An enriched research experience for minority undergraduates—a step toward increasing the number of minority nurse researchers☆☆☆

A focus on undergraduate students 

Since our ultimate goal was to increase the number of minority nurse researchers, it might appear most efficient to focus our enrichment efforts on students who are close to that goal—master's and doctoral students. However, there are so few minorities enrolled in North Carolina's master's and doctoral nursing programs that we chose to focus our efforts on undergraduate students with the hope of increasing their enrollment in graduate programs. Our expectation was that exposure to graduate research faculty during their undergraduate experience would increase the likelihood of minority students returning to the campus for graduate studies.

A partnership 

Each student was paired with a faculty mentor with an active research program involving subjects from a health disparity group. Students were paired with 8 faculty members (1 of these faculty members mentored 2 students). Seven of the mentors were at UNC-CH, and 1 was at NCCU. Students worked on faculty research projects including an intervention with older breast cancer survivors, a qualitative study of spirituality in African-American women with HIV/AIDS, an analysis of alcohol use on HBCU campuses, and an intervention to reduce depressive symptoms in low-income mothers of young children.

Paid employment as a student assistant 

During the summer, we paid students for 20 hours a week—15 hours spent working on their mentor's research projects and 5 hours spent on other education-related activities. The time participants spent on the REAP program would otherwise have been spent earning money for tuition and living expenses. We therefore needed to compensate them for their time so that they could afford to participate. Students' time commitment was reduced to 5 hours during the academic year to allow time for their course work and clinical rotations. At the start of the program, REAP participants and their faculty mentors developed a contract and timetable that specified activities to be completed during the program. The contract included the student's role and schedule for participation on the mentor's research project and regular meetings with the mentor. Students participated in a wide variety of research experiences, including interviewing research participants, delivering interventions, coding data, and establishing the reliability of biobehavioral measures.

Completion of a research project 

REAP participants worked on their own research projects with the goal of presenting their completed work in a 2-page abstract and research poster format. During the summer, students met with their mentors, who provided guidance on identification of a research problem and initial plans for studying it. At the end of the summer, students received additional feedback when they presented their project proposals to a meeting of the project coordinators and REAP participants. During the academic year, students worked on completing their projects in coordination with the requirements of their senior research course. Examples of student projects include conducting focus groups to determine African-American women's preferences for exercise videotapes, delivering an intervention to teach HIV/AIDS prevention strategies to Latinas, and conducting a secondary analysis of data on the relationship between alcohol use and social support in minority undergraduate students. To facilitate the design, conduct, and presentation of sound studies, the REAP program provided extensive support. Methodologic and statistical consultation was available to help students develop their projects, editorial assistance was provided for writing their abstracts and posters, and the UNC-CH Medical Illustration Department assisted them with creating professional quality posters. In April 2002 we hosted an evening program at NCCU at which student participants from both schools presented their research projects to faculty, families, and friends.

Seminars and conferences 

From June through mid-August, we offered weekly seminars that covered a diverse range of topics, such as the use of biobehavioral measures in nursing research, how to write a research paper, and where to find health-related statistics on the Internet. Students also completed training on the safe and ethical conduct of research with human subjects. The location of the seminars alternated between the 2 campuses, with faculty from both institutions taking the lead. Students also attended 2 national research conferences. During the first month of the program, they attended a week-long “Minority Health Research Institute” sponsored by the UNC-CH School of PublicHealth. In February, 7 students traveled to San Antonio, Texas, to attend the Southern Nursing Research Society's annual conference. The REAP program's project coordinator attended the conference with the students and oriented them to ways to make the most of the opportunities provided.

A project coordinator 

Project coordinators at both UNC-CH and NCCU oversaw the REAP program. Students had regular contact with the project coordinators. During the summer, they met with the project coordinators during weekly group meetings to review progress, maintain group cohesion, and ensure that participants were receiving the support they needed to complete their student projects. The project coordinators served several key roles. Perhaps the most important role was that of advocate and counselor. Minority students often face many challenges to their efforts to complete their education. Students work multiple jobs to pay for schooling, often have young children, and are more likely to struggle with language barriers.10, 11 The project coordinator can play a vital role in helping students connect with on-campus resources and to negotiate options within their undergraduate programs of study. The project coordinators also served as liaisons between the REAP program and other faculty involved in the undergraduate nursing programs. In this role, they met with the director of the honors program to develop a mechanism for integrating the REAP project with the honors project when a REAP student also chose to be in the honors program. They met with the faculty for the senior year research course to ensure that the REAP project requirements were consistent with the research course requirements.

