9th Biennial Conference on Community Research and Action:
Final Report and Recommendations
New Mexico Highlands University
Local Conference Planning Committee
(first person, personal pronouns refer to Jean Hill)
Table of Contents
Conference Planning and Infrastructure4
Committees and Workgroups4
The National Planning Committee4
Conference Theme5
Development of a Preliminary Conference Schedule and Program5
Call for Proposals5
Abstract and Presentation Guidelines6
On-Line Abstract Submission and Management8
Proposal Reviews11
Keynote Speakers and Invited Addresses12
Continuing Education (CE) Units13
The Printed Program14
Advertising15
Conference Evaluation15
Conference Logistics15
Registration 15
Pre-Registration15
On-site Registration17
Attendance17
International Attendees18
Housing20
Communication22
Travel and Transportation22
Accessibility of Conference Events23
Food and Entertainment24
Alcohol24
Breakfasts25
Breaks/Refreshments25
Lunches26
Friday Dinner26
Historic Walking Tours27
Mentoring Events27
Ambassador Program28
Audio-Visual Needs28
Poster Boards29
Staffing29
Conference Finances31
Financial Management31
Conference Sponsors31
Fundraising32
Silent Auction32
T-Shirts33
Summary33
Appendices35
Symposium Submission Instructions35
Guidelines for Presenters37
Mentoring Materials39
Ambassador Program Materials48
9th Biennial Conference on Community Research and Action:
Final Report and Recommendations
The 9th Biennial Conference on Community Research and Action took place from June 4-7, 2003 in Las Vegas, New Mexico. A total of 488 individuals registered for the conference, which included 61 symposia, 45 roundtables, 11 innovative sessions, 6 town meetings, 5 workshops and 4 invited presentations, as well as 127 poster presentations. There were 761 authors listed in the program. The conference began at 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday, June 4th, and ended 12:45 on Saturday, June 7th. Total expenses of the conference were $50,639.18 with total revenues of $87,319; yielding net revenues to SCRA of $36,679.82.
Conference Planning and Infrastructure
Committees and Workgroups
The conference was coordinated both by the local planning committee and the national planning committee. The SCRA president-elect and the local planning committee chair served as co-chairs of the national committee. The national committee provided regular input to the local planning committee.
The initial plan was to have a local planning committee made up of faculty and staff from Highlands University, as well as members of the local business community. While this plan received a great deal of support when the conference proposal was developed, when serious work on the conference began in April of 2002, it proved extremely difficult to get volunteers to commit any actual time. This resulted in the majority of the local planning being done by two individuals, Jean Hill and Tom Ward. This lack of local volunteers, and recommendations for future Biennials held at non-traditional sites, will be addressed again later in this report.
Initial work focused on communicating with the University and the Las Vegas community regarding the conference, and ensuring that the necessary resources would be available. To this end letters were sent to all the local hotels informing them of the conference, a letter was published in the Chamber of Commerce newsletter to let local businesses know about the event, two dorms were reserved with the NMHU housing office, and an initial request for facilities was discussed with the NMHU facilities director.
The National Planning Committee
Due to the fact that I was the only community psychologist on site, and the only person in Las Vegas who had attend previous Biennials, I relied a great deal upon the National Planning Committee for input into basic decisions about the Biennial. This seemed to work fine. It was very helpful to me to have a group of community psychologists I could ask for feedback. We tried setting up an on-line discussion forum, but this did not get used and we ended up relying exclusively on email.
Conference Theme
After the 2001 Biennial the International Committee made a request that the theme of the 2003 Biennial address issues of diversity. This idea fit well with the fact that the conference was being held in a small, rural, Hispanic town. The concept of a diversity theme received strong support from the National Planning Committee, and it did not take much discussion to decide upon the final wording.
Development of a Preliminary Conference Schedule and Program
The preliminary decisions about the conference program were based substantially upon what had been done at the 2001 Biennial. For example, the length of the program, presentation formats, Call for Proposals, and preliminary time-blocks were all based almost exactly on what had been done in 2001. There were several advantages to this. First, these issues have remained essentially the same for at least the past two Biennials and have been well received by the SCRA membership. A review of the reports and evaluations from the past two Biennials does not reveal any clear need, or suggestions, for altering these elements of the conference. Second, the COS set-up for the 2001 Biennial was still in place, could be easily modified for the 2003 Biennial, and was designed to fit this structure. Third, adopting the previous structure allowed for the early preliminary identification of room requirements, which was essential in ensuring adequate facilities. And, fourth, it saved a lot of work.
