One Good Point… Beth Mabry

I’m Beth Mabry. I’m a sociologist on the faculty at the Graduate School of Leadership and Change. I work with students a lot around their research and using research to inform their practice. And when people hear research, I think sometimes it can. Create a little anxiety. Often it comes with ideas about number crunching and complex models, and those are in the toolbox, but we’re really trying to think about using data as part of a larger story.

We come to Antioch because we wanna make a difference, and so people come with passions that they really want to impact. It could be a community, an organization, a population that they’re trying to serve, and that’s. The background, the context of the story, where we often stop with data, is trying to convince people that there is an issue behind every data point.

There is a person, and the more we can understand about lived experience, and how we can create interventions that connect with that to improve the situations that we’re focused on. The better our outcomes might be. And so thinking about it simply as a story with a beginning, a middle, and hopefully a more positive end gives us a chance to work conceptually and reduce anxieties about research.

Research is a tool, and we want to use that tool to create greater justice in the world.