Pepperdine Graziadio Business School and Seaver College Introduce Pepperdine Exploratory and Accelerated Research Laboratory

 

On August 30, 2021, Pepperdine Graziadio Business School and Seaver College unveiled the Pepperdine Exploratory and Accelerated Research Laboratory (PEARL), a new academic initiative funded through the Pepperdine Cross-School Collaborative Research Program managed by the Office of the Provost. A collaborative effort among eight public relations, marketing, and business management professionals at both schools, plans for PEARL were spearheaded by Clark Johnson, assistant professor of marketing at the Graziadio School, and Sarah Fischbach, assistant professor of integrated marketing communication at Seaver College.

“Pepperdine is a community of incredible students and faculty, and this new behavioral lab will provide students with direct experience in behavioral research and in collecting primary data,” shared Johnson, explaining that through PEARL undergraduate students will gain familiarity with valid and reliable surveys while taking part in experiments. 

According to Johnson, “The lab can be used in undergraduate research while our graduate students at Graziadio can use the lab if research is part of their curriculum. For Pepperdine faculty, this is an invaluable resource for conducting behavioral and social scientific research, and we hope that this will strengthen the research techniques of our outstanding faculty and help form working relationships among faculty across the University’s five schools and all social science disciplines.”

Operated through the SONA scheduling system, students interested in communication or marketing research can sign up for and participate in 50-minute lab study sessions for credit. 

“We are lucky to have student-centered education here at Pepperdine,” said Fischbach. “PEARL incorporates students’ insights into the research that undergraduate and graduate faculty are passionate about, and the lab will help students see how research is developed, collected, and published as a method to motivate them to move forward with their own research ideas and, ultimately, to change the world.”