New Project Idea, New Energy

I'm not sure why, but the last few days have been very difficult in terms of motivation. Yesterday was particularly rough, and at the end of the day, I was tired and feeling down. Again, not really sure why. I was explaining the feeling and what I'd been working on all day to someone. As the conversation continued, this person got me really excited about a particular research project that I had hoped to do at some point in the future. But this person was encouraging me not to wait, but to pursue it now and gave me some tips for how to succeed, at least in the initial set up stage. By the end of the conversation, I was pumped about it, and I can feel that energy still today. I've got a little work to do early next week to get ready, and I've got a meeting Wednesday with someone that can really help me. It'll be interesting to blog after my conversation with that person to see what his reaction is.

new printer, updated vita

I got a new printer for home last night. Pretty exciting, lots of bells and whistles. I think it can do everything except make breakfast.

I got the article submitted that I wanted to get done on Monday. After I submitted it, I sent the editor an email about my identity-masking issue, so if there's a problem, I'm sure he'll let me know. It's kind of interesting. I've never submitted to this journal before. Even though it's not as high as some communication journals to which I've submitted in the new impact ratings, I think of it as the most prestigious journal for what I want to publish. I'm not entirely sure that it has a good chance. I think it's an important article and well done on most levels, but I'm not sure. We'll see.

By the way, I thought Tim Levine's post on impact ratings and subsequent re-rating was interesting. And it was nice to see some of the regionals thrown in.

I'm working on a theory piece that I've been doing all summer, and I'm continuing to look at data from this summer, data that I hope we're going to work on during the next semester. Still pretty busy, but has a relaxed feel to it.

Great Weekend, Should be a great week

This weekend was so relaxing. Yes, I got lots of stuff done, but more than anything, I had plenty of time to relax a little and recharge. I think I really needed that in getting ready for the fall. It really felt like a laid-back couple of days.

Last week, I was only able to submit one article, so I'm trying to knock out the second one today. It's ready, but I was having trouble masking my identity in light of the fact that things googled straight to me. My adviser suggested that is just more evidence that blind review is just a myth and that I should point out the problem to the editor, but go ahead and submit it. So that is what I intend to do today.

Other than that, I'm just taking care of some miscellaneous things that need to be done. Should be pretty low stress I hope. Overall, I feel pretty good about the whole week. July should finish well.

This is going to be a good day

I'm still ahead, but I think today is going to be a good day. A few appointments, but overall, a lot of flexible time to write and revise in.

I finished one of the papers that I'm trying to submit this week, but I didn't submit it yet. I'm having trouble figuring out how to completely mask my identity in the paper--thanks Google for making life harder. Although I guess when you balance everything, Google is still pretty handy. I'm hoping to finish the second paper today. No identity problems there, so I'll submit it either today or tomorrow. It's interesting that right now, I have only one citation from the journal that I want to submit it to. I have other articles that are kind of related that I'd like to squeeze in, but I hope that's not a bad omen.

I met yesterday with a representative from the organization that is going to work with my org. comm. analysis class this fall. Pretty good meeting overall. It's a much bigger organization than I've examined in the past, and I'm uncertain about whether my contact there is high enough in the hierarchy to push my research stuff through, but HR and legal are fine with everything, so hopefully.

No Time To Blog

A little bit behind today.

Busy Week

This is going to be a busy week. I have a couple of papers that are really close, and I'm hoping to have those submitted this week. One is a second submission, got rejected at the end of last month. I've tweaked a few things based on reviewers' comments, and I'm sending it to a less prestigious journal, so I'm hopeful. The other is going out for its first submission to a top, national journal. The sampling method is a weakness (though not necessarily a fatal flaw) and I cite myself a lot, but I'm still hopeful that it may go. I've heard the editor say that he doesn't get enough articles like this one, so I'm hoping that works in my favor.

One Month To Go

So meetings start a month from today. Kind of sad. I'm excited to see students again, for sure, but the self-directed pace of the summer, with fewer commitments during the week is nice.

My student is on board for working together in the fall. Another faculty member from the summer's project and that person's student are probably also on board. Looking pretty good for finishing that.

Hope for the summer project in the fall

It's been 3 years since I moved from my PhD program's town to my first job's town. Three years as of today. Kind of cool.

So for the summer project, we made it through coding 20% of the data, partly because of optimism, partly because of poor reliability, partly because of group dynamics. I really want to do the other 80% at some point. That point may come sooner than expected. My university is interested in parlaying its success with summer undergraduate research into undergrad research during the school year. Faculty members get professional development money and the student gets a 1 hour scholarship for working through the semester. I'm going to see if my student will continue through December, and another faculty member (the one that I seem to be working well with) may do the same. If I unitize the data, the four of us might have the data coded by December. Yes, there is hope after all!