The need for careful selection of research projects 

On the basis of student and faculty feedback, we identified 3 critical factors that defined the most successful research project placements. Students become most invested in the research process when they are partnered with researchers working in an area of interest to them, when the researcher values the students' expertise, and when there are opportunities for them to engage in meaningful research-related activity. As an example, one student, who is the mother of a prematurely born child, was partnered with a researcher working on assessing risk in preterm infants. The student got to participate in research that directly related to an issue that was very important in her life, and the researcher benefitted from the input of an African-American who is the mother of a prematurely born child. In this case the researcher hired the student, after completion of her REAP employment, to serve as a consultant to her grant. In another example, a Mexican-born student worked with a researcher on her HIV/AIDS prevention work with a community of recent Mexican immigrants. By placing the student on this project, the REAP program turned the student's greatest challenge in the nursing program—his first language is Spanish—into his greatest asset for the research program. Since the faculty researcher is not a native Spanish speaker, she benefitted from the student's language skills and his perspective, whereas the student benefitted from the recognition of his distinctive value to the discipline. Another student joined a researcher's project to prevent HIV/AIDS by intervening with women while they are in prison. African-Americans are disproportionately represented in the prison population, and the researcher benefitted from having an African-American interviewer. The student, in turn, was very engaged in what she was learning when she went to the prison to interview these women. These examples illustrate the importance of ensuring that increasing numbers of racial/ethnic minority nurses pursue research careers so that they can enrich the research on health disparities. They also illustrate the potential for a program like REAP to make nursing research come alive for undergraduate students, potentially motivating them to continue their studies to the graduate level.

However, not all research projects have the capacity to incorporate undergraduate students in such a meaningful way. Despite the very best intentions of the researcher, some research projects do not invite the inclusion of an undergraduate student. In our case, we ran into problems when we assigned 2 students to a researcher who was conducting a highly controlled nurse-delivered telephone intervention. The students could not participate in the intervention delivery, data collection, or data analysis. As a result, they had no direct contact with subjects or data and were employed to assemble data collection materials and to prepare mailings to subjects. Even though these are important parts of the research process, they are not inherently compelling and did not serve our goal of getting students excited about research.

Finding the right balance of didactic training versus hands-on experience 

One of the top concerns raised by current REAP participants was the frustration with trying to develop a research proposal before taking their research course.

Introducing the participants to a research experience was successful in capturing their interest in the research endeavor, and at the end of the summer, they all expressed excitement about their upcoming senior research course. We do not believe that we would have captured the same level of interest if we introduced them to research through a didactic experience; undergraduate nursing students often give poor ratings to their academic research course. The challenge we face in designing the REAP program is how to maintain the sense of relevance and excitement created through the hands-on research experience while also reducing students' frustration with their lack of knowledge related to research theory and methodology.

Some REAP students also spoke of their research mentor's inexperience with undergraduate students. As faculty build their research programs, they often have decreasing contact with undergraduate students. As a result, a number of the faculty mentors were unfamiliar with the capabilities of undergraduate students and the nature of an undergraduate research project. The next time we offer the REAP program, we plan to address this challenge by increasing the project coordinators' role in overseeing the research project and by changing the content of the seminars to focus more specifically on research methodology. The project coordinators will keep abreast of the students' research activities and research projects to ensure a realistic level of expectations on the part of their mentors. The seminars will provide some research basics by capitalizing on students' excitement with their research activities and by focusing on research methodology and theory that is directly related to the students' projects. For example, we could discuss the theory and methodology behind qualitative research with specific examples from students' qualitative projects.

Creating an effective collaboration between research mentors and project coordinators 

The research mentors and project coordinators play important but distinct roles in the program. We initially had difficulty with clearly articulating their respective roles, resulting in some confusion for both faculty and students. We resolved this problem by establishing and communicating clear guidelines, specifying that the research mentors will guide students' work on both their mentor's and their individual research projects. The role of the project coordinator is to facilitate the students' access to resources offered through the REAP program and to monitor the nature and progress of the research projects and activities. If project coordinators have concerns about the progress or feasibility of a student's activities, they will meet with the student and research mentor to collaboratively revise the research project and work plan.