Made it!!

Everything is turned in, all the i's dotted and t's crossed. February was a busy month--just listing everything for someone yesterday made me tired. Last night when I got home, I was a mixture of deliriously happy and weepy all at the same time because I was so tired. But it felt great to finish this month of yucky busy-ness. Spring Break is next week, so I won't be blogging until March 9. It's going to be nice to have a break. What does the rest of the world do without Spring Break.

Fixing Problem Reliabilities

I typically blog about goings-on in my life as an assistant professor, but one of my favorite blogs does that and also occasionally posts invaluable statistics help. Today, I want to talk about an article and stats technique that I recently found very helpful.

The citation is: Bernardi, R. A. (1994). Validating research results when Cronbach's alpha is below .70: A methodological procedure. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 54, 766-775.

Bernardi addresses the age-old problem about what to do with bad reliability scores. If you are like me, you often throw out the variable altogether or use it cautiously and hope reviewers and editors will be happy with your cautious language. However, Bernardi presents a solution. Let's say you have a 3-item scale measuring job satisfaction and a sample size of 200. The reliability is .40, completely unacceptible. First, compute the variable based on the scores that you have and calculate the mean, s.d., confidence intervals around the mean (plus or minus 2 standard errors), and correlations with other variables. Is the variable related to a dependent variable of interest in the study? If so, then there needs to be steps taken to make the variable useable. Calculate the distance between scale items for each respondent. For two items, you would do that by calculating the absolute difference between items. For three or more, it's a little more complicated, but the principle is the same. When you have the absolute difference, sort your data based on that difference. The goal now is to select out cases that have the largest differences between scale items, thus increasing the consistency between scores (which is what alpha measures). How many to leave out depends on how far about scores are. So let's say our original sample size of 200 is selected down to 164.

But wait! What good social scientist would intentionally tamper with data in order to get better results?! Bernardi isn't finished yet. Compute a new variable based on the new data and calculate the mean, s.d., confidence intervals around the mean, and correlations with other variables. Now compare the new variable to the first variable. Are the means signficantly different (nonoverlapping confidence intervals)? Does the new variable correlation in comparable ways to over variables in the study? If so, Bernardi would argue that the low alpha score is a product, not of poor reliability, but of a highly homogenous sample. The trick then is to write all of this to honestly describe how you handled poor reliabilities in such as way as to persuade reviewers that you know what you are doing.

No time

No time to blog. 4 days till Spring Break!

Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines

So the NCA deadline has passed. Today is the deadline for internal grants at my university, and I'm almost finished with that stuff. I'm reviewing for NCA, which is due Tuesday. I have a grant deadline on Wednesday. After that, I think I'm just about done with deadlines. I'll still have self-imposed deadlines for teaching and research, but next Wednesday will end the other-imposed deadlines. And I can't wait! It's been a long month (even though it's the shortest month of the year).

I submitted an interdisciplinary grant yesterday with 2 colleagues, and I'm pretty excited about the work that we want to do. And the stipend incentives for faculty are pretty nice for that.

Yesterday, I gave a test, and a student didn't show up. She emailed me about 3 hours after the test to tell me that she was in an interview for an MBA program and the interviewer wouldn't let her leave. Hmm. She says that the reason the interview was at that time on that day was that her mother scheduled it for her. Hmm. Don't you wish your mother made your schedule?

So my thesis student and two other students in the same boat have set their defenses next week. I will lead a thesis defense on Tuesday and participate in ones on Wednesday and Thursday. Fun week. Oh, and did I mention the deadlines on Tuesday and Wednesday?

Dinner last night with my mentee

Last night, I had dinner with the new faculty member I am mentoring and his wife and child. It's an experience that I'm really enjoying. Now, I haven't put as much time into it as I probably should have, but I am enjoying it.

I went to a presentation about international programs at my university this morning. I had never really been interested, but I have to say that I am now intrigued a little.

Got to go. Busy, busy, busy.

