Stay informed with the LNN Daily Newsletter

Multiple benefits to come from new research chair at Lethbridge College

Nov 24, 2016 | 2:37 PM

LETHBRIDGE – A new position for an instructor at Lethbridge College is going to mean new opportunities for students, faculty and even the community.

Dr. Faron Ellis has taken on the role of Research Chair at the Citizen Society Research Lab (CSRL), an initiative he has guided since 2001.

The position will give Ellis more time to oversee the lab, allowing more students from varied programs to get involved and explore a broader range of topics through the public opinion studies. The initiative, which had only been available to Liberal Arts students prior to this year, is now open to social science related fields like Justice Studies, Health and Human Services programs and Multi-media, among others.

“Any industry that is dealing with humans, or has a human service element, needs to have people on staff who can either collect data on their customers that they serve in a systematic and meaningful way, or at minimum, be able to read and analyze that data to know whether it’s good data or not that somebody else has collected,” explained Ellis.

Ellis started the CSRL as a way to engage students in his Local Government class in applied research, and has developed over time to become a nationally recognized public opinion service provider.

The community benefit comes from the fact that with more time and students to work on the polls, more community groups will be able to bring questions to the college, at a much lower price than what they would expect from the commercial market.

“Our market is a niche market, where the commercial industry isn’t servicing it,” explained Ellis. “Typically it’s smaller community groups that don’t have a huge budget, and if they’re interested in studying the general population in Lethbridge specifically, bang, we’ve got a route for them to do it just by adding questions to our Lethbridge omnibus poll. If their interests are Alberta wide, same thing.”

The new position was created with funding from the Centre for Applied Arts and Sciences at the college.