Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 7:21 pm. 0 comments
I’ve been on Twitter for a while now, but I haven’t really taken it seriously. I figured that no one cares what I have to say, so why bother. Plus, it is hard for me to say anything in such a short amount of characters. :)
I hear that the best way to get followers is to ask questions and be controversial, but that somewhat hard for me considering that there are so few people in my field on Twitter. I would like to use it for more industry-related things, but all the “experts” in the I/O field are either not that interested in new/emerging technologies or don’t really need to use it to get things done.
I would like to move from a strictly I/O area of interest to the application of I/O ideas to entrepreneurship and software development. There seem to be a lot more of those types on Twitter, so I’m learning new things there. It is hard to search for these people though, so I’m just going by my connection’s connections at this point.
I don’t think I’ve learned exactly the right way to utilize the network yet, so if people have tips on what they did, I’d love to hear them.
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 7:10 pm. 0 comments
I am having issues at the moment trying to figure out my focal sample. I was hoping to look at teachers and students in an entrepreneur education program with the ELIF. The issue is that the student sample is not guaranteed because the ELIF has to find additional funding at that point, so it is likely that surveying students will delay my graduation. I really do not want to put off graduation for an additional semester or year since I’ve already spent 10 years in college. I have a meeting on Friday to try to figure out other options, but I am not sure at this point how that will turn out. This is probably why people end up going with a student sample, since it is obviously easier. I am still trying to figure that out and stay motivated to finish my last few classes.
At this point I really just want to throw myself into something non-school related for a while. Too bad there aren’t any internship opportunities in what I want in the area. Even the I/O consulting internships are likely to be cut for next year because of the economy. I am not sure how that is going to affect teaching and other funding opportunities at school. Let’s just hope I can find something that makes money next school year and still allows me to put some time into my dissertation.
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 7:03 pm. 0 comments
I wanted to do a quick update on my Entrepreneur Descriptives Survey. The results aren’t completely finished at this point because they are more difficult than I thought. The issue is that many of the highly rated items (in terms of mean scores) were all synonyms related to motivation. When creating a typical survey, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to have more than one item that taps something like motivation, in this case, I am looking for a variety of traits. This is because I am using the words for a process called pathfinder that creates what is essentially a neural network of relationships among items. With any neural network you need to determine the strength of the associations among items, which is essentially what the pathfinder does. In order to figure this out, comparisons among the items are made and that helps to define the relationships. Since adding in an additional word means that participants have to do a lot more ratings, I need to have as few items on as many different underlying traits as possible.
Over the last few weeks I have been trying to cut down on the synonyms and create a scale where the words are related to the idea of entrepreneurship, but not so related that they are all part of an underlying construct like motivation. Taking words out is more of an art than a science at this point, so I am trying a bunch of things and trying to figure out what makes the most sense.
Posted 1 year, 5 months ago at 2:26 pm. 0 comments
I just read a couple of articles for class that suggest self-control is like a muscle. I think we all can agree that there are definitely times that we need to control our behavior by inhibiting our urges or desires, but many people may not know that this type of control is costly because we have a limited amount of resources from which to draw. By controlling ourselves in terms of our response to stressful events, we are likely to have lapses of self-control later on because we don’t have the resources available to inhibit our impulses. This is much like muscle fatigue after a hard workout. The good news is that if self-control is like a muscle, we can get stronger as we continue to work it out.
One of the most interesting things from the articles was how self-control uses glucose as its energy source. Low glucose impacts performance on difficult tasks, and problems with glucose are associated with aggression and impulsivity. Glucose levels drop during times when people must exert self-control and it affects performance on later tasks where self-control is necessary, showing a depletion in resources. Giving people a glucose-rich drink such as lemonade sweetened with sugar eliminated the problems of self-control.
