High School Student Explores Politically Charged Views

Source: Yoav Aziz/Unsplash

This is the fifth in a series.

Through a series of studies, Yale University social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen (2003) showed that Democrats who identified as extremely liberal would embrace an exceedingly stringent welfare proposal and Republicans who identified as extremely conservative would embrace an exceedingly generous welfare proposal if each study participant was told that the plan was proposed by the participant’s own party. People’s biases are ever-present, and those conducting research must consider such biases to appropriately phrase questions and other study components.

When we prepare students to become researchers, we need to help them understand and plan for psychological factors so their findings can be as reliable and valuable as possible. When interviewing my latest researcher, I felt great joy recognizing his awareness of participants’ psychological biases on the politically charged topic of COVID-19 responses. This awareness was especially impressive considering that the researcher was not a university academic; instead, Nicholai Grombchevsky is a Laguna Beach High School (LBHS) student.

In Part I of this series I interviewed Jun Shen, the passionate teacher and edtech coordinator who runs LBHS’s Authentic Exploratory Research (AER) Program. AER is an independent research course inspired by Palo Alto Unified School District’s Advanced Authentic Research program. The program pairs students with adult mentors (such as LBUSD staff, industry experts, and academics) who assist the teens in researching their own big questions in fields of their choice. Shen’s explanation of how the AER program works, combined with students’ input through the rest of this interview series (from Aryana Mohajerian, Carter McKinzie, and Carter Ghere), lets us glimpse some of the different ways students can use the program to pursue individual interests, as well as how other educators can implement such a program.

LBHS student Nicholai Grombchevsky was the fourth student to give us an account of his experience in AER and the findings that his AER research produced. The way Grombchevsky integrated psychology with his study of pandemic views illustrates how complex research topics can successfully be tackled by a high school program.

Jenny Grant Rankin: In short, what was your research study about?

Nicholai Grombchevsky: With the rising importance of government-sponsored public health initiatives in modern society, I hoped—with this research—to create a model that helps balance health and safety and public trust that could be used to guide decisions related to research regulations and government action.

JGR: What were your most important findings?

NG: My most important finding was that there was no significant difference between peoples’ trust in the government before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to this, it can reasonably be inferred that people's views of the government did not change significantly following government regulation. There were very few differences between state responses to the pandemic. Many states, and the federal government, followed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC’s) guidelines. The only major difference between ordinances was between counties.

JGR: What was the biggest thing you learned about conducting research?

NG: I learned the importance of taking people’s biases into account. When collecting survey data, I found that the questions' phrasing changed peoples’ responses. I asked the same questions and phrased them in negative, positive, and neutral ways. I found slight variations in the average political leaning of responses, with negative and positive questions having slightly more polar responses.

JGR: What was the biggest thing you learned about communicating research?

NG: I learned that when communicating research, presenting as, and being, an unbiased presenter was vital. With my topic being political, I had to communicate what the data showed and remove my bias for the data analysis. I also learned that people want to discuss opinions on research and that when I gave my opinion of the data, I had to make it clear that it was an opinion based on my data, not a neutral analysis.

JGR: What was your favorite part about AER?

NG: My favorite part of AER was the mentorship. Being paired with an industry mentor was invaluable. My mentor, Sydney Colitti, works in epidemiology data analysis. From her, I learned so much about data research and data science that I would not have learned without taking this class.

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JGR: What was the most difficult part of presenting the research?

NG: The most difficult part of presenting the research was condensing over 120 responses into a less than 10-minute presentation. Trying to present everything I wanted was impossible, so trying to only present the most important data was a struggle.

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Grombchevsky not only considered study participants’ biases, but he even considered his own when analyzing data. As we teach students to become researchers, it offers an excellent opportunity to also teach them to apply bias awareness to their own thinking as Grombchevsky did. If all students can master this skill, we should see a brighter, less polarized future.