, but we believe that it can be a lot of fun. However, we also recognize that not everyone necessarily has the same view. Perhaps we can spend some time with you working to recapture some of the excitement you felt as you started to explore your discipline. Exploration is at the heart of research, and we can help you to think about ways to make the exploration less daunting and more fun.
- Conceptualize research problems. In order to successfully create publishable research, you need to get a handle on how to structure your exploration. We can help you deal with a number of questions that emerge at this stage: How might you approach research? What kinds of problems can readily lead to a research program?
- Develop research strategies. How might you begin to work on addressing the issues that you have identified? How can you formulate testable hypotheses? How might you develop a program of research? What skills and resources do you need? Do you need to consider funding, and if so, what strategies might you adopt?
- Develop research designs. Fancy analyses of data obtained from poorly designed studies generally are not well received. We can help you design studies to answer your questions and produce results that can readily be disseminated in presentations and publications.
- Develop measures/means for data collection. Whether you collect data or extract them from existing sets, proper consideration of how to quantify or classify phenomena can profoundly impact the value of your work. We can help you in considering your data needs, developing measures, means for collecting or extracting data, and considering alternatives.
- Develop research procedures for your study. We can help you with taking your design to the point where you can actually begin to collect data.
- Plan and implement analysis strategies. We can help you to think through the process of data analyses and with understanding the strengths and potential pitfalls of particular approaches. Although we do have familiarity with many of the statistical packages, helping with utilization of the actual packages is generally outside our scope.
- Interpret results. In many cases, we can help you with interpreting the output from your analyses. Between us we have broad exposure to many different kinds of analyses, can find resources for many others, and we would be pleased to assist in this phase of your research.
- Provide constructive feedback. We can review and critique manuscripts and grant proposals prior to submission either individually or in the context of “quality circles” that utilize the expertise of other faculty members.
- Find outlets. Finally, we can help you disseminate the knowledge that you create by working with you to find publication and presentation outlets for your research.
Tom Ford tford@email.wcu.edu 227-2109