One issue that was not addressed in this Biennial, but which I believe will have to be addressed at some future date is the length of the program. Traditionally, the overwhelming majority of proposals submitted to the Biennials have been accepted. One reason for this is that we get very good submissions. Another is the pragmatic point that the more presenters you have, the greater your attendance will be. However, this is resulting in an extremely large and full program. We have as many as 12 presentations at one time, and this results in some presentations having extremely low attendance. At some point the SCRA membership is going to have to decide if they want to set a limit on the length of the program and the number of presentations offered at one time.
Call for Proposals
The Call for Proposals was disseminated in several ways. It was published in the fall, 2002 issue of The Community Psychologist. It was published on the conference web site. It was distributed electronically to a number of different list-serves and distribution lists. These lists are included in this report as an Appendix. In addition, a one-page flyer, giving a description of the conference and indicating that the Call could be found on the conference web site, was prepared. This flyer was distributed to local agencies and was made available to SCRA members and other interested individuals for posting and distribution in their departments.
We specifically did not mail printed copies of the Call to the SCRA membership. A mailing to the membership seemed redundant, since members would be receiving the Call in their copy of The Community Psychologist. This decision not to mail hard copies of the Call does not seem to have affected the number of submissions to any discernable degree. We had a total of 528 abstracts submitted: 8 town meetings, 7 workshops, 12 innovative sessions, 51 roundtable discussions, 61 symposia (this accounted for 320 of the abstracts), and 125 posters (5 submissions did not specify a format). This is comparable to the last Biennial when they received 561 abstracts: 5 town meetings, 11 workshops, 15 innovative sessions, 38 roundtable discussions, 56 symposia (this accounted for 320 of the abstracts), and 172 posters.
The Call was also translated into Spanish, by a local psychologist and with the assistance of an SCRA member. The use of this translation will be discussed further under the section on International Participants.
Abstract and Presentation Guidelines
As stated above, we used the same formats as those used by previous Biennials. For the most part, these formats worked fine. Some authors seemed unclear about what constituted an innovative session and a workshop, although the reviewers seemed to have clear ideas of what these formats should entail. The confusion seems to arise from the fact that some authors approach the Call knowing what they want to submit. They then look for a format that fits what they want to do, rather than designing a presentation that fits the format. This is especially true for those authors who want to do a verbal presentation of a single research project, a type of presentation that is strongly discouraged in SCRA Biennials. It would probably be useful to state this explicitly in the Call.
As a way of increasing participation by new members and non-members of SCRA, it might be useful to think of creative ways to include new members on symposia, which account for the majority of the presentations. Generally, symposia are developed by groups of individuals who are already familiar with each others’ work. Occasionally symposia are developed through a posting on the listserv. Individuals who do not have access to either of these approaches are left with few options for submitting their work, except through poster presentations. I had several people in this situation contact me, asking if I knew of someway their work could be included in the conference. In the future it might be useful to have people who develop their ideas of symposia early, and who are open to including new presenters, post those ideas on the conference web site in the two months before the deadline for submissions. That way, individuals interested in presenting at the Biennial could be directed to look at the web site to see if their work could be included.
In accordance with the recommendations of the 2001 Biennial Planning Committee, each author was asked to limit his or her participation to four presentations. This limit did not include poster presentations, or chairing meetings or special events. This rule cannot be enforced through the COS system, basically because one author’s name can be associated with several abstracts in the same symposium (for the sake of the rule, one symposium was considered one presentation, even if the author was listed on several abstracts). Overall, individuals seemed fine with adhering to the rule, and were very supportive of its intent. I did a review in early March of authors who were listed more than five times in the program, and found only a few who were violating the four presentation rule. This seemed to occur because people loose track of how many symposia they agree to serve on as discussants. Most of these situations were dealt with by the authors voluntarily withdrawing from one or more of their presentations.
In accordance with the recommendation from the 8th Biennial Committee, we required full contact information and email addresses for all authors. We found this to be extremely important, as we communicated with authors almost exclusively through email. Future submission instructions should stress that whoever is submitting the proposal should be sure to have accurate contact information, including email addresses, for all authors ready at the time they do the submissions. This point is addressed further in the section on the on-line submission process.
Authors were asked to choose between 60 or 75-minute sessions in most instances. Reviewers were then specifically asked to include a recommendation regarding an appropriate length for each proposal. This resulted in several people who requested 75-minutes being allotted only 60. This did not seem to present a serious problem for the authors involved. As in the last Biennial, a few sessions were extended to 90 minutes due to the number of abstracts included.