Updates on Old Items, New Items for the Coming Weeks

Two internal reviewers came to my classes last week. The first went ok. The second went fantastically! The reviewer said he would need to leave about 30 minutes before class was over, but he wound up staying the whole time. Afterward, I asked him, and he said that he "didn't want to leave." That's success in my book.

My thesis student is still desperately trying to pull things together to defend and walk across the stage. Never mind the fact that he will still be done and still not owe any money--he wants to walk across the stage. I completely understand. As I think about it, I took short cuts and made decisions based more on timing than on quality. I'm doing the best that I can with turnaround time. It's tough because I have a pretty full plate this week and next week. But I don't want to be the reason it doesn't work out.

My university's deadline for internal grants is Friday, so that's a big thing this week. I'm applying for a small grant for a project for next year and I'm also applying to work as part of a cross-disciplinary team with faculty and undergraduate students. This program seems like one of the university's favorite ways to get undergrads involved in research, so I'm kind of excited about it.

I'm also applying for an external grant, and that application is due in the Office for Sponsored Programs by Wednesday of next week. It shouldn't be too bad. I applied for the same grant last year, and I got good feedback even though I was rejected. I need to tweak my methodology a bit and the review committee said I needed to include a discussion of popular, non-academic literature as well as academic stuff. They like to bridge the divide between the two, and my proposal was too academic.

Oh, and I've got some grading to do. A lot of grading to do. Did I say that my plate was pretty full this week and next?

100 posts

This is my 101st post on this blog. It's kind of cool passing the century mark, although I know that's nothing compared to some blogs. It's interesting. This blog gets so much less traffic that my workplace communication blog (probably because of topics), but I can do so much more with it because the other blog is in word press. I'm considering creating a duplicate blog of the other in blogger so that I can see which gets more traffic and compare. Maybe it's something to consider over spring break.

It's great to have NCA submissions behind me for another year. Because ICA is in Singapore in 2010 and because of budget cutbacks, I'm probably not submitting anything this November, so this submission push was it for me for a year.

I also got a revise and resubmit on an article on the same day as NCA submissions, so it was quite the day. When I looked at the reviews yesterday, one was focused on "add a caveat here, clarify there." The other asked me to take the 30 pages and say the same thing in 20 pages. But neither was anything that will be super-challenging. Nice.

Done!

Everything is submitted to NCA that I needed to submit! It's a great feeling to be done. And I must say that All Academic was remarkably smooth and running much more efficiently than I had anticipated.

The Home Stretch

Here we go, the home stretch, the last 65 hours or so until the NCA submission deadline. I had a decent weekend as far as getting stuff done. There were a few things for my classes that I needed to finish off (lesson plans for today, for example), but I also made progress on most of the NCA things. The panel that I'm putting together is just about done--I need a statement from the chair saying that he'll attend the conference, but other than that, the panel's done. One of the papers is one rewrite away from being done. It just needs a little bit of polishing and a double-checking of the reference list. Today is packed with classes and meetings, so I'm hoping to knock that out Tuesday morning and get that paper and the panel submitted then. I didn't get quite as much done on the other paper as I would have liked. I need to finish the discussion section, substantially clean up and bolster the lit. review, and probably tweak the analyses a bit. And then rewrite and polish it. I've got most of the day Tuesday and a big chunk of the day Wednesday available. We'll see.

My thesis student (along with 2 others that I'm a committee member for) has realized that if he doesn't get everything together in a matter of days, he won't be able to defend in time to walk across the stage at Spring graduation. I'm not sure, but he may be working close to 24 hours a day. I doubt he will make it, but the problem is that I don't want to be the hang up. So I'm going to try to find a little bit of time Tuesday to read his results chapter and maybe some time Wednesday to go through his discussion chapter. Given his topic and results, I think the results chapter should be pretty easy, but I'm almost dreading the discussion chapter.

Two of the people in my department who are my internal reviewers for pre-tenure review are coming to my classes this week. One is coming today and one is coming Thursday. I spent some extra time on my lesson plans for today, but this is among my least favorite and consequently my least polished lesson of the semester. Please be nice.

