Paper 2

Research Problems

Applied Management and Decision Sciences

Organizations are human systems. As such, each member of the system brings to bear the full range of psychological and emotional behavior while also applying themselves to their work which is highly prescriptive and ostensibly rational. Because of this, human systems experience high levels of inefficiency as emotions, personality, and unconscious impulses interfere with the objectivity and logical processes at work. The question is, to what extent do individuals' idiosyncrasies interfere with the expectations of their performance? A secondary question is, are there managerial tools to mitigate these forces among employees while they are in the workplace?

Counseling Education

When a parent or guardian is incarcerated, that incarceration has an impact on family members, especially children, and the relationship that the incarcerated individual has with family members. As human service professionals, we are concerned particularly with the family experience for ex-offenders and with designing interventions that improve the relationship between ex-offenders and their children and interventions that reduce the likelihood of recidivism with a formerly-incarcerated individual. However, in order to design interventions to address the latter, we must first understand the internal and external factors that result in ex-offenders committing crimes again. The question that we are interested in answering is what are the external and internal factors that contribute to recidivism and what interventions are effective in minimizing the impact of those factors.

Education

The impact of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is being felt at all levels of education. Even though a new administration has continued and redoubled the goals of NCLB, no research has yet been done on the effect/impact NCLB has had on students' motivation to learn at each educational level—from Early Childhood through Higher Education and Adult Learning, where the impacts of NCLB on recent graduates are only beginning to be felt—and in each educational venue, from traditional public education to alternative programs and private educational environments. (Students can tailor their designs to their own areas of specialization.)

Health Services and Public Health

Health disparities are a growing concern in the U.S. There are also a significant proportion of people with limited or no health insurance which may prevent them from receiving adequate health care, medication, and the use preventative measures such as exercise and diet. How would you address this issue?

Public Policy and Administration

Elected and appointed officials at all levels of government are faced with the dilemma of raising demands for services and diminishing financial resources needed to meet those demands. The traditional method of using a public agency to implement policy and deliver services is no longer possible or even desirable in many cases. Governments in the United States and throughout the world have formed partnerships with nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations as a means to implement policies and deliver services. In many cases, the new partnerships have placed administrators from two very different organizational cultures in direct contact with one another on a daily basis. Public and nonprofit administrators must learn to accommodate the organizational culture of their counterparts if the new partnerships are to succeed. Scholars studying in the fields of public and nonprofit administration can provide a great service to their counterparts in practice by addressing the research problem of how to integrate the organizational cultures of their two sectors.