The CECH Chats Podcast

09:27
Rodney Wilson: Welcome to CECH Chats, the brand-new podcast from the University of Cincinnati's College of Education, Criminal Justice, Human Services and Information Technology. In this podcast, we'll be talking to faculty about their ongoing research, chatting with students about the work they do in CECH, learning from staff members about their important roles in the college, and more.

34:13
Hello, I'm Rodney Wilson, content specialist at CECH. On the debut episode of CECH Chats, we're hearing from faculty members and students from the School of Criminal Justice about their work under the Department of Justice, Office of Violence Against Women Grant Award in 2020 for the project, titled Language Access Barriers to Justice Among Victims of Violence Against Women with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, and to collect data, do interviews and focus groups around the experiences victims with intellectual and or developmental disabilities face when reporting violent crimes. While future episodes of CECH Chats will focus primarily on one-on-one or small-group conversations, for this debut episode, we have something special: A wide-ranging presentation moderated by project lead, associate professor Brittany Hayes, featuring co-principal investigators Ráchael Powers, also an associate professor in the School of Criminal Justice, and associate professor Amanda Simmons from the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, in UC's College of Allied Health Sciences.

We also heard from co-investigator Leigh Anne Kingsley from the ARC's National Center on Criminal Justice and Disability. The ARC is a national organization that promotes and protects the human rights of individuals with IDD. Students at the undergraduate, master's and doctorate levels involved in various stages of the grant-funded work are also included in this conversation.

02:01:14
Brittany Hayes: Well, thank you so much for having us, Rodney. We are really excited to chat with everyone today about our project on reporting barriers for victims with disabilities. The PIs on the project are myself, Doctor Brittany Hayes, as well as Doctor Rochelle Powers and Doctor Amanda Simmons, as well as Leigh Anne Kingsley from the ARC, which is the national association for individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.

So this project is multifaceted, and we're really excited to have eight students here with us today to talk about their experiences working on the project and with those three parts. We have a systematic review, which is just a fancy way of saying we are looking at the literature that's been done on reporting barriers for victims with disabilities and organizing it to look for themes within that research.

We've also looked at policies on law enforcement and victim service agency websites across four states, and those states include Ohio, Florida, New Jersey and Arizona. So four states from the four regions in the U.S. Cooper will talk a bit about that. Rebecca and Jackie will talk about the systematic review. And then our.

Big, big, big heavy lift of the project was we conducted a 152 interviews with practitioners, caregivers and individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities and to the eight students who are here with us today, are going to talk a little bit about their research interests, but then the different roles that they've taken on the project, what something that Doctor Powers and Doctor Simmons and I are really passionate about is this idea of tiered mentorship, where we have students who are further along in different programs being able to provide mentorship and leadership to undergraduate researchers, master's students, and first year PhD students, but then also first year PhD students be able to provide that mentorship for undergraduates and master's students. So we really are trying to get students not only experience with research, but also experience with project management on that end. And so I'll I'll open it up to who would like to share their experiences of working on this project.

04:26:24
Cooper Maher: First, I'm happy to say I'm happy to speak. My name is Cooper Maher. I'm a fourth year PhD student. I'm in my final semester here at the University of Cincinnati School of Criminal Justice. My role on the project, I was mainly involved in some of the data collection for our victim service provider agencies and also of our law enforcement agencies.

So again, going through those four states that Doctor Haynes described Arizona, Florida and New Jersey, Ohio, and collecting some open source data from these organizations, as well as, sort of supervising and managing some of the other students on the project that have been involved with those in those capacities. So sort of that tiered mentorship idea as well, I've been involved in that with honestly, pretty much everyone that you're seeing on this call right now has been involved in that process, and that's been really fulfilling.

To be able to see, how that's been going and to be a part of that and to be able to, help how I can I guess with that, that tiered mentorship, beyond that, I've really been involved in a lot of the interview, transcription and qualitative coding, which has been, really exceptional experience for me, just to be able to get access to some of those tools and some of that, research experience that I might not have had otherwise.

