By Stephen M. Gavazzi, Ph.D.

The Latest News, Views, and Announcements

Happy Holidays!

Last week, CHRR employees celebrated our annual Winter Holidays Party, with some three dozen team members in attendance. A great time was had by all! Special thanks to Mary Persons and Brittany Poast for all the great planning that went into making the event so successful (and much appreciation to Rosella Gardecki for assuming the role of White Elephant MC in Brittany’s absence!). On a somewhat related and festive holiday note, Laura Rusnak reported that CHRR staff members generously donated $640 to our JamesCare Hope for the Holidays family this season—the highest amount to date! Many thanks to all donors and to Laura for her continued leadership on this effort.

What’s New at CHRR

CHRR recently closed our second-ever longitudinal survey using the American Population Panel (APP)! In partnership with Chris Knoester (Ohio State sociology professor) and Leeann Lower-Hoppe (Ohio State sports management associate professor), we worked to secure the participation of 1,367 panelists in the next round of the National Sports and Society Survey (NSASS). The response rate of 41% is fairly impressive given the very large gap in time between Time 1 and Time 2 (approximately 7 years!). Equally impressive was the fact that 86% of the panelists who responded to the first survey were still available in the APP as potential survey respondents!

The work surrounding NSASS is remarkable not only because the research team has stepped up the sophistication of its methodology to now include longitudinal data, but also because these NSASS-focused scholars have nearly twenty studies using the Wave I data accepted for publication to date. Therefore, we expect to see a rapidly expanding set of contributions to the literature from this research team in the months and years ahead as the Wave II data is analyzed!

CHRR's Leadership Team

As noted in the November 2024 newsletter, the CHRR Leadership Team settled on a topic for our next round of Quarterly Check In (QCI) meetings, focusing important attention on Work-Life balance. Leadership Team members will be discussing themes that emerge from these meetings and will plan accordingly. On a related note, training on supervisor awareness of mental health issues was discussed in the August 2024 newsletter, with the promise that more information would be made available after all Leadership Team members took part in a training offered by Ohio State’s employee assistance program. The prevailing thought coming out of these trainings was that supervisors and employees alike can and should be supported in accessing these and other resources that focus attention on mental health concerns. Leadership Team members also believed that the QCI meetings are an excellent and informal way to remain focused on wellness issues of all types.

CHRR Team Member Celebrations

Not a single CHRR team member has a work anniversary that falls in December. And so, instead of celebrating any single individual, I wish to note that CHRR is fortunate to have so many long-term employees whose experience and skillsets are the very reason we have been so successful over 59 years of work. As readers know from previous newsletters, current statistics indicate that the average length of employment at CHRR is almost 15.5 years. Thanks to everyone for your commitment to the CHRR mission!

Things You Might Want to Know

CHRR Releases Round 30 of the NLSY79

CHRR released Round 30 of the NLSY79 to the public in November 2024. For this longitudinal project, CHRR partnered with NORC at the University of Chicago to field the sample. This survey began in 1979 with a national sample of 12,686, respondents born between 1957-1964. Respondents are now ages 57-66. In addition to a core cross-sectionally representative sample of civilians, the survey was administered to oversamples of Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged non-Black/non-Hispanic civilian respondents. A military oversample was also included. Due to funding reasons, the military and economically disadvantaged oversamples were dropped (following the 1984 and 1990 surveys respectively).

The survey was fielded annual from 1979-1994 and biannually afterwards. While the focus is on the labor market activities of this group, questions are asked about most aspects of respondents' lives that could potentially affect their participation. Early non-labor topics included additional questions about schooling and training while the current survey devotes more time to questions about health status, activities and behaviors, and retirement activities. The Round 30 response rate for the active sample is 74.4%.

The Ohio Education Research Center Releases Strategic Plan

The Ohio Education Research Center (OERC), sister center to CHRR, recently released its five-year Strategic Plan, which outlines the center’s current strengths and future opportunities for supporting Ohio’s leaders with current educational research and recommendations for successful future planning. OERC has established a 15-year track record of partnership and collaboration with the State of Ohio and colleagues in other institutions across Ohio. As stated by OERC Director Josh Hawley in the plan’s preamble:

“What started with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 has now become a robust infrastructure supporting educational outcomes, job development and a healthy workforce. This work spans nonprofit, private and government sectors and leverages federal, foundation and state support.”

Congratulations to our OERC colleagues and we look forward to working alongside all of you as you move to realize your strategic priorities!

New Publications in Journal of Family Theory and Review

The article I co-authored with Indigenous scholar Theresa Ambo (associate professor of American Indian Studies at UCLA) was just published in a special issue collated by the Journal of Family Theory and Review. This article focuses attention on the “land grab” history of land-grant universities, with special attention paid to my academic field (family science). Click to read the article: Family Science, Land-Grant Universities, and the Challenging Legacy of Land-Grab Institutions.

Also, I was a co-author on a second article published in that same special issue, this time with collaborators Anisa Zvonkovic and Alton Standifer (both at the University of Georgia) and Rebecca Dumlao (East Carolina University). This article allowed me to extend my prior theoretical and methodological work on models that applies a marital perspective to the study of campus-community relationships. Click to read the article: Addressing campus–community relationships using the three corners marriage model.

Voices of Excellence Podcast Focuses on CHRR

I recently joined host David Staley, host of the College of Arts & Science’s Voices of Excellence podcast, to discuss various issues related to the work being done at CHRR. Among other activities, I shared insights from longitudinal studies run by CHRR such as the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY mentioned above), the increased visibility and use of the American Population Panel, and CHRR’s emerging role in housing secure, accessible data repositories for long-term research. Click to listen to the podcast: Shaping Public Policy with Data.