Recently a group of students and faculty helped the Coalition for the Homeless.
Page 14: Sociology: Training Sociologists to Tackle Real-World Problems
As part of a metropolitan university, UCF sociologists use their skills to help serve the larger community.
On any given night just as you sit down to eat dinner, the phone may ring. On the other end is an unknown voice asking you to participate in a brief survey. With the invention of the caller ID and the National Do-Not Call registry, phone surveys are becoming increasingly more difficult; however, for social scientists, phone surveys are one of the most common methods for collecting information.
At UCF’s Institute for Social and Behavioral Sciences (ISBS), student researchers learn techniques for engaging potential respondents in conversations about their lives and their opinions about local issues. This, however, is only one small part of the activities—both research and otherwise—engaged in by sociologists at UCF.
The ISBS houses several research groups: the Survey Research Laboratory, the Center for Qualitative Methodologies, and the Center for Outreach and Public Service. All of these entities play vital roles in the many agency partnerships maintained by the department of sociology and anthropology.
In the Survey Lab, Director James Wright and Associate Director Jana Jasinski have kept the phones working with projects as diverse as evaluating the quality of life in Central Florida; inventorying programs providing alcohol, drug, and mental health services to homeless persons; and, most recently, working with the City of Orlando Housing Department to assess the housing conditions in the city limits.
The Center for Qualitative Methodologies has been equally busy with research projects involving focus groups and unstructured interviews. The center has organized such services for community partners, such as the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida and Harbor House Orange County Center Against Domestic Violence.
The Center for Outreach and Public Service helps facilitate these efforts by linking agency needs with skilled faculty and students. Recently, the center has worked with the Coalition for the Homeless to investigate the consequences of relocating homeless services, counting the number of non-homeless people who eat at soup kitchens in Orlando, and surveying volunteers. Each of these public services has provided vital information to the agencies involved as well as opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students to apply the knowledge they have gained as part of the sociology curriculum.
Although the ISBS plays a formal role in creating and sustaining community partnerships, many sociology students—both graduate and undergraduate—are already using their sociological skills to make a difference, in the local community. Students are working with adolescents at risk for dropping out of school, evaluating foster grand-parenting programs, and assisting agencies in identifying individuals with behaviors that put them at risk for contracting HIV. And, most recently, they established a movie nights program for underprivileged children.
The sociology program at UCF is a vital part of the Central Florida community, providing research expertise to community agencies, practical hands-on training for students, and working to make the Central Florida area the best it can be. With the addition of the the university’s new Ph.D. in Sociology, the faculty’s efforts can be greatly expanded, and UCF will become an even better neighbor.
The sociology program, and ISBS in particular, are open to working with other academic or communty programs. The sociology students and faculty have both the desire to eliminate social problems and the skills to help other social-assistance agencies assess their work.
Want to know more?
Sociology website: www.cas.ucf.edu/Soc_Anthro
James Wright, jwright@mail.ucf.edu
Jana L. Jasinski, jjasinsk@mail.ucf.edu
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