RESEARCH TOPICS
Now is a great time for students to join my research team!
I direct multiple studies under the umbrella of The AIR Lab. The AIR Lab Team broadly aims to educate people on Authenticity, Identity, and Resentment in relationships and uses these variables to predict health and wellness.
We do customize our research goals to fit student interests. Meanwhile, most of the studies typically incorporate topics related to authenticity, identity, or resentment with two primary goals: (1) explaining relationship problems and (2) understanding their impact in terms of relationship health.
Research Requirements
Our current projects require that each assistant go through a set of designated training modules. In doing so, student researchers gain a variety of marketable skill sets through their research experience.
Emphasized Skill-Sets: the needs of every study will vary at different times, which allows students to acquire a variety of skills and experiences. Depending on the student's interests and abilities, my goal is to guide student researchers through different phases of a study and emphasize the skills they can use in their desired careers. I generally classify the phases of a research project as 1) Research Design (Planning); 2) Data Collection & Analysis (Organizing and Interpreting Information); and 3) Reporting (Communicating Results). Student researchers may be involved in any or all of these phases. Every phase includes opportunities to develop skills that are useful for graduate school, research careers, future clinical work, legal practice, or other careers that involve teamwork, professional communication, or the collection and interpretation of information.
For example, common research tasks that promote skill development include:
1) Survey programming - writing questions and testing surveys in Qualtrics. These skills are useful for research, graduate school, and a variety of industries, including data analytics, consumer behavior, and marketing.
(2) Data management - student researchers can be trained to export and organize data in SPSS (a software package that is similar to Excel).
(3) Data Analysis - students who have taken Psychological Statistics can help conduct analyses to test our hypotheses and report results.
(4) Professional Conference Presentations - once data are collected and analyzed, the team will put together an abstract to present the results at a conference. This will include some exposure to literature reviews, scientific writing, and, of course, practice making evidence-based arguments and presenting scientific findings.
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