NCSU Libraries Focus Online

Volume 26 number 1 - Fall 2005

ICPSR Stipends Awarded

By Anna Dahlstein, External Relations

Two NC State University graduate students received stipends to attend a week-long course on structural equation modeling offered by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in July 2005. Each year, ICPSR makes available to its member institutions a small amount of money to encourage researchers to attend the summer program. The librarian serving as the university’s official representative to ICPSR solicits funding requests and manages the award process. This year, Gretchen Thompson and Robert “R. V.” Rikard split  NC State’s allocation. Both are in the Department of Sociology’s doctoral program.

Thompson is a native of Greenville, North Carolina, and an NC State alumna, having earned a bachelor’s degree in animal science as well as a master’s degree in liberal studies. Her research interests include global social change and development and rural and community sociology. She is interested in studying the relationship between agricultural development and infant mortality in different nations for her dissertation.

Rikard, also a North Carolina native, grew up in Black Mountain near Asheville and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Appalachian State University. His research interests include social control, sentencing, corrections, quantitative methodology, research methods, the intersection of mental health and the law, and the provision of health care to special needs populations. For his dissertation, he hopes to evaluate an intervention program diverting people needing mental health treatment from the criminal justice system into social services. He says, “Given my interest in quantitative methods, I want to have a diverse set of skills to move beyond one level of analysis into multiple areas of research. The ICPSR course will add one more resource to my quantitative tool-belt.”