VoE - Stephen Gavazzi 10.28.2024 === [00:00:00] Stephen Gavazzi: One third of the sample said, I don't have enough information to give you an opinion. So, we talked about this in the book as being this amazing white space that universities could get into and say, wait, there's a large segment of the public on the fence right now about how well we're doing: let's go after that. Jen Farmer: From the heart of The Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff with departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. David Staley: I'm pleased to welcome into the ASC Marketing and Communication Studio, my colleague and collaborator, [00:01:00] Steve Gavazzi, Professor in the Department of Human Sciences and Director of CHRR at The Ohio State University. He established a research program that identifies the impact of family dynamics on adolescent development, psychopathology, and problem behavior. Dr. Gavazzi, welcome to Voices. Stephen Gavazzi: Thank you, David. David Staley: So, I introduced you as my collaborator, and I think I should probably explain what that means. You and I co-edited the volume, _Fulfilling the 21st Century Land Grant Mission;_ that was in 2020, I think. Say a little bit about what this volume was. Stephen Gavazzi: Well, it was a really great opportunity for us to celebrate Ohio State's sesquicentennial celebration, and for the audience, that's 150 years. We passed that mark in 2020, and we wanted to commemorate it in a substantial way, and so you will remember that you and I were both working on books at the time, and so it was not out of the realm of possibilities that we could write a book together. But, we decided [00:02:00] that the easier route was to co-edit. We invited... 35 of our colleagues? David Staley: Something like that, yeah. Stephen Gavazzi: Both here at Ohio State, and also people who moved on into other leadership positions, and we were able to capture the essence of what we wanted to say about Ohio State, both in its present state, which is really a premier land grant university, but also what the future was going to look like, and of course, as a futurist, you had, a great way of framing that up for people. And I was really pleased that so many of the authors that contributed took the time to really think about what the future of a land grant university should look like. David Staley: Mhm. And, as you say, you were writing a book at the time; you've actually written quite a few books about the status of higher education, its future. Your latest is _What's Public about Public Higher Ed?;_ I'm interested to hear more about what you argued in this book. Stephen Gavazzi: Well, it was a follow up to the previous book that we did for Johns Hopkins University [00:03:00] Press. My co author, Gordon Gee, who is a twice president here at Ohio State and twice at West Virginia University, still there and planning on retiring next year. David Staley: That's what I understand. Stephen Gavazzi: I suspect there's probably one more book that he and I will write together, and I think it will coincide with him stepping down, because he'll have more time on his hands, and while he's a delightful collaborator, being a president, running a university, it's very time consuming. I mean, he is the Energizer Bunny, right? So, I really think that this will be an opportunity for him to look back at his almost 50 years of being a president at seven different institutions, I think, at last count,~ ~and perhaps take ~ ~what's public about public higher ed to the next level. David Staley: So what did you argue in the book? What is public about public higher ed? Stephen Gavazzi: So, because it was an extension of our previous book, we took the themes developed in the 2018 book, _Land-Grant Universities for the Future_, [00:04:00] in which we interviewed 27 different presidents and chancellors from land grant universities, and developed themes out of those discussions that we had, those interviews that we had with those presidents. We decided the biggest drawback to that book was that we only talked to people in higher ed. So, we did the interviews with the presidents and then afterwards we had interviewed, I would say, conservatively another 25 to 30 higher ed thinkers, people who were thought leaders ~ ~in that space. As a result, we came up with these themes. So, we looked back at that book, it was very popular, it sold lots of copies, and we said, so what's wrong with that book? We did a little bit of navel-gazing, right? It was all people inside of higher ed. So, what we decided to do, and here's the irony of now being the director of CHRR, CHRR has a nationwide panel called the American Population Panel. Because I had known about that, and because my predecessor, [00:05:00] Elizabeth Cooksey, and I were friends she said during one informal conversation we were having, Steve, you have all these ideas about higher ed, have you ever thought about checking that out with a national audience? And so, what we decided to do was just that. The interesting thing about that book was, it was a pre-pandemic survey; we also had decided that we were going to go only to the four most populous states in the country, so that's New York, Texas, California, and Florida, plus Ohio and West Virginia, because that's where both Gordon and I were, and see if we couldn't just begin to develop some ideas about how accurate these higher ed thinkers were about what people out in the country really thought of higher education institutions and specifically the public higher education institutions. What we found as a result of that particular survey was that the presidents and thought leaders got some things right, but also we're really missing the boat on a lot of other things, and things that [00:06:00] you and I would probably imagine, like, free speech: very, very important to people in America, was not really mentioned much by the president's chancellors and other thought leaders, as one example. But here's