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.