Ohio State takes great pride in its role as a leading public land-grant research university. In fact, construction on the new West Campus Innovation District, a space designed to facilitate interdisciplinary research collaboration and ambitious discoveries, has already begun. However, one key problem repeatedly pops up as the bane of almost every researcher’s existence: funding. Students especially struggle to find support for their projects, often relying on grants to fund their work which is an incredibly competitive and time-intensive process.
Enter subject pools. A subject pool is a common method of essentially free data collection, usually found at universities or other higher level educational institutions. Students volunteer to be participants in research studies in exchange for extra credit in their classes. Pools for marketing, psychology, and communications have already made an impact on campus.
Now Sustainability Institute affiliated faculty have access to a School of Environment and Natural Resources (SENR) subject pool.
In 2018, the steering committee for the Environmental and Social Sustainability (ESS) Lab established the Environmental and Social Sustainability Research Experience Program (ESSREP). The committee consisted of Jeremy Brooks, Nicole Sintov, and Robyn Wilson, with the help of PhD student Emily Walpole, the lab manager at the time. Kristina Slagle, a postdoctoral scholar in SENR, works as the current lab manager and does most of the “leg work” to keep the pool up and running, while Sintov, now the ESS lab director, oversees the process and weighs in on strategic decisions.
“It’s really critical to for scientists to have this type of resource because it requires less financing and provides a source for surveying and evaluation,” Sintov said.
Graduate students, post-doctoral scholars and researchers all utilize the pool for data collection. Results garnered from use of the subject pool have contributed to a variety of projects including pilot studies for future grant proposals, three PhD dissertations, two class projects, two master’s theses, and six peer-reviewed journal articles. Even more, the pool provides an extra credit option with minimal additional work required for the instructors of courses in which potential student participants are enrolled, many of whom often already have so much on their plates.
Though the pool has its benefits, some limitations do exist. Since the participants are college students, results are quite limited in their generalizability or their ability to apply the results to other experiments or scenarios. Additionally, the pool depends on professors’ cooperation and willingness to hand out extra credit. It also may not provide significant benefit if a researcher needs to conduct field work with a specific population – but it can be used for piloting data collection instruments in these cases.
However, these road bumps can be overcome, and without the pool many Ohio State researchers would have an incredibly tough time collecting their data. It is a critical resource that gives people access to data that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to use. Now, this resource is being expanded to include more of the College of Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Sciences.
Thanks to the hard work of Sintov, Brooks, Wilson, and Slagle, more students and instructors from Agriculture, Communication, Education and Leadership have begun entering the pool. In addition, the ESS Lab is now extending access to the subject pool to all Sustainability Institute-affiliated faculty. SI core faculty will have access to the subject pool without the requirement of enrolling their classes in the pool though that option is strongly encouraged. SI affiliated faculty are required to enroll their course in the subject pool in order to gain access for data collection purposes. If you would like to learn more about this opportunity, please contact Nicole Sintov.
SI-affiliated faculty come from a range of interdisciplinary backgrounds, which will increase the generalizability of subject pool results and provide a larger potential sample size for researchers. Going forward, if the SENR, psychology, communications, and political science pools joined forces, they would have the potential to create a larger, more interdisciplinary and fuller resource for researchers all across Ohio State.
Story by Aurora Ellis, student communications assistant