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SAMR at SWPASociety
for Applied Multivariate Research
Who and What is SAMR?SAMR was organized in 1973 to provide a forum for those interested in multivariate methodology and research. Through the years, SAMR has presented a variety of symposia, invited speakers and workshops that provided instruction and information across a wide range of multivariate topics including factor analysis, regression, discriminant analysis, MANOVA, structural equation modeling and factorial invariance. SAMR meets annually in conjunction with SWPA’s annual convention. Dues are $15 per year for members and $10 per year for student members. All SAMR convention events are open to non SAMR members. 2009 SAMR Program: First Update A new event is being planned for the 2009 meeting – a SAMR poster session. SAMR extends an invitation to all SWPA members to submit a presentation to this session. The content area of the research is open, but submissions must utilize some type multivariate methodology. Monetary awards will be given for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place. Questions about the poster session (or SAMR) can be sent to Dennis Jackson djackson@uwindsor.ca or Jeanne Burdsal jeanne.burdsal@wichita.edu. The poster session will be followed by “Have Coffee with a Methodologist” conversation hour. This will be an informal time where SAMR members will be on hand for questions, research ideas, or just conversation. Statistical Resource: Stat software for students A recent APA email newsletter promoted the following website: http://www.apa.org/science/psa/may08ssc.html The site has sources and links for a variety of free software that would be useful to students and others. |
Student Interest: The Benefits of Joining a Professional OrganizationAmie R. McKibban, Ph.D.(c)
Wichita State University Academic mentors often encourage students to join one or more professional organizations during their course of study. Having the student’s best interest in mind, there are many reasons mentors encourage such membership. Professional organizations not only support legislative efforts within the student’s field of study, they also provide many benefits that will aid in shaping the student’s professional career and identity. Given that one of the criteria in many professional occupations includes involvement within the field’s respective organization, joining prior to completion of your degree will give you, as the student, a competitive edge. Amanda Haas, an undergraduate student at Stephen F. Austin, describes her experience by stating, “One of the major benefits of joining a professional organization is networking. By meeting people who are interested in other fields, you are exposed to new ideas, and end up learning a lot. A professional organization not only looks good on a job application, but it also gives undergrads a chance to gain some experience in research...which looks good on graduate school applications”. Others, including professionals, share Amanda’s sentiments. According to psychologists at California State University, students gain many benefits when participating in professional organizations. Specifically, members of professional organizations often receive journals, newsletters and other materials. Students may use these written materials to further their knowledge about various topics. The journals are often helpful in doing class assignments as well. Even better, most of the literature is free (or offered at a discount rate) once the student joins an organization. The journals and newsletters not only provide easy access to the most recent developments in the field, attending conferences provides an opportunity to keep up with new knowledge as well. Further, including this membership on one’s resume illustrates to employers that he/she keeps abreast these most recent developments within the field. One of the most talked about benefits of professional membership is that of networking. Professional associations provide an excellent source for networks, which will benefit you, as a student, when applying for jobs, expanding your research interests, searching for project funding, etc. You also have the opportunity to search for jobs through the organization’s online resources and newsletters. Lastly, each professional organization has its own philosophy and ethical guidelines. These guidelines provide a framework for appropriate practice within your field. The benefits of joining a professional organization extend beyond those discussed here, although this provides a good framework to begin a discussion between student and mentor. For more comprehensive lists of the various organizations and societies available to students, visit the American Psychological Association website (www.apa.org) and the American Psychological Society website (www.psychologicalscience.org). |
Research Highlight: Faculty-Student InteractionsParticipate in Survey!
