Knox Area Family and Child Studies (KAFACS) Lab Up and
Running!
First Successful Semester Completed
Working from their headquarters in 428 JHB, a contingent of six graduate students and three undergraduate interns spent their Spring 2004 Semester telephoning Knoxville residents for a telephone survey about neighborhood safety, walking with clipboards and checklists through the hallways and classrooms of four inner city Knoxville elementary schools, conducting systematic social observation of the neighborhood environments of the four schools, managing the audio equipment for parent focus groups, conducting open-ended interviews with teachers, and recording the words of children participating in in-class activities. Students collaborated in the development of data collection tools and learned to use each of these data collection techniques in the first KAFACS Lab project. KAFACS is the new hands-on research practicum that is a core component of doctoral study in CFS, housed in the soon-to-be-newly-renovated KAFACS Lab on the fourth floor of the Jessie Harris Building.
The Child Safety Study, which is the KAFACS Lab's first research project, focuses on the effect of different neighborhood environments on children's sense of safety and is a collaborative effort under the direction of two CFS faculty, Dr. Mary Jane Moran and Dr. Greer Litton Fox. Preliminary results from the project were used by the undergraduate interns to develop a poster for presentation at the UT Undergraduate Research Fair in April 2004 and by the graduate students in a presentation at the Quint State Graduate Student Research Forum, also in April. Dr. Fox and Dr. Moran used both the quantitative and qualitative data from the children's interviews to develop a poster for presentation at the Safe Communities-Safe Schools international congress in Prague, CZ in June 2004.
During the Fall 2004 Semester, the Child Safety Study project continues with activities focused upon techniques for quantitative and qualitative data analysis as well as the completion of personal intensive interviews with a small set of parents and children from each of the four study schools. Students will gain experience with SPSS analytic software to convert the questionnaire data into a quantitative database for analysis. And they will have the opportunity to learn Atlas, a software program that has the capability of working with video as well as audio-based text files. Students were in agreement that their experiences in KAFACS were eye-opening about the process of research, with some saying (after more than a month of evenings and weekend interviews) they never realized that so much work was involved in conducting a research project from start to finish!
Funds for the renovation of the lab and for Dr. Fox's travel to the Safe Communities-Safe Schools International Congress were provided in part by the Moore Endowment. Funds for the Child Safety Study were provided by a CEHHS Catalyst Grant to Drs. Moran and Fox.
Spring 2004 KAFACS Team
KAFACS Faculty |
KAFACS Graduate Students |
KAFACS Undergraduate Students |
Keesha Chapman (GTA) |
Hannah Arick |
|
Sid Collins (GTA) |
Delana Friar |
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|
Sally Hunter |
Jana Teixeira |
|
Mi-Hyung Hyan |
|
Reggie Curran |
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|
Lin Wang |
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Marcy Webb |
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|
Eric Whatley |
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Contact CEHHS
335 Claxton Complex
1122 Volunteer Boulevard
Knoxville, Tennessee 37996
Phone: 865-974-2201
Fax: 865-974-8718