Faculty and students alike crammed into a seminar room in the Palmer Building on Monday to welcome a researcher from Stanford.

The standing-room-only crowd listened to Anne Peterson, deputy director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, as she discussed adolescent research and policy implications in a seminar hosted by the department of human development and family studies at Iowa State.

Peterson said a lot of the problems with turning adolescent research into effective policy was that being both an advocate for change and a researcher can damage the credibility of a lobbyist.

“One of the things I learned when I was in Washington is that it really irritated politicians when someone was acting like an advocate but used their label as a scientist,” Peterson said.

Peterson said it undermines your research study if you’re trying to be an advocate and a scientist for a policy change.

She said one youth policy that is flawed is the current school system.

“High school structure, as everyone is finding, is no longer functional. It’s the high school that we had more than a 100 years ago and lots of things have changed in society, but the structure is still there,” Peterson said.

Peterson then discussed her research of what programs work in schools and what programs do not.

“All of the scientific studies of the original form of DARE [Drug Abuse Resistance Education] show that it didn’t work, it really didn’t have any effect. But everyone loved it, because the local police were involved with the kids in school,” Peterson said.

She said this was an example of a policy that wasn’t grounded in actual adolescent research.

Peterson gave many examples of some other middle school policies that need change.

“It’s also known that with kids who have already gotten into trouble, if you put them with other kids who have also gotten into trouble, they get worse, not better, because they have each other to bounce off of,” Peterson said.

The seminar didn’t give any specific policy changes that should be made, but rather focused on how one would go about changing adolescent policy.

“We have to emphasize the importance of doing research of adolescents and young people,” said Peter Martin, professor of HDFS and director of the Gerontology Program at Iowa State. “We should emphasize the positive aspects; I think that point was clear. We shouldn’t just focus on the negative aspects.”

There were many students in the audience taking notes from Peterson’s PowerPoint.

“I thought it was really interesting; it was all things that I’ve never heard of before,” said Brenna Nelson, graduate student in educational leadership and policy studies. “I’m in a program that deals with college students, so knowing the background of adolescents and what forms their mind before they get to college is important for my field of study.”

Martin agreed with Peterson’s remarks, offering his own opinion of what could help research become the foundation of adolescent policy.

“Researchers should not sit on their data; they should share what they know with policy makers,” he said.