And honestly, just being able to be a part of this project as a whole has been really fulfilling for me. To back up a little bit, one of my main research areas of interest is understanding fraud victimization and fraud victim decision making. And one thing that I didn't really get a chance to realize until I became a part of this team and was, brought onto in this project, was just how important disability, in particular intellectual and developmental disability is in terms of understanding risk and decision making among fraud victims.

It really plays a crucial role, and I don't think that's really talked about enough. And being able to be a part of this project has really, opened my eyes to that.

06:09:15
Brittany Hayes: Thanks, Cooper. I feel like this is a great transition to Kristonn, who was one of the students who was entering the information for this policy analysis, across the four different states and the different agencies. So, Kristonn.

06:27:19
Kristonn Stubbs: Yes. So good day. Kristonn, I'm a first year PhD student. My interest is in bio social and human behavior at the time when the project started, at least when I got on, I was a massive student and doctor has payment is, you know, great idea. She was like, hey, who wants to get involved with research? And I was like, oh yeah, research is going to be my first time.

And then when I got into it, it was just me sitting down for a few weeks. Just one zero one zero one zero, just coding was very, repetitive. And Cooper had always come to me and be like, hey, how's it going? And I'm like, ones and zeros, ones and zeros and but the best thing about it was, doctor who sent me, when all the numbers were compiled.

And what is that I exactly did and seeing that on paper, seeing that and, and a diagram seeing what I did was like, wow. And I think we don't really get to see that, you know, how the results came about, what was the whole process? And so that was a big thing for me. And I got me hooked on to under research.

And then I also got to meet, Cooper, who's I thought, yeah, he's leaving. He won't admit it, but, like, we're like, best friends now and all that was possible. Do this project, you know, a massive student getting in contact with a four year student. And Cooper has helped me out a lot. And it was just a great thing being exposed to exposure and being exposed to present in the field and seeing the end result.

07:58:29
Brittany Hayes: Thanks, Kristonn. I always say that a student in the program is a much more accurate reflection of the experience. I don't like to admit it because I am so young, but my graduate student days are very far behind me, and it's usually much more helpful to talk to somebody who's closer to that experience as you're making that decision to come for the PhD program.

Thank you. Kristonn, I'm going to pop over to Jacquie Burckley at the University of South Florida. She is currently the lone University of South Florida person on the team. But Doctor Powers, we did get her from there. So, Jacquie, do you want to talk a little bit about your experiences?

08:43:06
Jacquie Burckley: Sure. Yeah. So I am the lone voice from Florida. I represent, my name is Jacquie Burckley. And as Doctor Hayes said, I am a, criminology major and the PhD program at the University of South Florida. And I kind of was brought on to this project, through Doctor Powers, who is my major professor. She ended up abandoning me for Cincinnati, but that's okay.

It was for a good reason. And it kind of what what Cooper and Kristonn has said so far. This is the most unique working experience I've had in research. Right? So since I, I've been working on my PhD for a few years, I do have a bit more research experience than maybe some of the master's students do, on this call and, and a part of this team.

But this research experience has been much more unique than what I've had previously. If not just for the size of the team, but for the interdisciplinary nature of the team. I'm very much used to working with, you know, other criminology students and criminology professors, and we all have very similar interests, and that's a good thing. But being exposed to a variety of interests from a bunch of different approaches, either inside and outside of criminology, has kind of really helped expand my own approach to my research.

And it just gives me more of a unique perspective on the research I'm doing in this team or outside of this team. And it's also really given me some really great lifelong friends. I'm hoping you all come down to Florida and visit me. But the the I'll talk a little bit about the project that I am primarily working on.

It along with the, the nature of this project is that we've all kind of had our hands in a lot of different, smaller projects that have stemmed off from our larger research question and how this grant started. But the first and primary project I've worked on is the systematic review of, you know, the disability research, what is out there that we want to know about disability and gender based violence.

So, we've, started, you know, collecting like what what what questions do we want to ask? You know, what are the key terms we're looking for? And I've done, a systematic review or a scoping review before, but this one was much more unique in that when I thought we were starting, we were actually starting. I feel like we had 9 or 10 different, step zeros.

