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Michigan Technological University

Department of Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences

Dow Environmental Sciences and Engineering Building

1400 Townsend Dr., Houghton, MI 44931-1295

phone: 906.487.2531 fax: 906.487.3371

Updated March 2010

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Michigan Technological University is an equal opportunity educational institution/equal opportunity employer.

Based upon feedback from our previous colloquium held in September, we have structured this semester’s colloquium to be more workshop style. Tuesday will be devoted to qualitative interview design and Thursday to quantitative surveys. See schedule for more information.

Dr. Carol MacLennan (Associate Professor of Anthropology ) and Dr. Kari Henquinet (Visiting Assistant Professor, Social Sciences), both will lead instruction and activities in designing ethnographic interviews.

Dr. Kedmon Hungwe (Associate Professor in Teacher Education) will guide workshop participants through an overview of quantitative survey methods and lead activities in survey design.

Both days, the attendees will be given an opportunity to put together their own set of open-ended interview questions and a survey questionnaire.

Background on colloquium

This colloquium is designed for scientists and engineering students who have no or limited experience in the social sciences, but wish to implement tools to gather information from human subjects to aid them in their research. More specifically, it is to serve the student population who work abroad as Peace Corps Master’s International students, in the international senior design program, or any other student involved in service learning. We hope to expose them to different methods for undertaking such research and introduce them to faculty and other students who may be of help to them as they progress in their investigations.

Within our project on remote sensing for hazard mitigation and natural resource protection, we hope to incorporate more social science to effectively communicate the hazard information, risk, and uncertainty we are working to characterize within the vulnerable communities we work. Several of our students have been employing surveys/interviews to assess perceived risk, determine impact of previous hazards on communities, evaluate effectiveness of current geohazard/resource management education
programs, and investigate decision-making behavior under both normal and
crises-response conditions. As our project seems to be evolving naturally this way, we recognize the need to better prepare our students to conduct this type of research....less

Not on campus?

Join us via web conferencing

Tues 4 / 6 / 10; 5:30-7:30 pm

Thurs 4 / 8 / 10; 5:30-7:30 pm

Location Dow 610