SPSP has launched a new way to connect with other SPSP members—Free-Form Fridays. Small virtual meeting rooms (generally max. 15 attendees) will be hosted every Friday. These rooms are available for members to use for a variety of activities: finding researchers with similar interests, finding support from members tackling similar career challenges, feedback and brainstorming sessions, and more. Take advantage of this opportunity to connect with other members.
Have an idea to host a Free-Form Friday session? Apply to host a future session (submit a meeting name, host, description, and preferred dates/times). Submit your April session idea by March 15, 2021.
March Free-Form Schedule
All Times U.S. Eastern Time Zone
The past decade has seen a rise in large team-based initiatives, including the ManyLabs studies, the Collaborative Replication and Education Project, and the Psychological Science Accelerator. This session will provide an overview of these initiatives, the benefits of participating, and the barriers to making them sustainable. There will be an open-ended Q&A period at the end of the session.
Host: Patrick Forscher (schnarrd@gmail.com), Université Grenoble Alpes
Assistant Professors Dr. Wood and Dr. Jerald will discuss the experience of becoming faculty members at a public university and a selective liberal arts college. We'll answer your questions about setting up a lab, mentoring students, and dealing with imposter syndrome. All early career researchers are welcome to join the conversation!
Hosts: Adrienne Wood (Adrienne.wood@virginia.edu) and Morgan Jerald (mjerald@macalester.edu)
Text analysis methods are providing new insights into the ways people think and behave. The implications for understanding social processes are particularly striking. This session will be a free-wheeling discussion about ways to use text analysis in your research and also how it might help you get a job in academe or in a variety of real world settings.
Host: Jamie Pennebaker (pennebaker@mail.utexas.edu), University of Texas at Austin
The SPSP Student Committee recently released their second technical report, “Careers Outside of Academia for Social and Personality Psychologists: Strategies and Insights about the Non-Academic Job Market.” The purpose of this session is to discuss the process of writing and publishing this technical report, to provide attendees with insights given by respondents who have been on the non-academic job market, and to discuss anything else related to this technical report.
Host: SPSP Student Committee (spsp_gsc@spsp.org)
How can an instructor instill an experiential appreciation for research into one's teaching? And how does teaching improve one's research? In this free-form Friday, we will discuss the rationale for integrating teaching and research, as well as describing specific methods for doing so.
Host: Harry Reis (reis@psych.rochester.edu), University of Rochester
Michael Robinson (michael.d.robinson@ndsu.edu), the Editor of PSPB, will discuss changes and features of the current term of the journal
For researchers looking for support with reshaping and resuming their prolific labs' research endeavours during the pandemic, York University lab manager Julia Sebastien has had ample experience running virtual literature search "parties" and adapting and troubleshooting a variety of virtual self-report surveys and behavioural experiments on virtual formats (including Qualtrics, SONA, Inquisit/Millisecond, Pavlovia, Psychopy, NVIVO, Covidence, and R-Studio). This session welcomes researchers with struggles, open-ended questions, doubts, or tips of their own to share about conducting and transforming online research.
Host: Julia Sebastien (jsebast4@my.yorku.ca), York University
Since the 1970's, the field of psychology--and social psychology in particular--has increasingly relied on self-report surveys to assess behavior (Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder, 2003). While understanding people's perceptions of their own behavior through self-report is indeed valuable, we would do well to balance these studies with studies that directly examine people's behavior; particularly given that people's self-report of their own behaviors (e.g., prejudice) may be under-reported due to social desirability effects. The reasons for the over-reliance on self-report are many, including ethical, logistic, and financial challenges. Indeed, to assemble a group of 20 people in a room to study their inter-group interactions is logistically challenging and financially costly. Yet, virtual technology provides some intriguing possibilities towards these ends. For example, in previous research I had groups of approximately 20 people create self-resembling avatars in Second Life and simultaneously interact in study trials. Not only was this method logistically feasible and low-cost, this method allowed for some acutely precise observations of behavior, for example, I determined people's exact average distances from each other over the duration of the trial. In this free-form Friday, I will facilitate a group discussion around the use of virtual technology for collection of behavioral data. While I will share briefly some of my past experiences with virtual technology and some of my data collection efforts, the forum will be geared towards encouraging your imagination and creativity for developing ideas for collecting your own behavioral data using virtual technology.
Host: John Tawa (jtawa@mtholyoke.edu), Mount Holyoke College