And that's just because the nature of disability research in itself, right? When we're talking about the language that we're using, what kind of specific word choice do we want to use? You know, there's not a lot of, there's some overlap across different disciplines, but there is not an agreed upon term for individuals with ID or cognitive disabilities or learning disabilities.

And what falls in and out of that. So every time I feel like we made progress, it was another well, have we considered this approach? And I feel like we had 9 or 10 different step zeros. But it was a good thing because I think our final product ended up being very specific, very intentional, and we have a lot of avenues to go after that intention.

So I, I've certainly enjoyed my time working here. I hope that this project and this team, you know, is a part of my long-term career. As you know, I love to stick around. I love this team so much.

11:56:10
Brittany Hayes: Thank you Jacquie. And I you know, you hear our voices, but on the screen everyone is smiling and shaking their heads and it's just really great to see. And that's something that's been really crucial to the team as well, is that we are doing research on a really difficult topic, and we've been able to come together and navigate the complexity of this work, but understanding why we're doing this work as well, I'm going to toss it over to Doctor Simmons and Doctor Powers to piggyback off of some of this interdisciplinary conversation, and then switch over to Leigh Anne McKingsley from the ARC, who is our practitioner partner on this project, to talk about their experiences and working and really how this idea came to be.

12:46:08
Ráchael Powers: So my name is Ráchael Powers, and I'm an associate professor here in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. And my research focus is on violent victimization and a lot of that gender-based violence. So sexual assault and intimate partner violence. And and then I also do some work on on hate crime as well.

And so we're this project came out was in part, data analysis and projects that me and Doctor Hayes were doing with the National Crime Victimization Survey. So we know that less than half of violent victimization are ever reported to the police. Right. And for individuals with disability, there's disproportionately less likely to be reported to the police. And for individuals with intellectual developmental disabilities or also sometimes referred to as cognitive disabilities, depending on the agency collecting the data, it is even less likely to be reported.

And so Doctor Hayes and I were exploring this with secondary data. But like any good research project, you wind up with more questions than you do. Answers. And we quickly realized that there's a lot that secondary data couldn't give us with regard to exploring the barriers to reporting. And so in those conversations is where this project came out, right, that we need primary data collection to explore these barriers to reporting.

And not only that, but we need qualitative data because quantitative data just wasn't cutting it. And so Doctor Hayes and I, who were both large lead quantitative researchers, decided to embark on a qualitative primary data collection. And then we knew we needed help, both in terms of methodology but also in terms of substance. And so we cobbled together this team that included Doctor Simmons, who I'll kick it over to next, and and Leigh Anne and the four of us together became like a captain Planet, like we all together became a whole researcher to be able to tackle this project, Doctor Simmons.

14:40:15
Amanda Simmons: Yes. Thank you so. Much, Ráchael. What a great, what a good what a great analogy. I don't I love that. So I am Amanda Simmons. I am a faculty member over in the College of Allied Health Sciences. And I'm actually a speech language pathologist by trade. And I usually tell folks I kind of fell into this research team.

I'm an educator, track faculty. So, predominantly support clinical in, in, like, the education side of things here. But my background is heavily focused in augmentative and alternative communication. So what we like to call AAC, these are communication supports. I tell folks twinkled  to wrinkle right across the lifespan and across diagnoses. I have had the pleasure of falling into this amazing research team, to kind of be the communication support person. I also have a decent amount of experience doing, qualitative research. So it really was, kind of a marrying of, of this team. I've also had the pleasure of bringing on some of some of the students that I get to work with.

So, there's three master's students in the speech language pathology program who couldn't join us today because they're all in full time clinical placements. So they are out around the Cincinnati area working as speech language pathologist. But Paige, Caitlin and Elizabeth have been fabulous additions to the research team and continue to work in support, efforts.

Kind of behind the scenes, cobbling it together, when they're not working clinically full time. So with that, I will pass it over to Leigh Anne from the ARC.

16:24.63

Leigh Anne McKinley: Thank you, Amanda, and I'm so happy to be here. So I work for the ARC of the United States. The ARC is a national organization that advocates with and for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We have about 550 chapters throughout the country, and I've been working there for 29 years, focused on people with intellectual developmental disabilities that come in contact with the criminal justice system in some way.

