Act Fast! How Community Development Extension Professionals Can Rapidly Utilize Applied Research to Assist Organization Development

Success Story

 Speaker:
Jerold Thomas and Joe Lucente
Ohio Sea Grant
Community Development (CD) programs are often asked to help non-profit groups conduct surveys as a form of needs assessment. Extension CD professionals are also interested in both helping the clientele and being able to share the findings and publish information in creative and scholarly works. The two purposes often conflict with each other. Extension programs are also more frequently required to obtain institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for any project using human subjects that might be used for creative and scholarly works. This requirement tends to increase the time and procedural requirements of applied community research projects.

This session will demonstrate a process used by the Ohio State University Extension Center at Lima to help an 11 county regional economic development organization develop and conduct a needs assessment. A key focus will be on how the Center used an educational consultative approach to meet with the group, develop a methodology and instrument (an online survey using Zoomerang), obtain IRB exemption, test the validity of the instrument, conduct a census with the survey, analyze the descriptive data and check the statistical significance on specific items, prepare reports and related documentation and then conduct a meting with the regional economic development organization within a two month period.

Click here to return to the Agenda.

For more information about the conference, contact the conference co-chairs: Cindy Bigger, cbigger@umn.edu, (888) 241-0843, or Rick Maurer, richard.maurer@uky.edu, (859) 257-7582.

For questions, comments or concerns about the 2006 NACDEP Conference website, contact emilye@srdc.msstate.edu.