the other thing that was really interesting, David. So, because the book was almost ready to go in March of 2020, the pandemic hit. David Staley: Of course. Stephen Gavazzi: And as a result of that, our publisher said, we're not releasing this because we don't know what the landscape is going to look like, and maybe you'd like an opportunity to talk about the impact of the pandemic on higher ed. And as a result, what we ended up doing was another survey. This time we went out to the full national sample and we asked some additional questions that we thought were really important, which included how well did people think the public universities of their state, how well were they responding both to the COVID crisis and also the calls for social justice. David Staley: [00:07:00] Mhm. Stephen Gavazzi: Fascinating things that we found out as a result of that, and I'm going to tell you the most important thing that came out of that, especially given where we are right now, in terms of a week before a national election, we found out the unsurprising result: Democrats, more than Republicans, thought that universities by and large, were doing a good job at responding to the crises of the day. That's not surprising. What was surprising was that equal amounts of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents told us they did not have enough information to make a decision about that, David Staley: Really? Stephen Gavazzi: Which is fascinating. By the way, that was a full one third of the sample said, I don't have enough information to give you an opinion. So, we talked about this in the book as being this amazing white space that universities could get into and say, wait, there's a large segment of the public on the fence right now about how well we're doing: let's go after that. I think Gordon took advantage of that at West Virginia University. [00:08:00] Other public universities, not so much. ~ ~Dr. Gee has his own special challenges at West Virginia, which included a huge budget crisis. David Staley: Right. Stephen Gavazzi: But in the end, he was paying attention to what public opinion was telling him about his university. David Staley: How about this university? Stephen Gavazzi: Well, we've been in the middle of a leadership transition, and I think that President Carter's still getting his feet underneath him right now, but he certainly looks and sounds like he's doing the right things in terms of paying attention to what at least the more vocal segments of the general public are saying right now about higher ed. And by the way, President Carter is a hockey player, David Staley: Yes. Stephen Gavazzi: As am I. David Staley: As are you, yes. Stephen Gavazzi: So, so I'm just going to tell you now, I would implicitly trust that he's going to find his own way. If only because of his on ice experiences. David Staley: I introduced you as a Professor in the Department of Human Sciences, and your research focuses on families, adolescence, that sort of dynamic. How did you end up, then, as a scholar of higher [00:09:00] education? Stephen Gavazzi: So, along the way, I became the Dean of the Mansfield campus. That was really life changing for me because I really did have to set my scholarship aside and begin to really focus on what it was that that particular campus needed most. The relationship between that campus and the community prior to my arrival was not in good shape, and there were a number of reasons why, most significant of which was the local hospital had offered a nursing program to be adopted by Ohio State, and it was almost a comedy of errors. And I think it really had to do with failed leadership at the time here at Ohio State. And it was really during the time that Gordon was a part of this, and it wasn't really Gordon's leadership as much as it was the leadership in the nursing school at the time. But they bumbled it and the local tech college picked it up. The community never forgot that [00:10:00] slight, and so as a result, I realized coming in, I was really going to have to do something about that. Paying attention to that town-gown relationship was something that, got me interested in looking at higher ed and thinking to myself, okay, well, this was a regional campus of a land grant university. It was important for me to be paying attention to that as a leader; what were other leaders thinking? And that was really the basis for doing all of these interviews, which led to the _Land-Grant Universities for the Future_ book, which was my posing the question and Gordon coming along with me and saying how important is the relationship between your campus and your communities? How does that fit into your leadership style? And what it revealed, I think, was that uniformly, presidents and chancellors were paying a lot of attention to that. And I think that's because of the land grant mission. We're pretty good at trumpeting how well we do at that, but there's also that community component, that engagement component. That I think is something [00:11:00] that university presidents, land grant university presidents in particular, pay a lot of attention to. Now the highlight of that typically goes through Cooperative Extension Services, that gives every land grant university access to every county in the state they are located in. Fortunately though, Ohio State, great example of that, engagement of communities goes well beyond what's happening inside of Cooperative Extension Services. And I think that has been one of the great findings that we reported in that 2018 book. David Staley: So I introduced you as director of CHRR. I note this will be the 60th anniversary of CHRR. First of all, remind us what is CHRR? Stephen Gavazzi: So, CHRR was started in 1965, which is why coming up next year in 2025, it'll be our 60th anniversary. It started largely because of a major contract that was given to Ohio State by the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor [00:12:00] Statistics. In its infinite