We used the same system of requiring authors to check up to three key words, and allowing them to provide information concerning populations, as the 2001 Biennial. It is unclear if these procedures were actually useful, since the COS system allowed users to make very specific searches without the use of these tools.
Although it was not released at this stage of the conference planning, we did have some additional guidelines for presenters that were emailed to all conference presenters in the last weeks before the conference. These guidelines were developed at the recommendation of several SCRA members, who felt that guidelines like these had been helpful in increasing the quality of presentations at other conferences they had attended. A copy of the guidelines is included in the Appendices.
On-Line Abstract Submission and Management
The 9th Biennial Conference was the second one to make use of the Community of Science on-line abstract management service. I strongly recommend that SCRA continue its use this system. The benefits are many:
- It saves a great deal of time, money, and effort in printing and postage. In fact, since submissions, reviews, and notifications are all handled on-line, it makes the whole conference virtually paperless, up until the printing of the actual program.
- While scheduling is going to be a major chore under any system, the COS system makes this as easy as possible. The fact that the system checks for author conflicts is particularly important.
- The system allows you to produce reports of an amazing variety. This was essential in planning for such things as audio-visual equipment needs.
- The system allows you to download a printable version of every abstract, complete with an author index. This makes it feasible to produce a program that includes every abstract.
- The on-line submission system makes it extremely feasible for the conference to be held at non-traditional sites, with few personnel resources.
This last point requires a bit of explanation. When I submitted the conference proposal, I had a commitment from the NMHU administration to provide me with a half-time secretary and a work-study student for the year of the conference. In between the time that the proposal was accepted and the actual conference, the university underwent a complete change in administration and a major fiscal crisis that lasted for several years. The new administration was still extremely supportive of the conference, however, secretarial staff was reduced throughout the university and there was no possibility of my receiving dedicated secretarial assistance. In fact, the Department of Behavioral Sciences went from two secretaries to one and a half, making it difficult for me to ask for secretarial assistance for the conference even within my own department. The COS system made it possible for me to complete abstract submissions, reviews, scheduling, and program preparation without secretarial assistance.
While it may seem like a minor issue, the online service was also extremely helpful in that it allowed me to easily work on the conference wherever I had access to a computer. As a single mother, I greatly appreciated being able to bake brownies, supervise my daughter, and work on the conference at the same time. Frankly, it was great.
There are some problems with the system. Access to the system for authors did not seem to be a problem. We only had one author state that he could not submit his proposal on-line. He mailed us his abstracts on a disc and we entered them ourselves. However, as noted by the last Biennial Planning Committee, many people still find the submission process for symposia to be confusing. We did everything we could think of to ease this process, including producing a step-by-step guide for people submitting symposia that we emailed to anyone who requested it (included as an Appendix to this report). People still seemed to have difficulty, and, as noted in the 8th Biennial report, not all were pleasant about it.
I heard stories about whole departments where all you could hear when you walked down the hall was people cursing at their computers for days on end. I had a few people who just refused to use the system. They emailed me their abstracts and I entered them. This actually was not that big of a chore.
One of the problems was that the majority of the submissions were made at the last minute. We even extended the deadline for submissions by one week, and still had the overwhelming majority of the submission being completed in the last three days. This results in a situation in which people have set aside a short period of time in which to enter their abstracts, and when they find the process taking much longer than that they get very frustrated. It might be helpful to clearly inform people that they should expect the submission process to take several hours.
As noted in the 8th Biennial report, it was very helpful for me to be available via email just about constantly in the week before the submission deadline. Checking my email late at night allowed people from oversees to ask me questions and get immediate answers in the days before the deadline. Thanks to the previous report, I had planned for this and it was not a problem.
While the COS staff were extremely helpful and responsive, there were several problems with the COS system itself that could be prevented for the next Biennial.
First, since this was the second time SCRA had used the system, many of our members already had account information entered into the system. Sometimes the system managed to associate them with their old accounts and that information was accurate. Sometime they were associated with their old accounts but the information was inaccurate (they had changed affiliations). Many times they simply set up a new account, and the system had them entered twice. This resulted in several problems when the system did not realize that two authors it was treating as separate individuals were actually the same person. The COS staff were alerted to this problem, and hopefully by the next Biennial will have come up with a way to correct for it. The next program chair should verify with the COS staff that a process has been developed for ensuring that each author only has one account on the system.
Second, in many cases the system only allowed submitters to indicate one presenting author, and then only checked for scheduling conflicts for presenting authors. The next program chair should ensure that submitters can indicate as many presenting authors as necessary, that they are instructed to designate all authors who will actually be in attendance at the conference as presenting authors, and that the COS system checks for scheduling conflicts for all presenting authors.