Project Goal
Once the program’s recidivism rate is verified by the Merit Partners (MP) Engineering Service Learning team, the MP team will analyze it and search for potential causes for that number. By determining the demographics of recidivism, there will also be a clearer understanding of what type of offenses result in the returns to the criminal system. Another goal for the MP's project is to assist Merit ePartners in providing solutions centered on raising the effectiveness and the scalability of their program. The MP also hopes to create methods to improve the different aspects of the Merit ePartners program relating to its working environments, training procedures, and ability to pass on knowledge to new participants. In addition, the MP team aims to create a more effective method of maintaining contact with the young adults once they are released so that recidivism data is more easily accessed by Merit ePartners staff. The MP team first intends to collect and analyze qualitative data on how the program has benefitted the youth when they are released. The MP team plans to do this by conducting interviews with participants of the program so that the MP team can receive feedback in aiding to find ways for the program directors to stay in contact with former employees.
Current Status
During the Fall 2015 semester, the ultimate goal was to complete necessary project design documentation to gain Institutional Review Board approval. This would allow the next semester’s students to be able to move onto getting the necessary training needed to conduct interviews with Merit ePartners program participants at the N.A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility. According to our timeline, we wanted to gain IRB approval, complete the interview guide, and complete the consent form. IRB approval was not obtained this semester due to circumstances out of our control. The interview guide was completed this semester. The interview guide was extended to reach the goal of 25 sufficient questions. Some of the challenges we faced were finding past research that we could use as examples to base questions on. These questions are significant to be able to gain background information on participants and to provide us information about their participation in the program and what the program has done for them. This semester, the consent form was also completed. An audio recording clause was added to provide notification that audio recording devices will be used during the interviews as long as consent is given by the participant. Also, the document format was revised to meet IRB requirements and to accommodate both current and past participants of the program.
