Germany here I come

I have not been as active on this blog as I would have liked and I can now give the reason. I will be taking up the Jacob's foundation post-doctoral research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. I cannot emphasis how big this is and I am extremely excited about the project I will be working on. It will in essence involve a focus on publications within a variety of applied domains with extremely large, longitudinal, and multi-national samples. The job starts in January but I am off to London in early December to meet the Max Planck team and members of the project's partner institutions including The University of London and The University of Michigan.

In other news I was excited to find my article on clergy well-being has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Religion and Health. I will give an outline of the findings which have general motivation applications when the dust has settled a little.

Statistics Calculators - Boring but Useful.

I have been using Daniel Soper's interaction program for some time which is great for a quick and dirty interaction graph (particularly good for regression interactions) and only cost US 5 bucks. I have, however, only recently become aware of the variety of free stats calculators he has on his site. The calculators can be found here and are probably worth bookmarking.

How to Publish From Your Thesis

I am giving a brief presentation on "How to publish from your thesis" as part of a professional practice class. As my supervisor says, when you finish your PhD and go for a job every other applicate will have a PhD so you will not be special. As such even us lowly PhD students are stuck in the publish or perish world view to give our CVs the vital push needed to land that elusive post doc (more on mine latter). Hopefully, this presentation will go someway for helping grad students use this world view for their own advantage.

The ugly version of the presentation with notes can be found here.

Fantastic Motivation Article: Yours to Own!

I once loved Psych Info with all my heart but recently I have found myself lusting after another - Google Scholar. Not only is it easier to search for stuff and the import function for End Note is that much easier to use but many of the articles I like to talk about can be freely downloaded by all.

An important example is this article by Martin Covington (2000). Not only is this a great overview of goal theory and motivation but here Covington gives a brief overview of his own work. Covington has never gotten the respect and press that he deserves but his work serves as a foundation a lot of work on motivation in applied domains.

Get it, read it, review it, and post your thoughts here!

Stress: Its an Individual Thing

It has been found for some time now that organisation wide stress interventions (changing organisational structures, removing stressors etc.) simply do not have a significant effect in improving workplace distress (for those interested the most recent meta analyses can be found here and a full text article can be found here).

As this finding is relatively consistent it was unsurprising to find that Randall, Nielsen, & Tvedt accept this in one of the most recent issue of Work and Stress. I was surprised however, to find the following statement "However, organizational-level interventions are usually based on well-validated theory and are therefore unlikely to be inherently ineffective'. The reason appears sound however, suggesting that much research in this area include "problems with the processes of intervention planning and/or implementation, or a hostile context, as being possible reasons for disappointing results" and "that what participants experience during the intervention is not always the same as what had been planned for them".

There is however another possible conclusion. In 1993 Richard Lazarus pointed out the problem of stress interventions which "[treat] everyone as though they were alike, and work environments as though they have common effects on everyone" (the full article can be found here and should be downloaded and read by everyone interested in this area). Indeed, this has been backed up by recent research out of that the Max Planck Institute of Human Development. Their article found that the majority of variance in stress and engagement and, the factors that predict it, is explained at the individual rather than the organisational level concluding "most of the variability in teachers’ emotional and motivational experience can thus be ascribed to individual rather than school factors". I like wise found this to be the case in my article in Teacher and Teacher Education.

The major point being that individuals within groups tend to vary far more than groups vary from each other. People appraise the same stressors differently, aim to cope with them in different ways, and evaluate the resources at their disposal with different perceptions of their sufficiency.

Meta Analysis: How do we really know?

Many of us, in either manuscripts or debates on forums, refer to meta-analysis as the gold standard of evidence. But how much do we really know? How many of us seek to close debates with a reference to meta-analysis and yet have no clue how they work.

I had the pleasure last Friday of attending a training course on meta analysis with the great Professor Herb Marsh from Oxford. In this course Professor Marsh referred to this article in review of general psychology. Likewise all Professors Marsh's training notes and workshopes are available here for free.

If you use meta analysis as evidence in your work or want to be a more savvy consumer this is the best place to start.

WARNING when the training moves to multi level meta analysis it can get a touch technical.

Unskilled and Unaware of it: AMOS and Latent Modelling

The Dunning–Kruger effect came up in a comment on this blog recently(the only one so far!). The study published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (full text here), suggested that individuals with low levels of competence are both unaware of how incompetent they are and are relatively ineffective at recognising actual skill in others (click here for a rundown). The effect was brought up in reference to a post I made on implicit theory by Dweck and Leggett. Comparing the two studies is something I would like to go into in another post. However, the reason I am posting on it here is it came to my mind today when purchasing SPSS.

My previous licence for SPSS ran out just last month and with 3 months on the PhD left to go I needed to buy it again (talk about bad timing). Anyway, theversion of SPSS that I brought came with a copy of the latent modelling software AMOS. Now I have been doing latent modelling for about 5 years now using LISREL. LISREL is about 10 times harder to use but I have persisted and here is why. In learning to use LISREL I needed to learn how to write all the correct syntax giving me a pretty good idea of what was going on under the hood (I even learnt how to do a CFA by hand!). With AMOS it is a case of drawing the model you want and pressing go (almost only requiring relatively base level skills in Microsoft paint).

My concern is that as products like AMOS become available, people with less and less statistical skills are increasingly becoming able to access and test very complex statistical models. With this I wonder how much the old "unskilled and unaware of it" is taking place in much of today’s social sciences. It also makes me wonder whether increasingly user friendly research tools are really as beneficial as they seem on the surface.

The interesting thing is that latent modelling programs have made complex models so easy to develop and test that researchers are also becoming increasingly unaware of the skills they do have. Thus we are increasingly seeing huge multi-stage models with paths going all over the place (often developed with the aid of modification indices), with the only criteria used to judge its veracity is whether the fit indices reach the magically numbers. What happened, I wonder, to the law of parsimony and on basing research models on a detailed examination of theory rather than based purely on what a computer tells us looks good!

~Phil