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Message from a Past President:You Can See a Lot by ObservingPaul Nail, Ph.D. SWPA President 2005-2006 University of Central Arkansas For the title of this column, I chose one of my favorite “Yogisms.” I did so because it was through casual observation that a colleague, several students, and I first embarked on a program of research that has led so far to two published articles, an invited book chapter, and five invited addresses presented at professional meetings or university colloquia. This research remains active to this day. As I am writing these words, in fact, I have an appointment in less than an hour to collect data on yet another new study from this same vein. The topic is racism. Like many social psychologists, I have always been interested in topics such as inter-group relations, stereotypes, and prejudice. Yet, I was never involved in systematic research on any of these topics until the appearance of two legal cases that more or less dominated the American news media for a number of months beginning in March of 1991, and again, in June of 1994. I refer to (a) the beating of an African-American, Rodney King, by several Caucasian members of the Los Angeles Police Department and to (b) the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, two Caucasians, allegedly by African-American/ex-football star, O. J. Simpson. From a purely academic point of view, these two cases included a number of variables of prime interest to social psychologists and social scientists in general: race, gender, socioeconomic class, social status, and society’s laws and norms—variables that can and frequently do divide us as people. The event in each of these cases that eventually got my colleagues and me interested in doing research on racism, however, was that after being acquitted in a California State Court, the defendants were put on trial a second time. Specifically, the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating were subsequently indicted and convicted in Federal Court of violating Mr. King’s civil rights. In a somewhat similar manner, O. J. Simpson was sued in civil court by the Brown and Goldman families and found responsible for the murders of their loved ones. As an observant social psychologist, however, my attention was not so much on the cases themselves, but rather, on the reactions of my friends and associates to them. In the case of the police officers in the Rodney King beating, it was my impression that it was my politically conservative friends who complained the loudest and longest after the officers’ guilty verdict was announced. They would say things like, “I don’t know how that prosecutor can go after those officers a second time when they were already acquitted by a jury. Doesn’t double jeopardy in the Constitution protect citizens from being tried twice for the same crime? Activist judges and prosecutors are ruining this country. Doesn’t the plain language in the Constitution mean anything anymore?” In the O. J. case, however, it seemed to be my politically liberal friends who were doing most of the complaining: “I realize that there is a difference between criminal court and civil court, but it seems wrong to me that it can be legal to sue a man in civil court for an alleged crime after he has already been acquitted in a criminal court. The double jeopardy clause should apply in these types of cases.” For my part, I found it most interesting that my conservative friends seemed not to notice the issue of double jeopardy when it came to O. J., whereas in the Rodney King case, it was my liberal friends who seemed not to care about the L.A. police officers and the double jeopardy clause. I began to wonder if my casual observations might have any basis in fact. Would conservatives and liberals, in general, perceive these cases differently with respect to double jeopardy? Were my friends’ political orientations and biases systematically influencing their perceptions, or was it my perceptions that were in error? The verdict in the O. J. civil case was announced on February 4, 1997 (Chronology of the O. J. Simpson Trials, n.d.). Within a few days of the verdict, I began planning an empirical study to examine whether political orientation might play a role in perceptions of double jeopardy for Black versus White defendants. I created a scenario, modeled directly on the Rodney King case, describing an alleged legal case in which a White male police officer was caught on videotape physically assaulting a Black male motorist. The officer was acquitted of assault and battery charges in state court but was later tried and convicted in federal court of violating the motorist’s civil rights. A second scenario was identical to the first except that the roles were reversed; the indicted police officer here was described as a Black male, the motorist a White male. After obtaining approval from the local IRB, a research assistant and I randomly assigned these scenarios to 69 volunteers from a community sample in a between-subjects design. The primary dependent variable was the extent to which participants perceived that the case had violated the U.S. Constitution’s protection against double jeopardy (1 = No, not at all to 7 = Yes, definitely). Included in our design was each participant’s self-reported political orientation (liberal, moderate, or conservative), which was collected after the judgment of double