And so through that work, of course, we do a lot around victims issues. And I met Doctor Hayes on a project that was, led by the University of Cincinnati. Now it's led by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. That was addressing crisis response and intervention training for law enforcement. One of the things that came up was the need to look at trauma informed policing.

But they understood that people with IDD often are traumatized and that can be linked to victimization. And you already heard Doctor Powers explain just how often people with IDs are victimized. And so that was something I've known ever since, pretty much. I started the ARC. We didn't have data back then on that. Canada did, but we did not.

Yeah. Then we got the National Crime Victim Survey. So we were able to start knowing the actual data around that. So this project is so important. And I mean, I'm thrilled to be involved. And it's helped me understand how we can apply research to these very critical issues that many people don't even get. They don't know this is going on.

It's very hidden in our society. So we really need to bring those stories forward and the data as much as possible to get, you know, the resources, right, to get society to understand and and accept that it's happening and then that we can create tools to address it. So that's what we're trying to do. And it's really exciting work, because we know that what we're doing is going to make an impact.

It's like the best thing ever. So just glad to be part of it.

18:43:09
Brittany Hayes: Thank you, Leigh Anne and are so happy you're here, and we're lucky to have you as part of the team. I pop it over to Dani Gerving since she brings a practitioner background to the to the PhD program that she just started, and she can speak about that transition from being a practitioner, working in the field to then being the researcher of the practitioners.

19:08:19
Dani Gerving: Thank you, Doctor Hayes. Hi, everybody. I'm Dani. Let me just start by saying I have loved getting to be a part of this team. I couldn't have asked for a more collaborative and supportive and patient team for my first semester in a PhD program. It's been awesome. Like doctors, he said. I came from six and a half years of field experience working with, Homeless Response System. I did know the Arc before this project, because I got to partner with them on a couple of different things.

So it was a very exciting step for me to get to join this project and get to see research in action. The point of joining a PhD program is to prepare for the next step. Right? And for me, I'm hoping my next step in my career will be focusing on research. So getting to see some of the things that I've gotten to learn through classes in action.

And getting to help on this project was really just awesome. I got to help with interviews and then with some data management behind the scenes, and both of those incredibly rewarding and getting to connect with the population that this project is doing the work for was just so informative and just so rewarding. For my first semester, I couldn't have asked to have a better start in a program.

20:36:19
Brittany Hayes: Awesome! Thank you Dani. We're lucky to have you, but you are now serving your research dream of working with.

20:44:23
Dani Gerving: So I'm getting to conduct interviews again with a different population, which is phenomenal. My research interests broadly criminological theory, but heavy emphasis on, certain populations, including individuals who are affected with substance use disorder.

21:03:19
Brittany Hayes: Awesome. Thank you. Dani, it's really just showcasing that the students here at the University of Cincinnati are getting that first hand experience. They are conducting the interviews. They are going out into the field and they're doing that hands on work. And as much as Doctor Powers and I like to sit in our jammies and analyze our secondary data, right.

It really is important that as a community-based action research team, that we are engaged with the communities that we're collecting data with. I will pop it over to Martha, who started at the same time as Dani and also was stolen from Florida.

21:43:04
Martha McCullough: Thanks, Doctor Hayes. Hi. My name is Martha McCullough. I am a first year PhD student in the School of Criminal Justice here at the University of Cincinnati. I also am from Florida. I did follow powers all the way out to Ohio, which was a very exciting feat. And one of the main reasons why I wanted to work with powers is not only is she a phenomenal mentor and support to me in this program, but she mentioned this project and I have a bit of experience with qualitative work.

