Capstone Blog Post 1

For senior year capstone, I will be teaming up with Professional Writer Rose Marshall to research Sexual Violence on college campuses, specifically looking at Champlain College. For this capstone project, we will be using both data (analyzed by myself) as well a human stories (gathered by Rose), to give a more holistic understanding of the current situation on Champlain College’s campus.

Although we both have a general idea of the goal for this project, the execution is not as well defined. I have gathered 10 years of data from Campus Safety & Security’s website, but I do not yet know what I am going to do with the data. Further data exploration should help me find some type of in depth analysis I can perform assuming this data set alone is adequate. By design, this analysis is not just dependent on my exploration. I will also be waiting for Rose’s progress to be able to provide the information she needs to back up claims. Additionally, her gathered stories might also provide insights into where I should be exploring.

Before we can get into the specific analysis, there is a significant amount of research that must be done to understand the topic we want to study. Sexual violence is a very complex issue that is constantly being advocated for by activists. Even the world of academia is up to date on constantly critiquing and hypothesizing new ways to shed light on societal conceptions and judicial issues. A lot of progress appears to have been made in this field as reported sexual violence rates have only gone down in the past thirty years. Unfortunately, it is hard to gauge the current state of sexual violence as we are reliant on reported cases.

To circumvent the issue of relying on self-reported data, this project will reach out to those affected by sexual violence in an unusual, low-stakes research project that will hopefully encourage people to speak. (This project will be open to everyone at Champlain, not necessarily just students or victims.) Also, this project will talk to individuals normally not included in research surrounding sexual violence in an attempt to capture more perspectives of the effects of sexual violence on smaller college campus communities such as Champlain College.

Moving past the issues of scope, the methodology of this project is going to take a lot of preparation. Not only is it important for the researchers in this project to be adequately knowledgeable about the subject of sexual violence, but we will also need to set up resources and get clearance by Champlain College to perform this research. Since we have humans that will be involved in the study, we will have to have an ethics check to make sure we conduct our research in an ethical way. This will require us to talk to John Stroup and find out more about how we can work with Champlain College.

Since this project is involving Title IX, we will also have to talk to the Title IX coordinator at Champlain College to see if we can work with the college to get the information needed to enact change. The Title IX coordinator can also help us not break any federal laws during our research.

Coordinating with Champlain College’s counseling center will also be essential for this process. The counseling center should be made aware of our project, and may be able to guide us through this next semester as we encounter situations that we might not be prepared to handle.

Once all these preparations have been made (and any unforeseen preparations) have been made, we can dive into finding stories and exploring what the state of Champlain College, and the nation is with the methodology described above.

This project will hopefully produce to pieces of writing. The first will be the required mock-thesis like document required by the ITS division. This will be the more scholarly presentation of our work with technical details about the data analysis used and the stories we gathered. The second piece will be an anthology that has nine stories along with more information (my data analysis) behind the stories. The result would hopefully look like a very long version of an article that has interactive data such as pudding.cool articles.