wisdom in 1965, it decided that it really needed to know more about how workforce development was occurring inside of the United States, and so they really adopted a biopsychosocial approach from the beginning. What's biopsychosocial? Biological, psychological, and social, so we just crammed those three words together to get the biopsychosocial. David Staley: And that hadn't been considered before. Stephen Gavazzi: Not to my knowledge. I mean, they weren't even calling it biopsychosocial back then. They were just simply saying, we need to know things about people's health and how that impacts their workforce participation. We need to know things about the individual, the psychological makeup of the person, and we need to know more about their families and the communities that they're inside of. So, what began in 1965 was a series of cohort studies. We were grabbing people who were a certain age at a certain time, and then we were following them. Now, all of those original studies that were given to us [00:13:00] in 1965, they're no longer in existence; however, in 1979 we were given a contract to start what was called the National Longitudinal Study of Youth or NLSY. And that particular study is going on today. A second cohort was launched in 1997 doing much the same thing, so we are now following these two cohorts of people, and what did we do in 1979? We grabbed families who had youth between the ages of 12 and 16. Those people were identified and then we began to recruit them and then follow them over time. Now what happens is these families of 12 to 16 year olds in 1979, we go into the field and we talk to them and then we talk to the next families the following year in the 1997 cohort, and we toggle back and forth. So now we do this every other year. Let's look again at the 1979 cohort. I was 17 years old, I just missed being in the cohort, but [00:14:00] I'm 62 years old. So, think about this: we have data on people from the time that they were 12 to 16 to, now, they're somewhere between 60 and 65 years of age. So, we've actually captured a whole life cycle of workforce development. David Staley: What sorts of things have you learned from this? Stephen Gavazzi: So, you actually talked to my colleague, Elizabeth Cooksey, several years ago about the fact that we have been able to facilitate over ten thousand published studies as a result of this 1979 cohort alone, which is fascinating. So what have we found? All of the evidence of the things that you would expect, right? That people who finish their education, which includes obviously for many, but not all people, the ability to go to college and for some people to get advanced degrees; this matters in terms of lifetime earnings. What we also see is that when the timing of certain things are off, like, for instance, [00:15:00] education has been delayed because you get married or you have a child, again, well documented that on time versus off time, the significance of those particular life events, the birth of a child, marriage and educational attainment; it really matters in terms of the sequence. Those people who finish their education first before having children and before getting married, they tend to do the best. Then there are all these other interacting events, like having a health scare, as one example, losing one's job; those are very significant, and again, we've been able to document how people experience them, and then also how they recover from them. David Staley: Is there any evidence of this information or this scholarship being used for public policy formation? Stephen Gavazzi: Oftentimes what has happened, and I'm actually an example of this, where you pay attention to the literature and then you say, Okay, in my particular [00:16:00] case I was paying attention to juvenile delinquency, people getting involved in some sort of illegal activity that brought them to the attention of the juvenile court. This has a tremendous negative impact, but it's differential, and so the question is, depending on what? David Staley: Right. Stephen Gavazzi: So, as one example, in terms of what I did, was I developed a prevention program that tried to move people who were coming in to contact with the juvenile court out of harm's way, if you will. And so, oftentimes I think scholars such as myself who develop programming, end up impacting policy, because one of the things that we see as a result of this kind of juvenile justice work are what are now called diversion programs. Diversion programs have become a huge component, and again, not even just juvenile justice, we see diversion programming for everything from prostitution to returning veterans. I think that this idea of diverting people away from courts came out of [00:17:00] policy decisions grounded in the kind of research done with the NLSY. David Staley: Are you asked to consult? Stephen Gavazzi: Oh, I've consulted around the country. David Staley: With whom? Stephen Gavazzi: Well, in my case, a lot of it has been with juvenile ~ ~court systems, but also adult systems as well, because they're trying to staunch the flow of people who are coming into their prisons. Oftentimes they're asking for help in terms of how to figure that out. David Staley: Earlier, you'd mentioned the American Population Panel. Tell us about what this panel is and the sorts of research that's come from this. Stephen Gavazzi: So in 2017, there was an effort to begin to build what has now become the American Population Panel, or APP, we'll just call it for short, based in large part on the lack of availability of affordable panels for researchers, especially when they're just beginning their research work. Oftentimes what researchers such as you and I need is a pilot sample. We need to be able to get our fingernails dirty and say, Hey, [00:18:00] I've got some ideas about things. Let's test this out. And it's hard to do that with the Gallup poll, it's hard to do that with the Harris poll, because they're so expensive to