Fifteen faculty receive minigrants for research

VANCOUVER – Fifteen faculty members at WSU Vancouver have been awarded minigrants to stimulate research productivity.

 

Allocations totalling $55,807 were awarded to faculty members as seed funds for projects that will lead to exceptional scholarly activity. The grants have a $5,000 maximum limit and cover the costs of the research in part or in full. The money for mini-grants is generated from academic administration funds.

 

The following are representative examples of research funded by mini-grants.

 

Jerry Goodstein, Ph.D., professor of management, will address an issue of growing significance in the health care sector with his project, “A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Responding to Disruptive Physician Behavior in Health Care Organizations.”

 

Disruptive physician behavior is defined as any inappropriate behavior, confrontation or conflict ranging from verbal abuse to sexual harassment.

 

“The toll on health care professionals due to disruptive behavior is high. Studies suggest that disruptive behavior increases levels of stress and frustration and hinders the effectiveness of team collaboration. In addition, many health care professionals perceive disruptive behavior as having adverse effects on patient care,” said Goodstein.

 

Despite the prevalence and significance of the issue, there is little research on how health care organizations are responding to disruptive behavior or the effectiveness of strategies aimed at altering behavior and restoring damaged relationships between physicians, clinicians and patients.

 

Goodstein has noted that existing studies draw exclusively from health care and do not incorporate other valuable perspectives, specifically from the fields of management, criminal justice and philosophy. Through a series of focus group discussions, he hopes to elicit the insights and experiences of a diverse group of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners affiliated with the University of British Columbia. In addition, Goodstein will conduct exploratory research within Canadian health care institutions. 

 

“My intent is to build on this initial research, publish its findings and extend this work to the United States health care sector,” said Goodstein.

 

Joan Grenier-Winther, Ph.D., professor of French, will research the love poetry of one particular medieval gentleman with her project, “Translation of the Courtly Poetry of the 14th c. French Knight-Poet, Oton de Granson.” Grenier-Winther is co-translator with Peter Nicholson, Ph.D., of the University Hawai’i, Manoa, a noted specialist of late medieval English literature.

 

“Granson’s poetry speaks of love-sickness, adoration of the beloved, the ways in which a gallant knight should court and honor his lady, and the pain of unrequited love. With Chaucer, he is also believed to have established the association of St. Valentine with the cult of love, giving us the Valentine’s Day we all, hopefully, enjoy today,” said Grenier-Winther.

 

Granson spent more than half of his military career in service to the English and served as a conduit for the transmission of the conventions and fixed forms of French poetry to England. In true medieval fashion he was killed in a 1397 duel.

 

Grenier-Winther will travel to the University of Pennsylvania to consult an original 14th century manuscript. She hopes to publish the translation along with the French text, an introduction to the life of the poet and his position among his French and English literary contemporaries. Her paper will also discuss the formal and thematic conventions of Granson’s work.

 

Sue Peabody, Ph.D., professor of history, is concentrating her research on enslaved people in 18th and 19th century France who participated in legislative reforms to advance the antislavery movement. Her project, “Furcy: Biography of a Slave,” takes a personal look at the life of a slave in regards to the rapidly changing political climate of France from the royal Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848.

 

While Peabody was researching her 1996 book “There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century France,” a study of slave’s pre-revolutionary lawsuits for freedom, she discovered a unique lawsuit by an Indian slave named Furcy. The case culminated in the 1843 decision by France’s Supreme Court of Appeal to recognize the freedom of Furcy on the basis of the Free Soil principle, that any slave setting foot on French soil was free. The decision also rejected an argument based on race and found that slaves of Indian descent were exempt from slavery.

 

“Scholarship on French antislavery is robust for the eighteenth century when enlightenment celebrations of freedom appealed to liberal philosophes and revolutionary politicians. However, France’s second abolition process, subsequent to the restoration of the Napoleonic and royalist regimes, has received considerably less attention. The Furcy case has been completely ignored in French scholarship until my own recent articles,” said Peabody. 

 

Peabody is currently using her mini-grant award in Paris, France where she is continuing to research and draft a biography of Furcy. While in Paris, she has access to rare census records for French settlements, ship passenger lists and French law newspapers.

Peabody’s research will result in a book that follows, through Furcy’s eyes, the experience of legal institutions and jurisprudence on categories of race, citizenship and freedom during successive political regimes.

 

Early interest in the project is significant, as shown by her recent invitations to lecture on her work-in-progress in Brazil, at Yale University, Vanderbilt University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Pennsylvania, at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes (Paris) and at McGill University in Montreal, and by the translation of her related articles into French for publication in foreign journals.

 

Katie Witkiewitz, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology, is focusing her research on the growing problem of substance use disorders in United States prisons among women. Her project is titled, “Evaluation of Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention for Women in Residential Treatment for Substance Use Disorders Following a Criminal Offense.”

“Re-incarceration, re-offending and relapse to substance use rates are particularly high among substance-involved offenders. Despite the grim statistics, it has been shown that providing evidence-based substance abuse and mental health treatment following incarceration leads to significant reductions in criminal re-offending and substance use relapse,” says Witkiewitz. 

 

Witkiewitz’s study aims to compare the relative efficacy of two substance abuse treatments, Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention and Relapse Prevention, in the prevention of relapse and criminal re-offending, particularly for women with co-occurring mental disorders.

 

The study will take place at the Volunteers of America Oregon – Women’s Residential Center (WRC) in Portland, a 40-bed chemical dependency program. WRC provides housing, addiction treatment services and other life-skills programs to women who have been referred from the criminal justice system for offenses that include possession of illicit drugs, theft, prostitution and probation violations. 

 

Witkiewitz is grateful for the WSU Vancouver students who will be working with her on the study.

 

“Three amazing undergraduate students, Connie Stauffer, Kelly Wade and Kaitlin Warner, and a wonderful recent WSU Vancouver graduate, Gillian Steckler, will be assisting with all aspects of the research. This research could not be conducted without their help.”