Undergraduate Students Travel to
China for Domestic Violence Research

The project aims to assess Chinese police cadets’ knowledge of domestic violence. Mason and Ingham traveled with Dr. Eric Connolly and Xinting Wang (A second year Criminal Justice Ph.D. Student) to collect data from 427 police cadets at Zhejiang Police College.

Brittany Hayes, Ph.D., assistant director of Crime Victims’ Institute (CVI) and one of their professors invited the students to join in the project. Ingham and Mason had already published work in the CVI Hate Crime Series, overseen by Dr. Hayes, and believed they would be great candidates for the FAST award.

The purpose of the FAST Awards program is to encourage the participation of undergraduate students in discipline-specific scholarly or creative work. Each funded undergraduate team should be able to support 1-3 students working together on a single scholarly or creative project under the mentoring of either one or two SHSU faculty members. Each student team member receives $2,000 for participating in the summer project. The faculty members involved in this project used the faculty stipend of the FAST award to fund the students’ travel to China.

The project is happening at an appropriate time due to the recently passed domestic violence law in China.

“We honestly thought there would be little to no knowledge of domestic violence. From entering the data, there is a lot more knowledge than we thought,” Mason said. “They’re probably more knowledgeable than the average Chinese citizen because they’re police cadets. It’s going to be interesting to see the actual numbers once we start analyzing.”

Mason and Ingham learned that there is only one government agency resource available to Chinese citizens who experience domestic violence.

“It’s still a very taboo topic even though it’s an illegal act,” Ingham said.

Wang, a Chinese native of a town near Beijing, was thrilled to return to her home country and contribute to the project. Wang translated the survey and then gave a presentation in Chinese on domestic violence awareness during the survey administration.

“Domestic violence was a private issue until the anti-domestic violence law was issued in 2016,” Wang explained. “This is a landmark for domestic violence awareness. We want to know if people will have a better understanding of domestic violence now that this law is issued.”

"WE WANT TO KNOW IF PEOPLE WILL HAVE A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE NOW THAT THIS LAW IS ISSUED."

—SECOND YEAR CRIMINAL JUSTICE PH. D STUDENT XINTING WANG SAID

After completion of the project, Mason and Ingham will present their work at the Undergraduate Research Symposium hosted by the Elliott T. Bowers Honors College in the Spring of 2019 and submit a final report to the EURECA Center.

Mason and Ingham are also looking forward to presenting their research at the American Society of Criminology in Fall of 2019. By the time they graduate, the juniors hope to have their theses converted into manuscripts for publication.

They have plans to pursue graduate school after graduating and hope to pursue an academic career.

“We’re really competitive and want to get into top CJ schools,” Mason said. “We’re doing everything we can to get us ready for grad school.”