Category: News

American Psychological Association has awarded the Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology award to OIBR Fellow, Katie Ehrlich.

Since 1974, the APA Early Career Awards have been given to recognize the large number of excellent, early career psychologists. Recipients of this award may not have held a doctoral degree for more than nine years. The 2020 recipients of the APA Scientific Contribution Awards were recognized by the 2019 Board of Scientific Affairs and selected by the 2019 Committee on Scientific Awards.

For purposes of this award, psychology has been divided into 10 areas, with five considered each year. The areas considered in 2020 were animal learning and behavior, comparative; developmental; health; cognition/ human learning; and psychopathology.

Katie was recognized for outstanding research that elucidates how children’s social relationships affect their physical health. Her  innovative research brings together insights from multiple subareas of psychology, including health, developmental, and social, to address questions of great importance for public health and human development. Her studies are characterized by sophisticated theory, rigorous methodology, and impressive creativity. Dr. Ehrlich’s theoretical and empirical work is already leaving a substantial mark on the field and paving the way for an integrative biosocial science of human development.

Katie is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia and the director of the Health and Development Laboratory. To learn more about her research, go here.

Traditional gendered patterns of child care persisted during the COVID-19 shutdown, with more than a third of couples relying on women to provide most or all of it, according to a study from OIBR Fellow and University of Georgia researcher Kristen Shockley.

Some previous research has found that typical familial patterns may get upended during crises, but that’s not what Shockley and her colleagues found in the early months of the COVID-19 shutdown.

Kristen Shockley

“Most people have never undergone anything like this before, where all of a sudden they can’t rely on their normal child care, and most people’s work situation has changed too,” said Shockley, associate professor of psychology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. “We thought this would be a chance for men to step in and partake equally in child care, but for many couples we didn’t see that happen.”

In mid-March, as schools and day cares closed and many shifted to remote work, Shockley and her colleagues quickly created a survey targeting dual-earner couples with at least one child under age 6.

“When the wife does it all, not surprisingly, the outcomes are bad for the couple.” — Kristen Shockley

“My son was 15 months old when this all started, and I know firsthand that you can’t just plop younger kids in front of a TV or expect them to do their schoolwork,” she said. “We were particularly interested in people who really had to provide active child care.”

The team initially surveyed 274 couples, conducting a follow-up survey with 133 of the same couples in May. The study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, assessed marital tension, health and job performance in addition to child care strategies.

“When the wife does it all, not surprisingly, the outcomes are bad for the couple,” Shockley said. “It’s not just bad for the wife, it’s also bad for the husband, including in terms of job performance although his work role presumably hasn’t changed. When one person’s doing it all, there’s a lot of tension in the relationship, and it’s probably spilling over into the husband’s ability to focus at work.”

Though 36.6% of couples relied on the wife to provide most or all child care, 44.5% used more egalitarian strategies, and 18.9% used strategies that were not clearly gendered or egalitarian.

Egalitarian strategies included alternating work days, planning daily mini shifts that included both work and child care for husband and wife, and alternating shifts that changed day to day based on the couple’s work needs.

“When you look at the more egalitarian strategies, we found the best outcomes for people who were able to alternate working days,” Shockley said. “The boundaries are clear. When you’re working, you can really focus on work, and when you’re taking care of the kids, you can really focus on the kids. But not everybody has jobs amenable to that.”

When both people were working at home, planned mini shifts and needs-based alternation had similar well-being outcomes for the couple, but job performance was higher for couples who used needs-based alternation, according to Shockley.

“I think that’s due to the communication that comes with it, and the flexibility within your dyad at home,” she said. “For couples who are continuing to work remotely, I would say needs-based alternation with night-before communication about work needs is probably better than having fixed shifts.”

Although the paper doesn’t include qualitative quotes, Shockley remembers the participants’ comments quite clearly.

“People were saying, ‘I’m at my breaking point,’ and this was just two weeks in. A lot of people said, ‘I’m just not sleeping.’ You could feel people’s struggle, and there was a lot of resentment, particularly when the wife was doing it all,” she said.

“This really highlights some infrastructure issues we have with the way we think about child care in this country. The default becomes, ‘Oh well, the wife is going to pick up the slack.’ It’s not a long-term solution.”

Shockley also noted that the couples surveyed have relatively high incomes.