use. So, what my predecessor Elizabeth Cooksey and all the staff there at the time were trying to do was to develop a reasonable and affordable way of beginning to gain access to a national sample. We've now got over fifty thousand people across the country who are now available to participate in surveys that are largely either social science and or biobehavioral, so some sort of medical question, health question, or psychological or social question. And so, the studies that have come out of that are really numerous. Chris Knoester is a great example from our college of the NSASS. It was a landmark study at the time; Chris is now actually coming back, and he's asking these same people who participated in the original study, which I think was done in 2018, so you know, [00:19:00] four or five years later, we're now going back to those same people and saying, Hey, this is what you told us back then, what are you thinking now? And Chris asked great questions about sports participation, but he also asked lots and lots of questions about parenting and other kinds of family factors as well as social factors too. Chris has been very widely published in that work and I suspect that with this now second wave of data, his research is really going to take off. David Staley: And I'll turn the listener's attention to the interview that Chris and I did some time back, Stephen Gavazzi: There you go, yeah. Michael Neblo, another great example. David Staley: And another person I've interviewed. Stephen Gavazzi: Right, so, and Michael used the APP to do some stuff on deliberative democracy. He must have talked about that. Another great example of where we helped him to further develop the work that he was doing in a really interesting way. That project helped us because one of the things that we are really good at is technology. In fact, at CHRR, [00:20:00] we have give or take fifty employees, almost half of whom are I.T. related. and that's because technology sits at the very heart of what it is that we do. So, just to give you an example, going back to the N. L. S., we need highly secure environments because people are telling us really private personal information. That has to be protected, and so we have a highly secure environment to collect and store that data. That's essential; we have to guarantee the confidentiality of this, and so we actually have higher security abilities than the rest of the university, precisely because we do this kind of work. But we also have to be able to store that information and keep in contact with people. It's one thing to sample, but it's another thing to stay in contact with people over time to be able to go back and ask questions again and again. The example of the NLS '79; we have over 30 waves of data [00:21:00] from these families. So, how do you do that? You have to have that kind of archiving ability, right? To be able to curate data in a way in which it's easily findable by researchers and, yet again, highly protected. David Staley: I'm interested in these fifty thousand members of this panel. How are they selected? That's, I guess that's my first question. Stephen Gavazzi: It's a range of ways that people come into the American Population Panel. Some were recruited through social media originally, there's a bit of a snowballing effect as people find out, we pay people for their time. David Staley: Well, that was my next question. How are they incentivized to be a member of this, especially if they're being surveyed all the time? Stephen Gavazzi: Well, it's why using the APP isn't free, and it's because we have to pay these people and we pay them what their time is worth. And although this varies somewhat from project to project, I would say that we're paying folks on average about a dollar a minute for what it is that they're doing, which is not bad. It's why people [00:22:00] will continue to participate. Once in a while, we'll do smaller surveys in which you're just simply put into a raffle, and people are willing to do that if they can also have opportunities to get paid, right? we're doing something on cancer awareness right now, as one example. It's a raffle, but people are, first of all, very interested in cancer related issues. It touches many people, as we know from Peloton and other kinds of things that our university does. And so, as a result, they will participate from time to time in these kinds of prize drawings. But by and large, when researchers come to us, we tell them, however long your survey is, by the minute, that's about what you're going to expect to pay them in terms of an incentive. David Staley: And Gallup doesn't do that, right? Stephen Gavazzi: I think that Gallup, Harris, and others differentially do that depending on who they're serving in their polls. But by and large, when they're doing many of these kinds of polls that you're seeing no, they are not. And so, that's the unfortunate part for I think most of these other polls. [00:23:00] And by the way, it's my pet peeve. Can I get on a soapbox for a second? Thank you. The thing that has bothered me is how many times I've watched surveys that have been conducted on higher education, and what they tell us is that over time, we've seen this significant deterioration in what people think about higher ed, right? Which may be true. But over and over again, all of these polls are using different samples to make that assertion. No one's ever come to us and said, Hey, we would like to follow higher ed over time, and so therefore you would get a much more accurate read of, are people really thinking something different five years later? And by the way, a little teaser on this there is someone sitting in your studio right now who is actually going to take that on. David Staley: Yes. Excellent. I'm really happy to hear that. So your 60th anniversary, you're going to be celebrating all throughout 2025. How will you be celebrating next year? [00:24:00] Stephen Gavazzi: So we have a committee right now that is