To varying degrees, our personal and professional lives have been altered over the past few weeks in ways that we can only begin to enumerate here.
In the interest of beginning a dialogue, I share a few changes that my lab and I have encountered recently, and I look forward to hearing what challenges other SRCD members have encountered and how they are coping.
1. Canceled/Postponed conferences - Several professional conferences have either been conducted remotely, postponed, or canceled. For many of my students, these spring/summer meetings were the first opportunity to present at a professional meeting. Besides the emotional disappointment of not getting to meet and network with people whose work you cite, and traveling to an exciting new locale, there are also practical challenges for professional development - conference presentations are important entries for young professional CVs. To assist with the latter, the APA released
new guidelines for citing work that was slated for presentation at a canceled meeting.
2. Remote advising - In our lab, web-based interfaces (WebEx, Zoom) were primarily used for communicating with collaborators and former students at other institutions. Now, dissertations and theses will be exclusively advised online. As advisors, we know that while these meetings are focused on meeting academic milestones, they are also opportunities to check in with students to see what "else" is going on. As scientists, we also know that a lot of communication is non-verbal, which is why I prefer students to log in with video (wifi connection permitting) so that we can retain as much of the non-verbal communication as possible.
3. Remote lab meetings - Communication challenges are further amplified when individual meetings are expanded into larger groups. We have had 2 lab meetings so far, and it is certainly harder to "read the (virtual) room" from behind a computer screen. My strategy has been to spend a few minutes touching base with each team member at the beginning meeting, although I recognize that this is a poor substitute for in-person contact. I am curious to know how others have managed this transition.
4. Toeing the line between structure and acknowledgement - There is no doubt that we are encountering new obstacles each day and adjustment requires that we remain flexible and nimble. At the same time, structure is important and provides direction in uncertain contexts. Where is the fine line between providing structure (e.g., weekly lab meetings) and also giving students space and time to adjust? How should deadlines (e.g., thesis proposals) be considered and what is reasonable?
I share here just a few things that my lab and I have been grappling with over the past 2 weeks. One thing that I am grateful that we are not dealing with is community based data collection. We completed data collection for a 4-year project focused on identity, discrimination and sleep last year, but I know that many others have had to suspend data collection. I have spoken to friends informally about this topic and I think that this would be a great forum for sharing what that process been like. What do you do if you are in the final year of data collection for a multi-year project? Or if you are just beginning a study?
Perhaps more than any other time, human subjects considerations related to harm associated with research participation has assumed an entirely different meaning.
Is there a silver lining? When I teach graduate level research methods, I tell repeatedly tell my first-year students, "there is no such thing as a perfect study". Although interruptions brought about by the recent pandemic are certainly on a different scale than what is typically included in a study's "limitations" section, the good news is that it is a systematic disruption impacting anyone who is currently collecting data. This context also provides an opportunity for us to apply some fun stats techniques that we learned in grad school, but never had the data for (e.g., interrupted time series). Finally, as a founding member of the Asian Caucus I am curious if anyone is currently collecting data on discrimination among Asian communities - this seems like a particularly important time to investigate this topic.
This post is by no means exhaustive, but I hope that it starts a conversation and provides a forum and a resource for the SRCD community to share how our research and professional lives can continue despite the changes around us.
Be well,
Tiffany
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Tiffany Yip
Fordham University
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