My research interests revolve around public opinion and wrongful conviction. I've also done other aspects of victimization, from human trafficking to hate crime. Other realms there. And when she mentioned qualitative, I was just as excited to get started on this project, but also knew very little about the community and how it integrated with the system. So that was something that was truly invaluable to me, that I was able to open a new realm and a new aspect of an interdisciplinary work that I wasn't familiar with, but I was able to be a part of, and nothing was more important to me, especially coming to this program that I had mentors and faculty and support who believed in qualitative work and believed in the power of qualitative work. So being able to lead interviews, being able to facilitate being able to transcribe and code and really understand that process was so important to me. More importantly, I saw so many parallels in the previous work I've done, particularly in looking at like the barriers to the system and how victimization and reporting victimization can be very tough in terms of understanding how the system works for anyone, including individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

So again, this work has been truly invaluable. I've absolutely loved it, and I've got to make a lot of new friends and peers and mentors along the way. So again, joining a program that I knew one faculty member and being able to join on such a large project was so exciting and such a privilege that I have all this research experience, all these papers experience, all these things that I can integrate into my classwork and not only have such peer and wonderful peer mentorship, but some great faculty mentorship as well.

So I can't emphasize enough how much I love this project and how much I love this team. I'm very, very fortunate and lucky.

24:02:14
Brittany Hayes: Thank you. Martha. I'll pop it over to we've got three students left, and every Monday we spend time together coding in a little essentially windowless room. For those of us that do the coding session, we all say it is the best time of the week. It is the thing that we look forward to the most. I'm going to switch over to Rebecca first, though, because when Rebecca came on the project and started here at the program, she was really interested in consent, which isn't necessarily criminal justice related, but it is.

And if we can teach consent, then you don't need me. And that would be fantastic, because that would mean the world is a better place. And so when Rebecca got involved in this project, I remember her thinking, I don't know where this fits in. And then I could she can hopefully speak about our coding experience and we were just coding right before this.

And she's like, oh, this is all of it. So Rebecca, I'll pop it over to you.

25:06:26
Rebekkah Gross: Yeah for sure. Thank you. So I, came from, psychology background. So I do have a good, bit of qualitative coding, obviously, as I'm quantitative too. But I switched from psychology to criminal justice because I really felt like this theoretical work I was doing in psychology wasn't enough. I wanted to make more of a difference and make that difference now and not decades later.

So, criminal justice was kind of a perfect fit for me. Something that I really wasn't totally considering before. But I would not. This is exactly where I'm meant to be, and I love the opportunities that I am getting here, and I'm doing exactly what I want to do. Like Doctor Who said I am extremely passionate about consent.

Definitely prevention of sexual violence. And I really think that education and sexual health education, consent awareness is kind of the key to that. I always say I want to work with people before they are victims or survivors or offenders. I want to work in the very beginning of everyone's lives to kind of teach that consent awareness and that kind of education.

It's just very near and dear to my heart. But I also think it will make a really big difference. And seeing that through the interviews that we've conducted, with law enforcement, disability community members, victim advocate, agencies, individuals with ideas, it's very clear to me that there is a very glaring gap in consent education and sexual health awareness or education.

But I have been able to really kind of hone my skills with qualitative work, with helping people, transcribe like, doctor his lunch in that tiered mentorship. I, I, I love teaching and having that kind of opportunity to mentor others in something that I absolutely love, like qualitative work has been really awesome for me, and it's made me not just a better, mentor, I think, or a teacher, but also a better coder and researcher too, because I've realized the things that I can work better on and things that, I maybe take for granted with my learning or how I learned qualitative work and and things that I can just kind of better explain. So that has been really amazing for me, and I really love that aspect of this project. But yeah. So, teaching others how to, transcribe how to code, just being in that nitty gritty part of the research project where you feel like you have no idea what you're doing, or there's so many things that can be applied to one sentence for coding, for example.

But kind of working that out and having that team meeting every week has honestly, like doctor has said, it's my the highlight of my week. It's three hours and kind of like a fishbowl and I love it so much. We get to talk everything about this project, everything that we've kind of talked about with all of our participants and kind of comes to fruition in these, coding sessions.

And I'm just excited to kind of start the next step. I did want to mention that my favorite thing about qualitative work, and something that I think it's just so incredible with this team and this project is, these people tell us their stories. They take time out of their schedules to talk about sometimes the worst parts of their lives.

And it is such an honor and an opportunity to be able to talk with them and listen to them and hear their stories and give voice to them and bring that out to other people in the community and and see what what we can do with it to make it a better experience and hopefully eliminate some of this kind of violence and just increase prevention.