developing ideas about that, and we're actually really pleased to be working with Arts and Sciences, Marketing and Communications Department. They have already given us so many tremendous ideas. The main idea, though, that we have is that we're going to do at least one, if not several, symposia probably in March and April of next year, in 2025, and by the way, those will largely be, if not exclusively, webinars, because we really want to reach a very broad audience. But then we are going to do a number of in person events. We'll probably do something internally for our university in the middle of the year, and then we're going to have some significant donor events that will be occurring probably right around football season, which tends to be a really good time to do donor related events. And what we're really going to be emphasizing there is our commitment to high quality research and especially, but not [00:25:00] exclusively for students, and so part of that donor event will be, can we get people to open their checkbooks to the idea of building a new generation of researchers that would come out of Ohio State University, and in particular College of Arts and Sciences? David Staley: You've already hinted at this, but tell us what's next for either your research or CHRR. Stephen Gavazzi: So I think that what we're going to see out of CHRR is a lot more technological development, especially in response to what's called the Nelson Memo. What has happened at a U. S. government level is the White House began this and now Congress and other federally funded agencies are going to be making demands on researchers that any data that is generated by a federally funded grant, must be made accessible and discoverable. Those are the two big key terms here. So, what does it mean to be discoverable? David Staley: You've anticipated my question. Stephen Gavazzi: Right. So, to be discoverable means [00:26:00] that you now need to use digital object identifiers, right? So now these DOIs are going to have to be created for data and not only the data as a set, but also all of the main variables that are in your data set. So, that's the discovery part, and then the access part is, historically, people who've had data that's been generated from federally funded projects hold it very tight, and what the government has said is, you can't do that anymore. They're not even going to allow researchers to have the ability to make their own data accessible by themselves because people move on, people die, people go into different fields. That has to be done by third parties, and CHRR is going to be one of the main third parties that is going to be helping researchers, first of all, here, but we hope actually through the state of Ohio to make that data both discoverable and accessible. David Staley: How does that happen? What does that look like? Stephen Gavazzi: So, we have to build something called a data repository. The data repository [00:27:00] looks much the same as the data repository that we currently do for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The difference is that the niche that we see is not just any data, but data that has a component that has personal identifying information, and what we can do for researchers is continue to have that data available where personal identifying information may be very important, especially for longitudinal research, right? So, the researchers still need access to that; well, you can't make that available on the internet. David Staley: No. Stephen Gavazzi: Right? So, you have to guard that, so the data repository allows differential levels of access into that data, depending on who you are. Then we have something that is kind of a Maserati, if you will, of data repositories called a data enclave, and the data enclave: think about a glove box, right? So, you're using a glove box to deal with uranium or highly infectious disease. You can manipulate that data in there, you can't get that data out, that's a data enclave. We've already built those for [00:28:00] three different sets of researchers, so I think this is the growth area for CHRR. David Staley: Is there anything else like CHRR in the country? Stephen Gavazzi: Yes, there are other data centers like ours, and in fact, they're oftentimes the competitors for the large grants and contracts that we go after. There's nothing else like us in Ohio, and again, that, I think, is the most important takeaway in terms of thinking about CHRR, which is we are here first and foremost to be serving researchers here at the university, but we also, because we're a land grant university, and we already have, actually, some great examples of participation and partnerships with other universities here in Ohio: we want to be able to serve them as well. That's the CHRR level, and then I'll just give you the inside extra scoop that I had hinted at before. So, Gordon and I are actually going to go back to that sample that we used for the _What's Public About Public Higher Ed?_, and we have designs now, early in [00:29:00] spring of next year, to go back to those original citizens and ask them questions about, so what do you think in terms of higher ed now? That's probably going to end up being our third book. David Staley: You mentioned CHRR has fifty employees. Does that include students? Stephen Gavazzi: Here and there, we have had great students who have come through, and in fact, that's part of our 60th anniversary celebration is getting back into contact with many of them. But here's the other kicker, David. I'm going to count at least five, but I think it's probably closer to ten if I would really think about this, former students who are now our employees, including our IT director, Nick Ramser. Our IT director started as a student at CHRR. David Staley: Steve Gavazzi. Thank you. Stephen Gavazzi: Thank you so much. Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the [00:30:00] podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.