Opportunity for Focused Study
Undergraduates work on research projects with IPR faculty

Spring 2007, Volume 29, Number 1

Priscilla Vasquez shows Jonathan Moore, another IPR summer undergraduate research assistant, some of the Web sites she studied in a project.

To earn their Northwestern degree, most undergraduate students take 48 classes over four years on campus. While many gain knowledge on a variety of subjects, few have the opportunity to delve deeply into a single research topic.

IPR Faculty Fellow Christopher Taber cites this as the fundamental reason why the Institute’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program is such a great opportunity for freshmen, sophomores, and juniors—they get to learn in a whole new way. Taber, who led the program this summer, said these rare undergraduate research opportunities are incredible learning experiences for them.

“They are spending the whole summer working on one problem in depth, which is very different from what you do in a class,” he said.

Last summer’s program put 21 students to work with 18 IPR faculty on their current research, covering topics related to adolescent depression, commercialism of higher education, school readiness, and reactions to prejudice among others.

Priscilla Vasquez, a senior psychology major, worked with IPR Faculty Associate Eszter Hargittai on her Web Use Project because she found the research intriguing. Hargittai, assistant professor of communication studies and sociology, is studying the ways in which different types of people navigate the Web. Using video files, Vasquez learned how study participants found certain information from sites on birth control to those with music or free software.

Vasquez has worked on other research projects in psychology labs, but she thought this summer program would be a good way to “branch out.” Looking ahead to graduate school, she said she gleaned new research techniques from Hargittai, such as ways of coding material, that will be useful for her in pursuing a graduate degree.

While the program is ideal for students headed to graduate school, it also allows students just interested in research to work with leading scholars in their fields.

James Wang, a junior majoring in political science, worked with IPR Faculty Fellow Lincoln Quillian, AT&T Research Scholar and asso-ciate professor of sociology, last summer on following trends in newspaper coverage of violent crime since 1950.

As a social demographer, Quillian has focused his research on urban sociology and issues of racial and economic inequality.

In this project, Wang was tracking race and other variables in crime stories to understand the media’s shifting coverage of different social groups.

“When you’re reading these journalistic reports, it tells you what has changed over time and what hasn’t as far as human interaction goes,” Wang said.

He hopes that his efforts can lead to a change for the better, as the project continues to reveal and explain racial and other stereotypes perpetuated by the media.