ITHACA, N.Y. -- Jewish leadership camps are big business today, with parents lining up to enroll their high school-age children in them, but the effectiveness of such programs has never been measured quantitatively -- until now.

As part of a senior thesis research project, Noah Doyle, an undergraduate in Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) from Commack, N.Y., is measuring whether such programs actually create leaders. "To what degree do the participants transfer the skills learned over the summer to their everyday lives? And how do such programs specifically develop Jewish leadership?" he asks.

Doyle has always been intrigued by how people acquire the skills to become leaders. As a teen, he attended international leadership training conferences in Pennsylvania's Pocono mountains sponsored by B'nai B'rith Youth Organization (BBYO) that he says led him to go on to leadership roles as an undergraduate at Cornell (he is president of Cornell's Student Assembly in 2002-03). He wondered whether others who attended such camps had similar experiences.

This summer, Doyle got to return to the Poconos to do fieldwork for his research project on leadership development. He is testing his theory by observing, then tracking 150 Jewish teenagers from around the world who spent three weeks this July and August attending the same program he had -- BBYO's International Leadership Training Conference in Starlight, Pa.

Doyle notes: "A special feature of this project is a web-based database, built by Site Effects, a technology firm based in Maryland, that will allow me to track the participants and solicit feedback from their family, close friends and professional directors of BBYO. Gathering data from an international sample pool such as this one, which includes high schoolers from Turkey, Bulgaria and Israel, would not have been practical five years ago," he says. "The Internet and the technological skills teenagers now possess have changed that.

Doyle expects to complete his study by May 2003. Grants from a Cornell undergraduate research program, the ILR School and the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization currently fund his research. For information on the project, contact Doyle at nad24@cornell.edu .