SIOP 2013: Day 3

SIOP 2013 Coverage: Schedule Planning | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3

Day 3 was the final day of the SIOP conference. Per tradition, sessions were lightly attended – too much late night enjoyment at the end of Day 2, I suspect!  I had a slow start myself, only getting to poster sessions a little after 10AM.  One that caught my eye explored the effect of organizational support for the use of technology over time; surprisingly, the effect of strong organizational support on technology use weakened over time, not quite in line with what prior theory (and the researcher presenting!) predicted.

I also decided somewhat last-minute to attend a Master Tutorial on Bayesian statistics for I/O.  Unfortunately, despite a full house and CE credits on the line for many, the speaker didn’t show!  After about 15 minutes, I left and headed back to the poster session on Research Methods, with lots of interesting work, including a bit more on the equivalence of mTurk and undergraduate research samples.  The added value on this paper?  English-speaking, US-based mTurk samples are similar to undergraduate samples, but non-English-speaker samples are a little different.

Finally, I ended up at the closing plenary, given by Reverend TJ Martinez, founder of the Cristo Rey Jesuit College.  He related an inspiring story about starting with zero support to start a school but ending by graduating a fair number of low-SES high school students (with an abysmal high school completion rate prior) with a 100% entrance rate into college. I am still not sure precisely what he had to do with I/O, but he was certainly an entertaining and admirable speaker.

At the very end incoming SIOP President Tammy Allen laid out a 5-section plan for SIOP in the coming year:

1. Tie the varied local I/O advocacy and interest groups better to SIOP.
2. Increase the visibility of I/O Psychology in Introductory Psychology courses and textbooks.  Graduates of undergraduate psychology programs should, at minimum, be able to answer the question, “What is I/O Psychology?”, and this doesn’t happen in most programs.
3. Work to improve SIOP’s branding, which may include the launch of a new practitioner-oriented journal.
4. Improve national advocacy efforts on behalf of SIOP.  Apparently we have already some folks on retainer, but this will expand.
5. Better understand SIOP’s role and position in “science.”  Psychology is viewed as one of the foundational areas of scholarship on which many other areas are based, but where does I/O fit specifically?

And that’s it for SIOP 2013!  I’ve got another day in Houston – which will likely involve the Houston Aquarium and a nice dinner somewhere – and then back to cooler Norfolk (at a relatively chillier 70 degrees F!), where I’ll be writing a slew of follow-up emails to all the intriguing folks I met this year.  And hopefully I’ll be sufficiently recovered from this trip in a year to attend SIOP 2014 in sunny Honolulu!