Sex and Drugs and...Proton Structure? 2005 Sally Casanova Memorial Awards Fund Gamut of Research

The idea is that a university like CSUDH might create upward mobility, perhaps more so than other more well-known universities. - Frank Papa, assistant professor of public administration

The Office of Research and Funded Projects announced the eight faculty members receiving Fall 2005 Sally Casanova Memorial Awards Program (RSCAAP) awards last semester, with research topics ranging from nuclear physics to television's depiction of adolescent dating and sexual behavior.

The Fall 2005 award winners and the titles of their research projects include
“Mexican-American Women’s Poltical Activism, Los Angeles, 1940-1966” by Marisel Chavez, assistant professor of Chicana/o studies; “Sex, Drugs, and HIV: Perceptions of Young Gay Men of Color” by Matt Mutchler, assistant professor of sociology; “Gone in She Is!: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Satires of All-Female Communities” by Helen Oesterheld, assistant professor of English; “The Value-added by Higher Education: The Linkage Between K-12 Education and Higher Education” by Frank Papa, Jr., assistant professor of public administration; “A Novel Approach to the Study of Proton Structure” by John Price, associate professor of physics; “Invariants of Rings and Modules” by Sean Sather-Wagstaff, assistant professor of mathematics;
“Gang Prevention through Targeted Outreach Boys & Girls Clubs” by La Tanya Skiffer, assistant professor of sociology; and “Primetime Television’s Depiction of Adolescent Dating and Sexual Behavior” by Carl Sneed, assistant professor of psychology. The awards were renamed in honor of Sally Casanova in 1990, who was instrumental in the development of the program both on the system level and at CSUDH.

The monetary awards distributed through the CSU System office allow faculty to pursue research projects that would otherwise prove impossible to find the time and resources to complete. Each award winner received $5,000, which allows them to teach one class less than the minimum, freeing up time in the process for them to focus on their projects. While they delve into their work now, the awards committee will begin poring over applications for $4,500 summer fellowships – the second batch of the annual awards – with the deadline for applications closing today. Both seasonal opportunities for the awards can be critical for research at CSUDH, considering there is little state funding allocated for research in the teaching-focused CSU.

Speaking of their significance, Ray Riznyk, director, Research and Funded Projects, who serves as chair of the RSCAAP Awards Committee, says, “I would say these awards are critical. At Research 1 (a classification by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, designating institutions where faculty are required to do research) universities like the UC’s, faculty members are hired on with like $50,000 of available start-up money for research. But here, our focus is on teaching. We don’t have such funds, so these awards are the only source of state funding immediately available to them.”

The CSU divides up $2.5 million to the 23 campuses based on full-time faculty for the program. CSUDH receives approximately $65,000 of that pie, and given the value of such awards, the competition among faculty is quite healthy. For the fall awards, more than 20 faculty members applied.

Riznyk also explains that preference is given to junior faculty members in the hope the awards will serve as seed money for them to begin their research on campus. This jumpstart has historically led to further funding from outside sources, an approach that has paid off in the past with both Danny Brassell, assistant professor of teacher education, and Molly Youngkin, assistant professor of English. The two each used their previous RSCAAP awards to secure book-length projects which have since been accepted for publication.

Papa, who completed an economic impact study last year evaluating the value of CSUDH to the surrounding communities and its graduates, has launched a similar study to evaluate the relationship between campuses like CSUDH, the K-12 school districts they serve, and the people who receive college degrees compared to those who do not in these communities.

“The idea is that a university like CSUDH might create upward mobility, perhaps more so than other more well-known universities. I plan on looking at people who go through Los Angeles Unified School District, and then focusing on those who do go to college versus those who don’t,” says Papa. To do so, he’s pulling together data and research from the Office of Institutional Research, California Department of Education, and the National Center for Educational Statistics. The data will allow him to quantify his findings on a local and national level while also looking ahead to what CSUDH can do to retain such students.

In the realm of psychology, Sneed and his three research assistants – senior
Alexander Nedilskyj (Psychology), graduate student Julie Mojica (Psychology), and Kary Fukunaga, a master’s degree student at Pepperdine – have spent a lot of time in front of the TV. Instead of viewing primetime shows on the major networks for entertainment purposes, they’ve been deeply focused on the interactions between the shows’ children and parents in how they talk about sexual behavior. Based on the concept of Social Learning Theory, where we learn behavior by watching others, Sneed is interested in how TV families address sexual behavior and how that will impact the ways both children and their parents receive cues in order to address such subjects.

“For example, watching a teenager who’s just been forbidden to go on a date sneak out his bedroom window – we don’t know for sure how that will relate to people watching the show, but it sets up an example of behaviors they have access to and could model their behaviors around,” explains Sneed, who has been researching sexual behavior topics for 12 years. The instances of such interaction are then coded so that they can be evaluated in quantitative form.

With both Papa and Sneed, there’s an obvious excitement over their research that certainly all of the award winners share. It’s the idea of allowing them to foster such interests at CSUDH that may be the most vital aspect of the program.

“A lot of the faculty being hired today have been groomed in that research culture,” says Riznyk. “They’re excited to continue it and this is a great way in which we can support them.”

-Ryan Brandt

Photos above: Frank Papa, Jr., assistant professor of public administration; photo by Gary Kuwahara; Sean Sather-Wagstaff, assistant professor of mathematics; photo by Joanie Harmon