Coordinating a research program with a cadre of students.

Abstract

H OW DO faculty manage to fulfill their obligations to teach and mentor students with a wide diversity of research interests and yet do their own research in order to publish scholarly work? I considered this question when implementing a program of research on the relationship between temperament and behavior in preschool-age children and the development of nursing intervention for parents. A plan for collaborative research with master’s level graduate students conducting temperament studies similar to mine seemed to be one way to meet these academic obligations so that all persons involved would benefit from the plan. Several years ago, I had conducted some pilot studies and was ready to explore the phenomenon of temperament in a series of projects. In order to progress my own research and assist graduate students in their research, those graduate students working on their theses under my guidance would use the instruments from my research to allow for both comparisons between and pooling among data sets. The goal for the faculty person is to find interested and ambitious students to mentor; the goal for the student is to participate in a senior faculty’s research and complete a research project. In this arrangement both individuals gain as the student may have less stress through involvement in an ongoing project, and the researcher gains from the addition of extra data as well as the opportunity to introduce students to research in a manner that may be less stressful than conducting an independent study. Additionally, students may have the opportunity to conduct secondary analyses of the