Hello world! The Civil Grand Jury Lab at Cuyamaca College is an undergraduate research lab focused on original research of California’s 58 county civil grand juries utilizing formal modeling, qualitative analysis, and quantitative analysis. The Lab consists of the following parts: Lab Administration, Database, Research, Simulation, and Public Policy.
I am founding this Lab as part of a long-term research project to complement my primary responsibility of teaching five courses each semester, participating in college governance and systemwide efforts, and supporting students in achieving their academic and professional goals.
In spring 2019, as a new tenure-track Assistant Professor at Cuyamaca Community College, one of my first actions was to create a new course: POSC 170 Introduction to Political Science Research Methods.
By the start of summer 2019, I secured a $20,000 grant from the Academic Senate for Community Colleges to co-author an open education resource textbook for the course.
By June 2020, Introduction to Political Science Research Methods (IPSRM), a first-of-its-kind open education resource, was published. With chapter contributions from Dr. Charlotte Lee at Berkeley City College, Kau Vue at Fresno City College, Dr. Dino Bozonelos at Victor Valley College, Dr. Masahiro Omae at San Diego City College, Dr. Steven Cauchon at Imperial Valley College, and myself, the purpose of our open education resource is to provide students interested in or majoring in political science a solid introduction into the research methods of the discipline.
Less than a year later, I published Polimetrics: A Stata Companion to IPSRM. This workbook provides a tour of the Stata software, an introduction to cross-sectional, time series, and panel data, and an introduction to a variety of models. I review models where the outcome is linear, binary, ordinal, categorical, and count. Additionally, I have an interpretation chapter on survival models.
Now, I am founding the Lab as a long-term research project that will introduce my current and future students to the lifecycle of research. I will use this blog to document the project.