Research
Research Funding
For students looking for research funding, check out the Kennedy Research Fellows and Canadian Studies Research options.
For faculty looking for research funding, click here.
WomanStats Data Project
The WomanStats Project began at BYU in 2001 with the aim of investigating the link between the security and behavior of states and the situation and security of the women within them. Since that time, it has grown to include thirteen principal investigators across eight countries, representing different fields of study: international relations, geography, psychology, sustainable development, statistics, and sociology. The Project has also been a source of mentoring to over 200 students, many of whom have gone on to post-graduate education or public service work. It has been cited over 600 times.
The Project has several interrelated goals:
- To develop the most comprehensive database on the situation and status of women in the world.
- To develop innovative indices and measures to describe the situation and status of women, which will allow for empirical analysis, assessment, monitoring, and evaluation activities.
- To perform empirical and spatial analysis of the relationship between the situation and status of women in the world with the behavior and security of states.
For more information, please check out these WomanStats resources or contact Celeste Beesley at celeste_beesley@byu.edu
Website and Database: https://www.womanstats.org/
Blogpost: https://womanstats.wordpress.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/womanstats
Global Politics Lab
The Global Politics Lab (GPL) fellowship provides intensive, networked mentoring to students interested in deep engagement in scholarly analysis and writing. Every semester, 10-15 GPL fellows participate in a one-credit mentored research class. Fellows work on academic projects under faculty supervision and make substantial progress on a publishable paper to be presented at academic conferences. For example, students working for Dr. Hawkins recently surveyed 10,000 Latin American bureaucrats and followed up with several in-depth interviews. In addition, many other students work as research assistants for affiliated faculty. The lab provides a physical and intellectual space for students to collaborate and network with other students, faculty, and universities.
GPL provides international experiences through mentored-research abroad (field school) programs. Each year, GPL faculty design a program centered on critical topics that enables rich and rewarding student research experiences. In recent years this has included programs in England to study immigration and refugees and in Thailand to study democratic stability and security. In Thailand, students met with government officials, Buddhist monks, ordinary citizens and others, and then designed a nationwide survey experiment with a few thousand respondents. In 2022, the program will center on development, conflict, and governance in the Mediterranean region. Students will have the opportunity to conduct research in Morocco, Spain, Croatia, and Bosnia. In each of these programs, students design, implement, and write up results from professional-level research.
Global Families Project
The Global Families project is a first-of-its-kind effort to collect and collate family-related data for every country in the world. To date, while much excellent data have been collected, the problem has been one of accessibility. For instance, if you wanted to know about marriage rates in sub-Saharan Africa, you often have to search for the data in a variety of places, including searching the internet, calling national statistics offices, and sending emails. Even then, it can be difficult to assess the quality of the data and ensure they are comparable to similar data for other countries. This is accomplished through three main focuses:
First, the Global Families Project aims to collate, appraise, and collect all child and family wellbeing data available for every country in the world and make it widely and freely available.
Second, it produces scholarship that overviews the state of families in each country (Country Profiles) and original brief reports (Global Family Profiles) that highlight global family and child wellbeing patterns and trends. These are written for general audiences and intended for broad consumption.
Last, it produces scholarly journal articles and presentations based on these and other data sources. We also seek to build the Global Families Consortium, a global network of family scholars devoted to improving family life and child wellbeing around the globe.