NCA progress and Microfilm

One of the NCA papers is coming together. I just found some literature that needs to be added, and the discussion section needs bolstering. Then, I'll probably have to shorten it by a few pages, but still, it's going to get there. The other paper has further to go. I need to write the discussion section, and the literature review is going to need a fair amount of polishing. One of the variables that I wanted to include had poor reliability, which at first, I thought had doomed that variable. But I just found an article that discusses how to "fix" low reliabilities and still use the variable. I haven't read it yet, but I'm hopeful that will help the paper. For the panel that I'm submitting, I'm still lacking a couple of abstracts (nudging those authors is on my list of stuff to do today) and I need to put together a polished abstract that defines the whole panel (also on my list), but it should all be ready by Sunday or Monday--far ahead of the All Academic chaos that I'm sure will ensue on Wednesday.

The article on reliability that I mentioned was a bit difficult to get. I found the citation on Google Scholar. My university's library did not have it electronically and did not list the print version, so I asked for it through InterLibrary Loan. This was about a week ago, so plenty of time to get it. No big deal, right? The ILL person emailed me back saying that they had it in microfilm and I could come to the library to print it. I hinted around that I really didn't want it in that form, could it not be found electronically or could someone not scan it and send it to me, but I was politely told to come print it. Immediately a number of objections to that system arose in my mind. First, it seems in 2009 that we are beyond the requirement that things be printed. Perhaps this is complete laziness/spoiledness on my part, but I think that if it exists and if it's been printed in the last 20 years, it should exist electronically and that's the version I want. I want it on my computer so that I can take it wherever I wanted to. Not to mention the "green-ness" of electronic copies versus printing something from microfilm. And along that, when I was getting my PhD, they had microfilm machines from which you could print, but the printouts cost 10 cents per page. As a faculty member, I felt like I was above paying such fees (especially since I know that it only costs them slightly over 6 cents per copy). I needed the article, so I went to the library. And the printout was free beyond the time it took me to relearn the machine. I'm not sure if I'm a spoiled brat or a green, convenience revolutionary, but this should have been available electronically.

Glad to be Teaching

I was listening to a radio interview with a researcher who, rather than working at a university, worked at a research institute. It reminded me of a friend who described one of his colleagues leaving academia to work at a research company. I would definitely say that my favorite part of my job is research. (That is in contrast to a statistic that I just read that said that 70% of faculty across the country prefer teaching to research.) However, I don't think I would ever want to leave a university setting for a research institute. There is something energizing about being around students, and I think the act of sharing what I do with students makes me better at research. I'm glad to be where I am.

NCA submissions are progressing. Today is an important day for getting things together for the panel that I'm proposing. I was working on one of the papers that I'm proposing, and it's occurring to me that the literature review is not right. I'm planning to submit it to the organizational communication division, but there is really only one org. comm. citation in the whole lit. review. Part of that is that it's a new direction, bringing in ideas from a different subfield. I'm going to work today and tomorrow to strengthen the rationale and the organizational part of the paper to make it more relevant.

IT heroes

My computer got a virus over the weekend. No, it was not from downloading attachments or anything that IT people tend to warn professors not to do (those of you who went to grad school with me know who and what I'm talking about). But it started opening up lots of internet explorer windows and setting of anti-virus alarms. I cleaned the virus and deleted temporary files, but that didn't fix the problem. The IT person for my department spent the better part of the day on my computer today and described this as a particularly nasty trojan. Apparently, it was designed to corrupt any anti-virus files that could be downloaded to fix it. Just like antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, it was resistant to all but the most forceful efforts to remove it. I was worried when the IT person said he was trying "Plan C" but, in the end, he was able to remove the problems without any damage to my files. Whew! With the NCA deadline looming, I was chewing my fingernails to the bone, but no problems. Hurray for IT people!!!

I got a little bit behind on NCA papers Friday, but I was able to catch up over the weekend (despite the virus). I have a lot of work to do, but I'm on my way.