29:24:20
Brittany Hayes: Thank you, Rebecca. And it's really poignant to circle back on that, because we spent a lot of time talking as a team about what our goal was, and it's enhancing access to justice for everyone. And you can see how so many of the students points come back to that overarching why of the goal and the reason and the motivation behind this project.

So thank you, Rebecca. And this is a great transition to Mary and Choi, who are really doing the nitty gritty part of transcription. And it also just showcases how students are finding the support within the project that best aligns with their overarching career goals, where they're at in their education journey. And I think that's of most interest to them.

And so Choi is finishing up the master's program. Very is an undergraduate researcher. She's not the only one we've had on the project, but she's who we have right now. And we'll be starting that master's program next year. And they can talk a little bit about that transcription and the mentorship from folks who have had a lot more experience with the qualitative coding.

So Choi or Mary, what if you would like to pop in?

30:41:18
Hye Sun Choi: Hi. My name is Choi. I'm currently in my second semester in my master's program. And I got involved with this project like early January, so I'm a little late, but, with like the transcription side and nitty gritty, I definitely agree. The process itself is very tedious, but there's so much to learn from. I had zero experience with qualitative.

I fortunately had some quantitative experience, but this building from ground up approach that we're doing, I've had no experiences. And I wasn't the one conducting the interview, so I'm just looking at it after everything's been done. But listening to these stories and what they are saying at least three times in the, for the transcription, things get engraved in my head.

I'm like, oh my gosh, okay, I never thought of it that way. Or, you know, I didn't know. And it sucks. I didn't know. So I'm even though I wasn't involved in the early on of the process, I still get to learn a lot from it. And given that my interest is in, victimization of minority, this project fits right into it, and I'm going to be really honest and say I didn't even consider, the community as minority until I started this project.

It's kind of shameful, but it wasn't it wasn't in my head until I started this project. So I'm really grateful that, you know, my research, like horizon, has really expanded on, you know what I could be doing in my future career. And I also really want to speak on the peer mentorship side of things. I really love our coding sessions because I'm not coding, I'm just transcribing.

But any questions? I have, I would, like take my headphones off and ask a question. Everyone's like, what is it? And, everyone's like, hands on trying to help me get their things. And the best part about it is that they're always, like constructive in their feedback. I send an email like, hey, can I get this reviewed?

And that it comes back with a list of things that I could improve on. And I, I feel like this project, it's a lot of busy work, but the fact that, members of this team is are willing to, like, take the time to go through things properly and make sure that we are all on the same page.

I think it's really important. And like back to the transcription part. My favorite thing about this is that the enthusiasm of our interviewees, I think at the end of each interview, we say that we are going to gather the results and we ask, are you willing to, would you be okay if we contacted you again with the results we have?

They all say, yes. Yes. As I come in now, we want to know. So just like the reassurance that I know this project won't end after we, gather our results, that's when it's really going to start. I feel like that gets me really pumped up about it.

33:57:25
Brittany Hayes: Thank you, Choi. And you don't have to be a shame, because when Doctor Powers and I started looking at this question, gosh, it's five years, five, six years now, we were also ashamed that we had like, we had overlooked two. And so there's some really great literature out there that disability hasn't been centered in our conversations around criminal justice, despite the fact that one in four individuals will have a disability at some point in their life.

And so it has been largely overlooked by the entire field, until relatively recently. So you are not alone. And this is for listeners. If this is the first time or thinking about you're like, oh, wow. Like it takes that light bulb moment to then go ahead and start making that change. And so we're all just grateful for Leigh Anne, for being patient with us on our learning journeys throughout it too.

34:54:29
Leigh Anne McKingsley: I just have to say that that is why getting those stories is so important. Yeah, because because of the nature of the disability, it's hard for people to get their stories heard. So thank you. I just want to say thank you to all of you. You do better when you know better, right? Like I did the same thing I, with the same process.

35:17:21
Brittany Hayes: Thank you. Liane, pop it over to Mary.

