CJS & SOC Professional Development Guide

The California State University Social Science Research and Instructional Center provides:
- Support for CSU student, faculty, and staff users of subscription data bases from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the Field Poll, and the Roper Center, as well as of unrestricted data bases.
- Workshops on use of these data, as well as on SPSS, SDA, GIS, and other topics as needed. Provided at no cost to CSU campuses. Other institutions: please contact us for more information.
- The annual SSRIC Student Research Conference. Open to undergraduate and graduate students at CSU and to students at community colleges.
- Research and training opportunities through the Field Poll Faculty Fellowship and the ICPSR Summer Training Program.
- Value-added teaching resources, including modules, exercises, and online textbooks. Most of these materials are freely available.

The CSU, SSRIC Student Research Conference is modeled on professional conferences in the social sciences. The Council invites both undergraduate and graduate students, from all CSU and California Community College campuses and in all areas of the social sciences, to present their research to their peers. Research that involves human or animal subjects must have appropriate institutional review.

Individual and group papers are welcome. Participants will make oral presentations of about 15 minutes in length. Papers accompanying the presentation must be 20 pages or less in length. Lunch will be provided to participants.

The atmosphere of the Conference is relaxed, and the emphasis is on meeting and sharing with students with similar interests from throughout the CSU. Dress should be dressy casual.

Work in small groups and with faculty mentors at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor to complete research projects resulting in conference-ready posters. Attend courses. Work with statistical social science databases. $3000-$5000 stipend + room & partial board, fees, texts.

The Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with the Department of Sociology, hosts the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. This eight-week summer program, which is held during June and July and is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (but also with significant contributions from the UT Population Research Center, Department of Sociology, and College of Liberal Arts), offers eight very selective upper-division undergraduate students from both UT-Austin and from around the country the opportunity to study social demography through course work and a mentored research experience with senior PRC graduate students.

The ICPSR Summer Program offers lectures and workshops in a wide variety of topics in research design, quantitative reasoning, statistical methods, and data processing. Many of these courses are presented in two four-week sessions held on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. From May through August, the ICPSR Summer Program also offers more than 35 three- to five-day workshops on both statistical and substantive topics. Many of these short workshops take place in Ann Arbor, but several are held in other locations, including Amherst, MA; Berkeley, CA; Boulder, CO; Chapel Hill, NC; Manhattan, NY; and Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Our mission: to facilitate research in criminal justice and criminology, through the preservation, enhancement, and sharing of computerized data resources; through the production of original research based on archived data; and through specialized training workshops in quantitative analysis of crime and justice data.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association collects a wealth of data from its member institutions and their student-athletes. These data are collected to help answer research questions posed by college presidents, athletics personnel, faculty, student-athlete groups, the media, researchers and others in the higher education community and to assist in the development of national athletics policies. Late NCAA President Myles Brand recognized that these data represented a valuable source of information for addressing a variety of issues related to both intercollegiate athletics and higher education generally, and he believed that sharing it was important to the goal of fully integrating athletics into the broader university community. To that end, in 2008 he charged the NCAA staff with developing a program for providing this information to interested scholars.

Students (and their faculty) are encouraged to submit papers for the annual Student Paper Competition.
Papers related to survey, public opinion, or market research are welcomed. Specific topics may include: substantive findings about public opinion, statistical techniques, methodological issues, new technologies or methodologies, or theoretical issues in the formation, change, or measurement of public opinion. We encourage entries from any fields that employ survey and opinion research, including political science, communications, psychology, sociology, and marketing as well as entries on survey methods. Eligible papers will be authored by graduate or undergraduate students, currently attending colleges and universities in PAPOR's geographic region.