Research

The bulk of my research currently centers around my own dissertation-in-progress and my support as a consultant to the research of others.

Dissertation

My dissertation topic involves the study of adolescents' attitudes towards control: Who do they believe controls their academic success?

High school students recognize many (but not all) of the ways that they influence their academic success through their behaviors. Prior research has demonstrated that students who believe they have relatively less control are less likely to attend class regularly, study, or complete assignments.

Can students be helped to find ways to take more control of their academic outcomes? And if so, do they have the potential to be more successful?

My dissertation will involve an experimental intervention to help shape high school students' attitudes towards control. The intervention will be administered through a computer-animated multimedia program with the purpose of helping students glimpse the complex, sometimes elusive mechanisms in which one's actions are responsible for shaping one's own success (and failure).

My subspecialization paper, as part of my doctoral qualifying examinations, investigated the theoretical and technological aspects of using this type of multimedia intervention directed towards a stress management focus.

Pro Bono Consultancy

In 2003, I wrote a computer software program to help Counseling students, researchers, and practitioners to make electronic surveys. The program was first installed on the University of Florida's Grove server, a Unix environment with PHP/MySQL support.

After a year of field testing conducted by dissertating Ph.D. students in the department of Counselor Education, I launched CounselingSurveys.org, a non-profit web site which allows Counselors to create electronic surveys. Unlike other survey services, CounselingSurveys.org is specifically created for professional research. The surveys are designed to run on almost any computer, while the informed consent process is built into the site itself. And, it is free.

Today, CounselingSurveys.org has hosted dozens of surveys for institutional and private researchers within the counseling profession. Users hail from every region of the United States and include graduate students, faculty, and counseling professionals.

In particular, the site has proven popular with public school districts and school counselors eager to use data in demonstrating accountability.

I also worked individually with some half-dozen dissertating Ph.D. students, to help each craft an informed consent statement that would satisfy his or her local institutional review boards (IRBs) while also gaining the technological and ethical understandings of electronic research that are reflected in a Methodology chapter.

As CounselingSurveys.org approaches its third year, I continue to work with the site's members and add new features that best match the requirements of researchers and the specifications of their IRBs.