jeopardy had been given. The results supported my original, informal impressions regarding political orientation and bias. Conservative participants showed a clear bias in favor of the White officer. In the White officer-Black motorist condition, conservatives gave the case a double jeopardy rating (M = 4.62) that was significantly greater than that in the Black officer-White motorist condition (M = 1.25). In sharp contrast, the bias of liberals was in favor of the Black officer. Liberals in the White officer-Black motorist condition gave the case a rating (M = 1.91) that was significantly lower than that of liberals in the Black officer-White motorist group (M = 3.18). Yet, what did these results mean? How could they be explained? I had little clue. To address these questions, I turned to the literature, and I got lucky. I quickly learned that my results were exactly what one would expect based on John Dovidio and Sam Gaertner’s (1998) theory that White conservatives in North America tend toward a form of contemporary racism known as modern racism (McConahay, 1986). White liberals, on the other hand, tend toward aversive racism (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986). Most importantly, mine was the first study to provide direct evidence of Dovidio and Gaertner’s (1998) theory following its proposal, as it was the first study to manipulate a scenario actor’s race (Black or White) between experimental groups, while at the same time including the political orientation of the research participants as an independent variable. Based on this initial success, I started taking on colleagues and students interested in helping with this research, and to date we have completed eight more studies. Through a mutual friend, I was put in contact with Sam Gaertner at the University of Delaware. He liked our findings, and his critique of an early draft that included four of these studies was critical in helping us get our writing up to par for publication. We were fortunate enough to have these studies published together in a package in the flagship research journal in our field (Nail, Harton, & Decker, 2003). One of the other studies was published this past spring (Nail, Harton, & Barnes, 2008). Eventually, Sam helped get us connected with a top, young Ph.D. from Canada whose research dovetailed with ours, Leanne Son Hing, (e.g., Son Hing, Chung-Yan; Hamilton, & Zanna, 2008). It is in collaboration with Dr. Son Hing that several students and I are currently collecting data on yet another study that we hope will add further to the growing literature on how contemporary racism tends to be expressed. I would love to further elaborate on Dovidio and Gaertner’s (1998) theory, specifically, regarding particulars of the theories of modern and aversive racism and how my colleagues’ and my data offer support for these theories, but I can see that I have already far exceeded the word limit for this column that was given me by this year’s SWPA President, Dr. Lauren Scharff (Yikes! Sorry, Lauren). Thus, interested readers will have to pursue this information on their own. In closing, I would like to reiterate that all of this activity and success started with a few casual observations. This point is significant, I believe, because in my experience many students tend to downgrade observational research because it lacks the controls necessary for cause→effect conclusions. As I hope this column demonstrates, however, controlled experiments often follow from, and can be used to test hunches generated by, naturalistic observation. Finally, I would like to append my original title as follows: “’You Can See a Lot by Observing’: How Casual Observations Can Lead to Success in Research ‘With a Little Luck,’ ‘With a Little Help from My Friends,’ and With Lots of Effort.” References
Chronology of the O. J.
Simpson Trials. (n.d.). Retrieved August 1, 2008 from http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Simpson/Simpsonchron.html.Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (1986). Prejudice, discrimination, and racism: Historical trends and contemporary approaches. In J. F. Dovidio and S. L. Gaertner (Eds.), Prejudice, discrimination, and racism (pp. 1-34). New York: Academic Press. Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (1998). On the nature of contemporary prejudice: The causes, consequences, and challenges of aversive racism. In J. L. Eberhardt and S. T. Fiske (Eds.), Confronting racism: The problem and the response (pp. 3-32). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. McConahay, J. B. (1986). Modern racism, ambivalence, and the modern racism scale. In J. F. Dovidio and S. L. Gaertner (Eds.), Prejudice, discrimination and racism (pp. 91-125). Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Nail, P. R., Harton, H. C., & Barnes, A. (2008). A test of Dovidio and Gaertner’s integrated model of racism. North American Journal of Psychology, 10, 197-220. Nail, P. R., Harton, H. C., & Decker, B. P. (2003). Political orientation and modern versus aversive racism: Tests of Dovidio and Gaertner’s integrated model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 754-770. Son Hing, L. S., Chung-Yan, G. A., Hamilton, L. K., & Zanna, M. P. (2008). A two-dimensional model that employs explicit and implicit attitudes to characterize prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 971-987. |
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