The interesting thing is that dieting involves cutting calories, which may actually impact the willpower that one has to inhibit indulging in food that is not part of their diet plan. The Atkins diet, cutting out calories from carbohydrates is probably a bad idea given this evidence. Many pieces of anecdotal evidence about the Atkins diet suggested that those people who cut out carbs were sluggish, moody, and have a hard time dealing with stress which is not surprising given that people are cutting out glucose. People on this diet are probably more likely to cheat, since they have no glucose energy to use to suppress indulging in carbs. The change in eating habits from dieting (if it is too restrictive) is actually contributing to failure, which can certainly be disheartening. The failure to control impulses might lead to depression, rumination, or other thoughts that take up a lot of the conscious resources necessary for self-control creating serious issues for dieters.
If you are interesting in the articles, contact me and I will send links.
Posted 1 year, 5 months ago at 2:04 pm. 2 comments
This survey, the pilot for my dissertation work, was closed today. I have over 50 completed surveys. I’ve done some initial analyses and it looks as though I will end up narrowing down my list of descriptives to about 25. I did a principal components analysis on the items with the highest mean values and was able to narrow it down to the 25 indicators of one general entrepreneurship factor. All my indicators loaded on the factor above .5, which is good. I looked at principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood estimation as well, and the results were very similar, which is what I expected. I will talk about the full list of words after I meet with my advisor Bob Lord and narrow everything down.
Posted 1 year, 5 months ago at 1:21 pm. 1 comment
I’m reading some articles for social-cognitive psychology that talk about how emotions influence thinking. One of the articles is Dutton & Aron (1974), which for some reason is hilarious to me. The basic premise of one of their studies is that guys who are crossing a bridge (either one that is really scary and one that is not) get approached by an attractive woman who asks if they will do some questionnaires. The researchers found that guys on the scary bridge created stories as part of the survey that were more sexual and tried harder to contact the sexy researcher girl after the study was completed by calling her on the phone. They also reported a stronger desire to kiss the girl.
I have to talk about how this article applies to real life as part of an assignment for class, and basically it translates into some good dating tips. Strong emotions (like fear) are relabeled as sexual attraction whenever an acceptable object is present (that would be you) and the emotion-producing object doesn’t require the full attention of the individual (like they aren’t actually being stabbed to death, just watching it on TV). The lesson is, if you like someone, take them to a scary movie, and they will be more likely to see the fear produced by the movie as sexual desire for you. ;)
A similar response happened in the lab. When guys expected to be shocked, it increased their attraction ratings for the girl in the room with them.
This article was definitely good for a laugh. There should be a lively discussion on Monday.
Posted 1 year, 5 months ago at 9:33 am. 0 comments
It seems that I am always playing catch-up at this point in the semester, but the good news is that I’m finishing up my last classes (ever, hopefully). I was hoping that by this point in the semester that things would start coming together, and it looks to be progressing in that way.
The Entrepreneur Descriptives Survey has about 60 completed surveys, which should be enough to do a few analyses and create a list of characteristics for the rest of my dissertation. I will probably keep it open for another week or so before closing it out and beginning the analyses. This should work well with my dissertation timeline because I just heard back from the ELIF last week, and we seem to be one step closer to a grant. The grant committee wanted us to fill out a few pieces of additional information that should be turned in by the end of this week. It looks like the grant is going to happen, but I’m not starting the next step in my dissertation until I am sure that the sample will be available. I figure we should hear back in a few more weeks at which point I will be putting together a survey for entrepreneurs and teachers in the training program. Eventually a version of the surveys will be given to students to help evaluate the entrepreneurship education program and to get information for my dissertation.
This week I am also helping out Graduate Student Government. I am evaluating dissertation grant proposals by students at Akron. The program has only been around for a few years, but we received about 20 or so applications. Grad students can apply for up to $2000 to help fund their research. I am doing interviews later on today. I am hoping that at least one is social science related, but most of our applications came from engineering, chemistry, and the other hard sciences.
In terms of the Hop-On Venture Fund, I am meeting later today to hear what others have collected for due diligence. I am in the process of collecting information myself based on questions that the group had during the last meeting. I am definitely interested to find out what other people discovered. I have definitely learned a lot in the process and being a part of this group (and a couple of other life events) has really made me think about getting smarter with the opportunities in the community.
