How well do crime witnesses recall faces? And how do the economies of small Northern communities differ from those of places elsewhere in Canada?
Those two seemingly disparate questions have one thing in common: the Faculty of Public Affairs professors trying to answer them have each received a $15,000 Research Achievement Award from Carleton to further their work. Joanna Pozzulo, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and the director of Carleton’s Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, is
focusing on teenagers in her current work on facial recognition.
“We really don’t have a lot of research on this group,” she says.
Pozzulo typically brings participants into a lab to observe a staged crime, then she asks them to describe the “criminal.” So far, she has worked with roughly 200 Ottawa high school students. After assessing the data, she will do a follow-up study with another 200.
The results may shed light on the relationship between a witness’s verbal description of a criminal and his or her ability to pick the criminal out of a police lineup. It may show that witnesses recall much more—or much less—than they realize. “I think that’s very useful information for the police,” says Pozzulo.
Meanwhile, Frances Abele, academic director of the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation and a professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration, will be examining the
complex economies of the territorial North, which include a large number of small, predominantly Aboriginal communities
and a few regional centres.
Unlike the image often presented on the nightly news, “most of the communities in the territorial North are healthy, pleasant places to live,” Abele says. For one thing, she notes, they are the places
where Aboriginal languages are thriving.
Abele hopes her research will help governments at all levels better understand how they can develop policies for the future economies of the territories to support these communities as they cope
with serious issues ranging from international pressure on mineral resources to climate change, while fostering sustainable
regional economic development.