Our 2023 Wrapped
Celebrating a year of research achievements: A month-by-month look back at the New Voters Research Network in 2023!
We were inspired by Spotify Wrapped to share a look back at 2023, the first year of NVRN’s operations. Whether you are a professor advising one of our projects, a student interested in conducting research, a parent wanting to know what her daughter is working on after school (hi mom!), or you just read the title of the Substack before deleting it, thank you! We could not have accomplished any of this without the support of an unfathomable number of people, and we are so grateful.
Please read on to see a month-by-month look back at our team’s accomplishments in 2023. This newsletter is written by Catherine Chan and Tanishka Sharma, who are sophomores in high school from New York City and Ontario, Canada.
After working with each other for 3+ years at New Voters, Jahnavi Rao and Sydney Fahn started NVRN to address the gaps in research (1) conducted by young people, (2) on the political behavior of high school students, and (3) in collaboration with activists.
The first NVRN research project on “Reassuring and Bolstering Identity in College Voters” was selected as a grantee for the Student Vote Research Network. You can read the results of our randomized control trial in the substack below.
After a rigorous interview process, NVRN welcomed seven high school research assistants, who ranged from having no research experience to being published authors of journal articles.
We presented our research on identity and youth voting in Chicago at the 2023 Student Vote Research Network workshop, and announced the New Voters Research Network for the first time (shown above)!
Our project on the impact of gun violence prevention messages and youth voting habits was selected as a semi-finalist project for the 2023 Innovation Under-tested Research Fund. This project is in collaboration with David Hogg (Founder of March for Our Lives) and Professor Michael Hiscox (Harvard University).
This recognition was granted by OpenLabs, The Movement Cooperative, Everybody Votes and America Votes.
We had our kick-off meeting for New Researchers, NVRN’s inaugural high school summer research program that ran for 8-weeks.
We trained 24 high schoolers on foundational topics related to conducting research for impact from how to read a political science article, to the components of a research question, to how quantitative and qualitative research methods differ.
Jahnavi and two US high school students attended the “Votes at 16 around the world - Deepening Collaborations” workshop at the University of Edinburgh, where they discussed research priorities for the global Vote 16 Research Network.
We completed the first draft of our Pennsylvania Case Study, which systematically surveyed all 191 Philadelphia and Pittsburgh high schools to understand the infrastructure and support within each school for voter registration.
We finished our pre-print paper titled “The Effects of Discourse-Based, Non-Partisan Civic Activities on Student Civic Engagement, Polarization, and Understanding of Political Issues,” co-authored with researchers at The Institute for Youth in Policy. The study included an original randomized control trial.
We closed out the New Researchers summer program with a High School Research Pitch competition. Three winners were selected from 20+ original research proposals created by our high school student participants. The panel of judges consisted of Prof. Mike Hanmer (University of Maryland), Dr. Ashley Daniels (Black Girls Vote Research Network), and Nivea Krishnan (New Voters).
Our two newest and youngest research assistants, Catherine Chan and Tanishka Sharma joined the research network (that’s us!).
We established collaborations with 4 professors and faculty from Delaware to conduct a study analyzing the usage of Delaware’s new school attendance policy, which gives public school students one excused absence per year to participate in various civics related activities.
Our paper “Lending a Voice to All: Early Voting Paving the Way to Youth Representation in America” was published the Oxford Political Review.
Jahnavi and Sydney continued their weekly meetings, but now in-person in Washington D.C! You can find them either on Georgetown’s campus, at a coffee shop in Adams Morgan or at Call Your Mother in West End.
Jahnavi began as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland to grow the New Voters Research Network (announcement can be found here on the CDCE substack).
We launched our Instagram page , where we regularly post about our projects and team and share opportunities for students, nonprofits and academics.
We announced the progress of the New Voters Research Network to our supporters in our first monthly research newsletter!
We completed three literature reviews on (1) methods of conducting qualitative reviews of civics classes, (2) secondary impacts of curriculum on career readiness, and (3) the demographics and history of select Oklahoma counties.
This is part of our ongoing collaboration with Generation Citizen, where we are investigating the ripple effects of Generation Citizen’s engaged civics curriculum on students’ career readiness in rural schools in Oklahoma.
We attended the National Student Vote Summit at The University of Maryland, hosted by the Students Learn Students Vote (SLSV) Coalition. The Summit brought together nonprofit organizations, philanthropic partners, and students to build connections across the nonpartisan student democratic engagement space.
After systematically reviewing existing literature, selecting papers and guiding New Researchers students, we ended the summer with over 100 student-written summaries of research papers about high school voting and civics. This month we closely edited each summary and will soon publish a compilation literature review tentatively titled “What We Know About High School Voting To Date.”
Jahnavi and Sydney were invited by the White House to go ice skating on the South Lawn, as New Voters and the research network are White House partners.
Our team reviewed the blog reflections our summer program students wrote about their experiences. The posts will be included in the launch of our website!
We concluded our analysis of the Pennsylvania voter file, in which we analyzed the voting patterns of 18-year-olds in PA in 2020 and determined whether factors like school funding and economic status impacted their voting behavior. Look out for a substack in the new year detailing our findings!
Thank you for reading, your continued enagement with the New Voters Research Network, and for supporting efforts by young people for young people. Stay tuned for our substacks in 2024, where we will share our plans for the year and the progress of our projects. Happy holidays from the NVRN team!
This newsletter was created by Research Assistants Catherine Chan (Stuyvesant High School) and Tanishka Sharma (Notre Dame Catholic High School).
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Wow! Amazing work, what a year! Great job, New Voters.