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

The wonders of RSS feeds

I have in recent times discovered the wonders of RSS feeds for keeping up to date with current research (best thing since the reference list manager Endnote IMHO). I have just started using Google's feed reader on my destop and when ever a new issue from a journal I use comes along up pop the abstracts.

A couple of RSS feeds I have been using come from the "Sources I use" section on the left hand side of this blog.

Exam Stress and Coping

The transaction theory of stress and coping Developed by Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman in 1984 is, perhaps, the single most useful framework to have emerged from the cognitive revolution. The theory itself is simple: stress results from the transaction of environmental factors with the individual's appraisal of and attempt to cope with those environmental threats. In practical terms, the theory suggests that when individual is confronted with a demand they: (1) appraise it in terms of whether it is personally significant and meaningful to them; and (2) appraise their avaliable resources in relation to whether they will be sufficient to cope with the demand. It is the outcome of this appraisal which leads to the choice and implementation of particular coping efforts and in turn predicts short term strain and long term burnout and distress. The theory is hardly new, has been tested and supported extensively, and its practical and stress management implications have continually been promoted by leading stress researchers such as Philip Dewe.

While the transactional model remains one of the most widely studies and implemented stress frameworks in the literature it seems that someone has failed to give the memo to researchers studying teacher burnout. It is odd that in 2009 we still get articles on teachers stress that fail to mention the transactional model, pay it mere lip service, or write about the model as if it refers only to environmental stressors and coping responses completely ignore the role of cognitive appraisal. Sadly, when it comes to research on teacher stress this seems to be the rule rather than the exception!

Thankfully, this is not case when it comes to research with children. Indeed, following on from the excellent work of Erica Frydenberg, a group of French researchers have shown the value of applying Lazarus and Folkman’s model to students facing examinations. In this research, appraisal of the threat in terms of beliefs in intelligence and ability as fixed or malleable predicted the type and range of coping strategies used. In particular, students who believed intenlligence and abilty could be improved, coped with the stress of upcoming exames via active task-focused coping, presumably based on an appraisal that effort is the important predictor in success or failure. In contrast, those that viewed intelligence and ability as fixed traits tended to use emotion-focused coping behaviours designed to prop up their ego, presumable based on the appraisal that it is their god given talents rather their effort that would be the sole determinate of success of failure.

Not only does this research acknowledge the strength of the transactional approach and focus on both appraisal cognitions and coping together, it also illustrates a major them I plan for this blog. That is that it successfully integrates theories developed in educational contexts with children with theories largely utilised in occupational research to develop new, creative, and important approaches to the study of achievement domains.

Cross-Pollination in Applied Psychology Research

While this blog relates to applied psychology, I will in effect be focusing largely on applied research in the I/O, educational, sport and exercise domains. In short, achievement domains! For my mind, research in this area has become a series of silos with researchers working only within their fields, with their own sample targets, testing their own, independently developed theories.

This would seem strange as all domains share a single dominate characteristic -achievement. While there are clearly unique aspects of each domain that require some level of silo activity, achievement and its effect on self-worth, stress, motivation, self-regulation, and well-being seem to be common enough to warrant more cross-pollination.

Therefore, instead of starting this blog with new research I will first discuss a couple of articles that have utilised research and theory from one domain to produce fascinating new research in other domains.

The foremost leader in this cross-pollination approach for my mind is Dr Andrew Martin, an Associate Professor in education at the University of Sydney. First highlighting the potential of cross-pollination in vol 24 (1-2) of the Journal of Organizational Behaviour Management, the case was made empirically in the Journal of Research in Personality 42 (6). Here Dr. Martin took his use-inspired framework of motivation and explored its applicability and validity across school, university, work, sport, music, and daily life domains. Dr. Martin showed that "there are many conceptual congruencies in motivation and engagement theory across diverse performance [domains]" and "constructs such as self-efficacy, mastery orientation, anxiety, self handicapping and the like are relevant in any situation where individuals are required to perform or are evaluated in some way".

The benefit of the current silo approach has been that research traditions and theories have developed in relative isolation from each other providing a diversity from which cross-pollination attempts can now be cultivated to produce a great deal of creative and diverse research. As a final example, VandeWalle, Brown, Cron, and Slocum in Vol 84 of the Journal of Applied Psychology take Carol Dweck's implicit theory and goal orientation approach (developed in education) and apply it to sales personnel.

Surprisingly, despite the appearance of a gulf between the pressures of schools and the pressures of sales, Dweck’s theory and constructs work almost identically across both domains. That is that, just like in the classroom, a learning orientation mediated by task-focused self-regulation strategies predicts performance in sales.

As a final note, it seems apparent that no matter how much of a gulf we think separates school life, work life, and sport and physical activity, much of the same struggles and stresses faced remain oddly consistent. Importantly, this includes not just the type of psychological struggles faced but the consistency in the way they are approached and coped with.