The idea started with my own experiences. I’ve had leadership roles in student government, DECA, dance, and other activities, and I began noticing how differently students learn what to do once they’re given a leadership position. Some organizations have conferences, officer training, and detailed resources. In others, students learn mostly from an advisor, the person who held the role before them, or simply by figuring things out as they go.

I started wondering how much those differences matter. Were the challenges I had seen specific to my school and activities, or were student leaders elsewhere running into some of the same things? That question became the starting point for the research.

At first, the question was fairly broad: What helps student leaders succeed?

As I talked through the idea with my father, he suggested that one possible direction might be a capability maturity model, which would give schools a way to assess how developed their support for student leaders was. I explored the idea, but it quickly became more complicated than I expected. Before creating a model for what schools should be doing, I needed to understand much more about what student leaders were experiencing in the first place.

That helped narrow the research. We focused on the challenges student leaders face, the preparation and support they receive, how advisors see those same issues, and what schools and organizations might realistically do to help. Those questions ultimately shaped both surveys and the final report.

The final study included 271 student leaders and 37 adult advisors from 44 states and Washington, D.C. Participants came from many different kinds of organizations, including student government, DECA and other career and technical organizations, service groups, performing arts, athletics, student media, and other school activities.

That variety became important to me. A student council and a theater program may look very different, but students in both can find themselves coordinating other people, balancing crowded schedules, trying to delegate work, and figuring out what to do when someone doesn’t follow through. Seeing similar challenges appear across very different organizations became one of the most interesting parts of the research.

This turned out to be harder than I expected.

Our original plan included asking schools to share the surveys with their student leaders, but many schools have restrictions on distributing outside surveys. We began looking for other ways to reach students directly. We contacted state and national student organizations and also used publicly available information and LinkedIn to identify student officers and advisors who might be willing to participate.

That approach helped us reach students across the country, but it also created an important limitation. Students who hold visible leadership positions or respond to an invitation about leadership research may be especially engaged in their organizations. The results tell us a lot about the students who participated, but we shouldn’t assume they represent every student leader.

The surveys included numerical questions as well as opportunities for students and advisors to explain their experiences in their own words. Together, they generated nearly 1,400 written comments.

My father, Jeff Lucas, and I worked together on the analysis. We compared the numerical results and looked for patterns in what students and advisors wrote. We also used AI to help identify possible themes and sort the large number of written responses. We checked samples of the comments, adjusted categories and assignments when needed, and made the final decisions about how the responses should be organized and interpreted.

The written responses became especially useful because the numbers could show us where something was happening, while the comments often helped us think more carefully about why.