Sunday, April 20, 2008
The study is looking for factors that contribute to good change in young people.
GROVE CITY, Pa. — A $300,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation is enabling three Grove City College psychology faculty members to examine adolescent development.
It’s a three-year study and most of the money is going to pay subjects to participate.
The study is primarily looking for which factors play into good change as opposed to “less than optimal” change.
“It looks like three years is probably the smallest amount of time to see differences in adolescents,” said Dr. Joseph Horton, who, with department Dr. Kevin Seybold and Dr. Gary Welton, is conducting the study.
“We have 235 families in this study,” Horton said. “The families are a sizable group of home-schooling families, another sizable group of families with a student in private school and a sizable group of families with a student in public school.”
Welton said the researchers are using Catholic pupils from two schools in the Hermitage area and one in Greenville, Pa., public school pupils from Grove City and Butler, Pa., and home-schooled pupils from Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia. The three Grove City College faculty members began the study with two groups of pupils – seventh-graders and 10th-graders. Horton said 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.
“[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 said.
In the first year of the study, participants completed extensive questionnaires and the faculty members collected information from pupils, parents and teachers. The varied answers gave researchers three viewpoints of what was happening in the pupils’ 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, the faculty will re-administer what is essentially the original questionnaire to analyze how pupils have changed. At that point, the seventh-graders will be high school freshmen and the 10th-graders will be seniors.
Students in the Grove City College psychology department are 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.
“So far this year we do have some really interesting findings,” Horton said, although the researchers aren’t releasing any details until the study is completed.
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.