It is nearly impossible for one individual or a small committee to understand the complex needs of an entire school system and its community. Only by partnering with local business and community leaders, parents, teachers and third-party experts can local boards of education and school administrators grasp the unique needs of their community. Only…

This article describes the preliminary exploratory process used to develop the research questions that will be addressed during a project to be offered in the 2005-2006 academic year. The project will bring together Maine high school and college faculty to learn from each other about shared needs, methods and priorities, in a year long series of…

The state of Indiana took a unique approach to developing a statewide plan to improve perinatal health outcomes by engaging parents in a series of focus groups, called Community Conversations in Perinatal Care (CCPC), to hear directly from consumers about their health care experiences and needs. Recognizing that disparities exist among different…

Podcasting (an automatic mechanism whereby multimedia computer files are transferred from a server to a client, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/podcast) is becoming increasingly popular in education. Although podcasts enable students and teachers to share information anywhere at anytime, the most frequent application of the technology to date has been to…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the current situations of condom using behavior and its related factors among college students in Taiwan. There were two phases in the study. In phase I, 50 students from one college in the eastern, southern, middle and northern parts of Taiwan were selected to form a focus group, and were interviewed…

Background: There is an emerging corpus of work on the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on education in sub-Saharan Africa. This mainly employs demographic models to make projections of student enrolments and teacher requirements. However, there is a paucity of research in basic schools to examine the experiences of AIDS-affected teachers and…

Most libraries involved to any extent with total quality management (TQM) realize that successfully gathering information from their customers is the key to improving services. To do this libraries must employ a variety of methodologies, both quantitative and qualitative research. Quantitative primary data is usually collected in libraries by…

The transition from undergraduate to graduate school is a point when female students may lose interest in pursuing engineering degrees, and the percentage of women enrolled in engineering graduate programs is small in comparison to that of males. To attempt to mitigate the potential isolation of women graduate engineering students, the Women in…

This study compared students' and professors' perceptions of the ethicalness of faculty behavior. A total of 115 professors and 157 undergraduate students at a medium-sized public Midwestern university completed a 16-item faculty behavior scale adapted from Tabachnick and colleagues (1991) work. Significant differences between student and faculty…

This document is designed to provide enough information for technical colleges and similar institutions to conduct their own focus visits. A focus visit is defined as a full-day activity that takes place on the campus during which a team of 10-25 individuals (program faculty, former and current students, technical college staff, advisory committee…

At Stephen F. Austin State University (Texas), focus group research was conducted to determine research needs and to inform the development of a new educational research center. Four graduate research assistants and a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership formed a study group to review the literature on focus groups and…

This report presents questions and typical responses from focus group discussions conducted at Johnson County Community College (JCCC, Kansas) in March 1999. A total of 23 individuals of varying ages from all geographic regions in Johnson County participated in three focus groups, designed as a follow-up to a phone survey about constituency…

Since the publication of Samuel Shem's "House of God," medical students and residents have been famous for their cynical conversations about patients and life on the wards. This image is largely a caricature, yet peer pressure, medical machismo, stressful working conditions, and house staff subculture do foster negative attitudes and…

This qualitative study attempts to document outcomes of two statewide agricultural and rural leadership programs by determining the affects of the program on participants after they graduate. The study explored three levels of outcomes: individual, organizational and community using the EvaluLEAD framework developed by Grove, Kibel and Haas…

Faculty development has been identified as a means of enhancing the ability of faculty members at higher education institutions to conduct scholarly engagement with community partners. The University of New Hampshire developed a semester-long Outreach Scholars Academy to help faculty partner with key external stakeholders in conducting research…