Two UTCSW undergraduate students were recently selected as Undergraduate Research Assistants for Spring 2023. This opportunity allows the students to explore undergraduate research first-hand by working directly with faculty members.

BSSW student Cat Steele will work with Faculty Research Mentor Gretchen Ely as part of a research team that will conduct an analysis of open-ended responses from a survey that examined the unmet health care needs of Appalachian women. Steele will be paired up with an MSW level graduate research assistant and charged with helping to categorize the comments into themes using the five dimensions of healthcare access framework. Steele will work with the graduate assistant to categorize themes and then meet with Dr. Ely to discuss agreement of theme categorization. After the completion of the qualitative analysis, the team, which will include the undergraduate student, will compose a paper for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.  Steele will be given the opportunity to contribute to the discussion section of the paper and included in the paper’s authorship.

Additionally, Hailey Crowe will work with Faculty Research Mentor Nikola Zaharakis in the Center for Behavioral Health Research. Crowe will be on the upcoming Cherokee Interview Study, which is a qualitative study involving interviews with staff, parents, and adolescent patients of Cherokee Health System toward improving the recruitment, enrollment, and engagement of families into a future clinical trial of a text-delivered preventive intervention for youth substance misuse. Crowe’s duties will include screening and scheduling participants, conducting informed consent, and structured one-hour interviews, checking transcriptions of interview audio recordings, and qualitative analysis of interview transcripts. Opportunities for Crowe will also include mentoring in research article publication.