RC Research

During the first week of October, Sydney Wagner attended the Southeastern Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences 2022 conference. Working with Dr. Sweet, she presented "Introducing Corporate Psychological Responsibility (CPR)." Sydney has been working with Dr. Sweet since the Spring of 2021 when she began conducting a literature review of multiple different motivational theories, including, but not limited to, Maslow's Hierarchy and Alderfer's E.R.G. Theory. After review, they landed on thirteen or so theories to code for common themes to pull out as key factors in human motivation, and the abstract of the paper that came from this was the topic of the presentation at the conference. The current topic is how motivational theory can be applied in the organizational workplace setting.

This was Sydney's second research conference, and both times she had wonderful experiences. Not only did she learn more about public speaking and presenting her work, but she has also learned a lot more about how to help present feedback to others on their work. She has learned that having multiple perspectives on a project is so important because sometimes there is an easy answer to the question, just through someone else's expertise and experience.

James is currently assisting Dr. Ball with her project that focuses on the partners of formerly incarcerated people. There is very little research in this area, so James and Dr. Ball are conducting in-depth interviews with the partners of former prisoners in order to chronicle their experiences. They have completed almost sixty interviews with people across many different classes, cultures, and regions. At this point in his project, James has worked on compiling an annotated bibliography, responding to inquiries, conducting and transcribing interviews, and entering their data into spreadsheets.

The future of this project will consist of more interviews, more transcribing, and James will begin coding the data collected. Eventually, they hope to publish multiple articles about their findings. James hopes to present at a Criminal Justice conference in the future!