35:22:25
Mary Grady: Hello. My name is Mary Grady, and I am a fourth year undergrad, so, yes, this is my first time working on a major research project or really anything research related. How I got involved with this project was Doctor Hayes pitched it to me one day, while we were somewhere, and it was definitely a light bulb.

35:47:18
Brittany Hayes: Mary! We were in Scotland!

35:52:18
Mary Grady: I know I didn't know if I should disclose that. But yes, we were in Scotland for the abroad trip and we were sitting around having drinks and she'd go in and I'm like, this is an interesting research topic. And it was definitely a light bulb moment for me because it definitely makes sense, because individuals with developmental disabilities or intellectual definitely have a disadvantage on reporting crime and victimization and just like how to help them get help after such a traumatic incident.

To beg you back off the Choi, we pretty much transcribed. So I just go through all the interviews and just like de-identify a lot of information so that it can be traced back to these individuals to protect them, but it also it's a it's very informative to just hear their stories, and they all have pretty much the same experiences, but it's in a different way of how they experience it.

36:56:21
Brittany Hayes: That's great, Mary.

36:57:05
Rebekkah Gross: Transcriptions is literally the heart of this. We wouldn't have anything to be able to cold or anything if we didn't have transcriptions. We've we've all started there. We're all we all are at that nitty gritty point and we all build up and it's it's really is a learning curve. But you are doing incredible work. Incredible. It's been awesome to see how everyone has improved from the start to now. Myself, included.

37:26:07
Brittany Hayes: Thank you Rebecca. That was absolutely fantastic. And you all really reinforce that peer mentorship. But I know Doctor Powers and I, really want to circle back to that, the role of students in this project. And I will say that the absolute best, most rewarding part of this job is working with students, seeing students growth and seeing students, and how they contribute to the project, but then evolve their interest, their skills over time.

So I'll pass it over to Doctor Powers, who can also speak a little bit more about this.

38:22
Ráchael Powers: Yeah, absolutely. I think we've heard some really great testimonials and experiences from students about what they got out of the project, but I think it's really important to highlight that a project like this, the success of it is really contingent on our early career collaborators. So every single student has brought something amazing to the team energy, effort and expertise.

And I think we heard a lot of that today. But I want to make it really explicit that this project works is because we have our early career collaborators. And so for prospective students who might be listening to this, wondering if they're going to go to grad school or wondering if they have anything to offer in the research space, the answer is yes, right?

You have stuff to offer. You belong in the room as the next generation of scientists. And so I just want to make that really, really clear that this is not a one sided, benefit.

38:54:27
Brittany Hayes: So you might be asking yourself why you see. Right. You're thinking about where my educational journey could take me. Who you see offers amazing research opportunities and an incredible level of support. And so while this project is grant funded, as you can tell, there's a lot of students involved in this project, and that support came from the university in various different ways.

We have Mary here, who is an undergraduate receiving course credit. We've had other students who used the honors program to obtain course credit and salary work. We have received support from the university in disseminating these findings to the community, and that has been really key to the project and the project team. And that we will produce the research report.

But that is not an accessible medium for the community that we work with. And with that, we have launched with the university and with the community overall to create accessible materials and plain language. And so where can you plug in? You can see that there's lots of different ways to get involved, and that might be through here. Of course, it might be through conducting the interviews.

It might be entering zeros and ones into the computer. If you really like to stay at home in your jammies like I do. And so you see presents a lot of different opportunities, not only for your education, but for gaining that research experience as well. And so we really thank you for taking the time. But we also really thank the students and the community members that we worked with Doctor Powers, Doctor Simmons, and Leanne and I might be the leaders of the team, but we're the really lucky ones who get to work with students and work with community members to really help us understand what those reporting barriers are and come up with better solutions.

So thank you.

41:06:21
Rodney Wilson: Thanks for listening to this episode of CECH Chats, a presentation of UC's College of Education, Criminal Justice, Human Services, and Information Technology’s marketing Department. CECH Chats is edited and produced by me, Rodney Wilson. To learn more about the college and its programs, visit us online at cech.uc.edu. While you're there, check out the CECH Headlines page for recent stories, past episodes of CECH chats, and more.

Until next time, thanks for joining us.