In terms of class material, I just started a new class a few weeks ago. I have a huge stack of articles to read, a facilitation to prepare for, and a class paper to write before May. I think the paper will be related to gender and leadership. It is supposed to apply a topic from social-cognitive psychology to an area of interest. The paper will likely be a research proposal looking at how gender primes different leadership prototypes. This was a topic of interest that I presented along with one of my colleagues at the IOOB conference in 2008. I am not sure what we will do with the paper, so maybe I will summarize some of the points of interest here, since I’m not certain that it is really publish-worthy.
As far as my assistantship goes. I am still working on an arrogance applied paper. I am working on the introduction section. I need to continue with the literature review. I am supposed to be collecting additional data, but sometimes it takes longer than usual to deal with an applied sample (especially when the sample is from a large company). I think we are stalled at the moment because the legal department wants to approve all the materials that will be shown to the participants.
Other than the things listed, I am working on some business development opportunities and trying to figure out what I will be doing for an assistantship in August. I already had to submit my preferences to the psychology department, though a position is not guaranteed to me. I was thinking earlier in the year that I wanted an internship, but I don’t think that a traditional I/O internship through the department is really what I want to do. I would like to work with entrepreneurs or venture capitalists rather than doing survey development for selection or performance appraisal. I put my preferences in for a teaching position because it should still give me enough flexibility to complete my dissertation and work on a few other things. I would really love to teach the undergraduate I/O class, so that was my number 1 choice. However, there’s only one spot for that, so I don’t think it is likely. I also put in to teach cognitive processes as my second choice because I feel like I would do really well in that role too. There’s also only one spot for that and it wasn’t even available last year, so I don’t know how likely that is either. My third choice was quantitative methods, which is an undergrad stats course for psych majors. There are a few more spots, and I wouldn’t mind doing that since I feel pretty good with my stats skills at this point in my career. I’m not sure that I’ll get any of these positions, so it should be an interesting process to see what happens.
Well I guess I should get back to reading for class…
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 5:00 am. 3 comments
If you consider yourself an entrepreneur, I need your help! I am currently conducting a pilot study on what characteristics and behaviors are typical of an entrepreneur. The link posted below is to a survey that will take about 15-20 minutes of your time to complete. The results of this study will be used to develop additional surveys about entrepreneurship, and I will share a summary on here once all the results are in. Make sure to complete the entire survey or else your responses can’t be counted!
Entrepreneur Descriptives Survey
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 1:59 pm. 0 comments
Good news on my dissertation. The pilot survey went live last night. I have about 12 completed surveys and I’m hoping to get more today. It went out to over 200 entrepreneurs. More details will be posted when I close the survey in a month or so. In the meantime, I am working on a business grant. I am hoping for this to be completed at some point this week. We’ve put a lot of effort in so far and are about 50% complete.
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 8:55 pm. 0 comments
My dissertation pilot research is officially online. I received my approval from the Institutional Review Board last Friday. I sent out an e-mail to members of the ELIF and once they review the information, the links should be sent out. I am hoping to get about 80 responses over the next month. If not, I might have to find some additional entrepreneurs to participate. I am still waiting to see what happens with the ELIF grant, but I am hoping everything comes through. It definitely feels good to have some progress on this.
In other news, I finally got something accepted for publication. We need to finish a final review of the paper and submit it this week. This paper was looking at visualization procedures and ratings of leaders and emotions. Look for the paper by Naidoo, Kohari, and Lord later on this year or early next year in Leadership Quarterly.
I am also working on due diligence for the Hop-on Student Venture Fund. We had a company present previously and now we are in the process of going over their business plan in more detail. I am putting together a list of questions for our meeting this week. I am a team lead for one of our areas of review, so that is definitely exciting for me. I am definitely learning a lot about how the process works. My tasks right now seem to fit well with my area of interest and my expertise. I am glad things worked out this way because I was concerned I would be given a task that’s completely outside of my interests and knowledge. I definitely like what I’m doing and wouldn’t mind working for a venture capitalist in the future.