“Compared to the country, the household income of our study is pretty high,” she said. “This might look different in lower-income samples. We might see totally different strategies emerging, particularly if there’s less possibility for remote work.”

Co-authors include OIBR Affiliate, Malissa A. Clark and Hope Dodd at UGA and Eden B. King at Rice University.

Article written by: Allyson Mann
Source: UGA Today

The University’s newest Regents Professor is OIBR’s past Director, Steven R.H. Beach, Distinguished Research Professor in the department of psychology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. This honor is bestowed by the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia for faculty whose scholarship or creative activity is recognized both nationally and internationally as innovative and pace-setting.

Beach’s scholarship focuses on the way that community, family and marital process affect mental and physical health.  His pioneering work and collaborations have shown that strengthening close relationships, including marriage and parenting relationships, can play a critical role in reducing depression and physical health problems, and can buffer the impact of stress from economic and social factors. Beach also serves as co-director of the Center for Family Research Clinical Program in the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research at UGA.

He has over 250 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, as well as multiple books and book chapters. He has received over $60 million in grant funding from organizations including the National Cancer Institute and numerous other divisions within the National Institutes of Health. Among other notable work, Beach recently initiated a program of research with African American families living in rural communities in Georgia, implementing the Promoting Strong African American Families. This program focuses on strengthening marital, co-parenting and parent-child relationships to help foster resilience to economic hardship and experiences of discrimination.

Beach has received numerous awards, including the Family Psychologist of the Year Award from Division 43 of the American Psychological Association, the President’s Award of Distinction for Team Science by the Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance, and the Best Family Economics Paper of the Year by the National Council on Family Relations.

Beach is the former director of the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research, serving from 2003 to 2013. He is currently a Fellow of the institute and a member of the OIBR Executive committee.

The Regents Professor appointment was recently approved by the board of regents and is effective July 1, 2021.

For four decades, OIBR Fellow and Terry College of Business management professor Robert Vandenberg has found new ways to accurately assess the attitudes, feelings and behaviors that employees experience in the workplace.

Vandenberg, who serves as head of the Department of Management and the Robert O. Arnold Professor of Business, was recently inducted as a Fellow of the Academy of Management.

“Bob’s work has laid the groundwork for organizational behavior and health care researchers to better understand how employees relate to their employers,” said Mike Pfarrer, associate dean for research and graduate programs at the Terry College of Business. “In addition, Bob is an internationally recognized methodologist, making his research accessible across disciplines.”

“His induction into the Academy of Management Fellows Group not only shines a light on the far-reaching impact of his work but also on the quality of research being conducted every day at the Terry College of Business.”

Induction as an AOM Fellow distinguishes those who have made enduring contributions to the science and practice of management. Vandenberg has spent his career using an organizational behavior lens to investigate what impacts employee motivation and dedication to an organization and how workers’ attitudes towards their employers impact productivity. Over time, his work has been cited by other scholars more than 20,000 times.

In the 1990s, Vandenberg started investigating the barriers that emerge when researchers try to compare workers from different cultures. Cultural norms and biases of the researchers can be a concern, but Vandenberg also looked at the cultural norms of the people being studied.

People from different cultures often interpret survey questions differently, he found. Researchers needed to account for this phenomenon, which came to be known as measurement invariance, in their analyses.

The culmination of this work was a seminal paper published in 2000 in the journal Organizational Research Methods, which set out the best practices and tactics for management researchers to correct for measurement invariance in their work. Ever since, the paper has provided part of the bedrock for the methodology now used by social scientists to account for differences in cultural attitudes in survey data. It’s been cited by more than 6,000 researchers as a guide for undertaking their own studies.

Vandenberg also introduced new methods of statistical analysis and better ways to measure change in employee’s attitudes and performance over time. He has extensively studied workplace health and safety, high-involvement work practices and employee commitment, and his research methods have contributed to more than $12 million in grant funding for studies into various management topics.

“Bob has emerged as one of the leading experts on research methods in the entire field of management,” Herman Aguinis wrote in his nomination of Vandenberg. Aguinis is the Avram Tucker Distinguished Scholar at George Washington University. “This means that his contributions are even more impactful compared to those of us who focus on a particular substantive domain. The reason is that contributions to methodology influence many, if not all, substantive domains across management subfields ranging from micro to macro.”

Article written by: Merritt Melancon
Source: Terry News