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Social Science Research Hits the Road

Mobile research van has Duke faculty going off campus for studies

The new mobile research lab will take Duke social scientists to the communities they are studying.

Natural disasters, union picket lines and even the North Carolina State Fair are all ripe with opportunities for social science research. But they also present challenges for researchers at Duke University and elsewhere in the Triangle.

"Research in our field is mostly question based," said Mark Leary, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. "We need to isolate people, do computer-based testing, and when we do interviews, we need privacy."

Researchers are often limited to studying the population that is willing to come to campus labs for their studies, Leary added. Scientists can tap into the university demographic for some studies, but they need to go outside campus borders for others requiring a diversity of ages, ethnicities and socioeconomic groups.

"We needed to design a real experimental lab on wheels," he said.

That's where the Research Mobile comes in.

The nearly 40-foot mobile behavioral research laboratory can take social scientists directly to the populations they want to study, along with all the tools and instruments they would have at their disposal in a stationary lab facility. Conceived by Leary with support from social science faculty across the university, the Research Mobile is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and arrives on campus this semester.

"This facility will allow us to study not only samples of the population that are hard to reach, but certain topics that we can't study [on campus]," said Leary, citing potential research examples such as polling places, Indian reservations and churches.

"As social scientists, our goal is to understand and improve the human condition why people think, feel and behave the way they do," he said. "This will allow us to get more diverse samples and study phenomena not located here."

Leary designed the Research Mobile with the help of former Duke faculty member

Wendy Wood and research associate David Neal. All three had experience building lab facilities on campus, but faced new challenges building a mobile lab unit.

"We had to learn about weight distribution to the axles on the vehicle, decide whether we would need a truck to pull it, and how much air conditioning was needed," Leary said. After soliciting bids from different companies with experience creating facilities like bloodmobiles, they decided on a Featherlite trailer pulled by a truck.

The facility has a distinct blue color and graphic of people splashed across the exterior. Inside, the unit is equipped with five soundproof cubicles with computers and audio-visual recording equipment, a larger room for small group studies, and a psychophysiology measurement system capable of monitoring heart rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response and respiration essentially the same features available in the state-of-the-art experimental research facility that is part of the Duke Interdisciplinary Initiative in Social Psychology (DIISP ).

Also like the DIISP lab, the Research Mobile is available to any researcher at Duke and from surrounding universities with an idea and plan for how to use it.

One of those potential users is Duke political science professor John Aldrich. "My area is studying elections," he said, "and we have been dominated by the survey. You get to ask a whole lot of people a whole lot of questions. That's very useful, but it's limited."

Aldrich said the Research Mobile would be helpful for studying voters as they are making decisions about candidates and at places where they are engaged in voting.

"Bringing them to [campus] could create a sort of artificial environment instead of a more natural setting where we can interview them, study them and do our various projects with them," he said.

Bypassing the artificial environment created in a stationary lab is a key benefit of the Research Mobile, said David Neal, who is now at the University of Southern California after several years running Duke's DIISP lab. "We try to create in a university environment scenarios and situations that map on to everyday life," he said. "We try to simulate the real world in the artificiality of the lab environment."

With the Research Mobile, someone studying religiosity can take the unit directly to a church and get people as they are coming and going, Neal said, thus relying less on simulating real-world experiences.

Rick Hoyle, professor of psychology and neuroscience, also plans to use the Research Mobile. A social psychologist, Hoyle studies self-control. Going beyond the campus community is crucial for his research, he said. "We're particularly interested in situations in which people are unable to control their behavior, such as dieting or adhering to medical advice," he said. "We can imagine parking the Research Mobile near Duke hospital. The nice thing about this unit is it has everything in it it is a mobile lab facility."

Hoyle stresses the benefit of using the Research Mobile to connect with hard-to reach populations for academic studies.

"We have good access to Duke students and staff and people near campus, but we don't have a good mechanism to gaining access to populations off campus," he said. "A lot of research questions, really to be answered well, require venturing out to these other populations."

The interdisciplinary nature of the Research Mobile is part of what made the project go from idea to reality, said Leary and Neal. "The tools really matter," Neal said. "Intellectual openness and forums are critical parts of interdisciplinary process but a huge component is logistical having shared physical spaces that draw people together are a huge piece of the puzzle."

Leary agreed. "Duke puts more time, effort, energy and money into promoting interdisciplinary things," Leary said. "Duke clearly says it's expected. A lot of times you try to talk across the wall and people don't want to talk, but here they do."