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PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT STUDIES ADOLESCENCE |
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February 26, 2008
GROVE CITY, Pa. – Three faculty members in the Grove City College psychology department have been conducting research on adolescent development. Their project has been funded by a $300,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation, which provides monies for “rigorous scientific research and related cutting-edge scholarship” on core themes such as forgiveness, generosity, prayer and meditation, purpose, ultimate reality and unconditional love – among many other things.
Department chair Dr. Kevin Seybold, along with Dr. Joseph Horton and Dr. Gary Welton, says they are making some interesting discoveries.
“I think we’re going to get some good papers out of it, good presentations,” Seybold said. The three are careful about the information they release because “we don’t want anyone in the study to get preconceived ideas about how to respond next year,” Horton added.
College President Dr. Richard G. Jewell ’67 first suggested that the department propose the research project to the Templeton Foundation. The professors wrote a 30-page proposal, which included a literature review, description of research method, justification for the study and budget, as well as what they would do with the results. Their original plan was for an eight-year study, but Templeton proposed a shorter study period.
“It looks like three years is probably the smallest amount of time to see differences in adolescents,” Horton said. He added that most of the money from the Templeton grant went to paying subjects to participate.
“We have 235 families in this study,” Horton continued. “The families are a sizeable group of home-schooling families; we have another sizeable group of families with a student in private school and a sizeable group of families with a student in public school.” According to Welton, the researchers used Catholic students from two schools in the Hermitage, Pa., area and one in Greenville, Pa.; public school students from Grove City and Butler, Pa.; and home-schooled students from Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia.
The three Grove City College faculty members began the study with two groups of students – seventh graders and 10th graders. Horton said that one of the challenges with longitudinal studies that follow people over time is the difficulty in assessing the same research points repeatedly as developmental levels change. For example, according to Horton, the group could use the same questionnaires to assess seventh graders and ninth graders because “their reading levels have not changed dramatically,”
“[This is] not just a static study but we’re going to be following the same people over time to see how children change,” he added. Horton, Seybold and Welton are primarily looking for which factors play into good change as opposed to “less than optimal” change.
In the first year of the study, participants completed extensive questionnaires and the faculty members collected information from students, parents and teachers. These varied answers gave the researchers three viewpoints of what was happening in the students’ lives.
This semester, families will participate in focus groups, which will give an “interesting richness that you do not get from a questionnaire,” Horton said. The professors will follow up the focus groups with further interviewing.
In the third year of the study, the faculty members will re-administer what is essentially the original questionnaire to analyze how students have changed. At that point, the seventh graders will be high school freshmen and the 10th graders will be seniors in high school.
“So far this year we do have some really interesting findings,” Horton said.
The workload was divided according to the strengths of the three faculty members. Seybold made phone calls and many of the initial contacts with school districts to get permission to interview students and kept track of the financial aspects of the project; Welton performed most of the statistical analysis; and Horton made most of the school visits to collect the information. He specializes in child psychology.
While their research is not entirely unique, “putting the positive psychology and the longitudinal component together I think will make some significant contributions to the discipline,” Welton said.
Over the past year, the group has presented some initial findings to various conferences. In August of last year, Seybold took the research to the American Scientific Affiliation with Christians in Science conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. This November, the researchers took their work to the National Council on Family Relations conference in Pittsburgh. They are waiting for word on a submission made to a third conference.
Students in the Grove City College psychology department are now required to conduct their own independent research, and a half dozen students have been involved in the adolescence project in various ways. Welton said he thinks more student research will be a part of the project in the future.
“One of my goals throughout this entire effort is to create more avenues for our psychology majors to get involved in research,” Welton said. “I think as we move ahead with the effort and start to develop more hypotheses and research ideas, we could easily find this becoming a very significant opportunity for lots of students to get involved with particular pieces of the puzzle.”
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