Finding Something in Nothing

So today, I'm trying to find a paper in the research from this summer. Some of it will turn into a paper with some more coding (perhaps in the fall?), but I'm not sure that it's a paper yet. However, the student working with me needs to write a final paper. So where are some meaningful results?

At the same time, it's fantastic to be near the end. I'm tired of this project for several reasons.

Working in Teams

As I design my new prep for this Fall, I'm planning a heavy team emphasis. The class is a leadership-type class, so it works for team projects. I remember one of the classes on which I worked the hardest had a team-oriented structure, and I think the concertive control element was one of the reasons I worked as hard as I did. So I'm going to try to do the same, except perhaps without the oppressive peer pressure that's often associated with concertive control. I'm thinking of having teams decide how to weight the various assignments and having them decide attendance policies for members. I'm going to give Readiness Assessment Tests throughout the semester, both individual tests and group tests to keep them accountable for reading. But of course, that puts pressure on me to make sure I'm not just rehashing the material--I'm really going to work to have high impact activities and guest speakers to really help students apply material. This class will be an experiment.

The Rhythm of Writing

One of the blogs I follow made a great point about writing in rhythm. It's very difficult to write just for the sake of writing. But writing with a conference deadline in mind helps a lot because it forces you to get something down on paper that's legible. Even if you don't submit it to the conference, just having a deadline helps you push yourself. Great advice! The ICA deadline is around Nov. 1, and even though I'm not submitting to it this year (can't travel to Singapore), I'm hoping to use that deadline to push me to write. It helps having ICA and NCA deadlines spread out a little bit.

Busy Month, Here I Go!

So this month is a busy one! I've got the summer research project to finish (or at least bring to a stopping point--grrr!). I've got a paper that's close to finished that I need to send off. I have another paper that was rejected in June but that won't take too much work to rewrite and send to a different journal, so I'd like to do that this month also. I have a new prep in the Fall, and I'd like to get the syllabus and a few weeks of lessons done for that. If I'm planning on re-submitting the grant that was rejected last month, I need to make progress on that. And I've got a few data collection things for new projects. Whew! Did I mention it's going to be a busy month.

The summer research project is winding down--just about 3 weeks to go. I'm looking forward to it being done. I think I'll have something publishable. It won't be as strong as what I'd hoped, but hopefully, it'll get published somewhere.

Guetzkow's U

So even though I couldn't do it because my coders couldn't agree, Guetzkow's U seemed like a useful way to measure intercoder reliability for frequency. I googled it and couldn't find the formula online, so today's post remedies that problem. For more information, see Folger et al. (1984) or Guetzkow (1950).

First, a caveat. Guetzkow's U statistic doesn't take chance into account, so treat it cautiously at best. This probably shouldn't be used alone, but only with other agreement statistics to provide an overall picture. Second, U doesn't count the agreement of specific codes but counts the agreement of number of codes. That works perfectly if there's a finite number of codes (the data's already unitized) and the codes are fairly simple. Bottomline, use common sense--this statistic could let you get away with poor coding, but doing so jeopardizes that anyone will take your results seriously.

U = Sum CodesA - Sum CodesB / Sum CodesA + Sum CodesB

Basically, U divides the difference in the number of codes between coders A and B by the total number of codes identified by A and B. If there's perfect agreement in the number, U will be 0. It's a measure of disagreement rather than agreement, so lower is better.

Again, remember, this statistic should never be used alone. In my summer project, I had good levels with one coder (U = .04) and poor levels with all other coders. However, three coders had decent levels with each other (U ~ .07) because they were all equally poor. This statistic can be very deceptive if used alone, but it focuses on freqency more than kappa or any other statistic.

I'm using a different version of kappa by Brennan and Prediger (1981) that considers marginals in a more forgiving way than does Cohen. I'm also using Krippendorf's alpha, and the SPSS macro for that is at Andrew Hayes' webpage at Ohio State University.
References:

Brennan, R. L. &; D. J. Prediger (1981). Coefficient kappa: Some uses, misuses, and alternatives. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 41, 687-699.

Folger, J.P., Hewes, D.E., & Poole, M.S. (1984). Coding social interaction. In B. Dervin & M. J. Voigt (Eds.), Progress in communication sciences (Vol. 4, pp. 115-161). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Guetzkow, H. (1950). Unitizing and categorizing problems in coding quantitative data. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 6, 47-58.

And the Hits Just Keep on Coming

I'm normally a pretty optimistic guy, but June has been tough. Starting and ending with journal rejection letters, tremendous difficulty with reliability on a project about which I was excited and which will end at the end of July (perhaps unfinished), and last now, I received word that a major grant I had submitted in January was not funded. It's been a rough month. To celebrate July, I'm taking most of today off and spending some time with my wife (who has a holiday today). Hopefully, July will improve.